Chapter 5

The Historic Origins of Leftism

The Earliest Roots

Leftism in the Western World has roots reaching way back into the dim past. Leftist ideas and notions made themselves felt again and again in late medieval and modern history, but for its first concrete and, in a way, fateful outbreak and concretization we have to look to the French Revolution.

Leftist tendencies, according to the terminology outlined above, existed in ancient Greece. Hellenic (Athenian) democracy not only insisted on the rule of the many, it also had a strong egalitarian slant. Naturally the notion of equality only applied to the full citizens, not to women, slaves, and foreigners (metoikoi), so that the electorate in Greek democracies always constituted a minority. We must add that Greek democracies, while frequently most oppressive, had certain liberal aspects; respect for men in elevated positions was not stressed and the absence of a strongly concretized ruling class as well as the total lack of anything resembling a “presidency” weakened authority. In the descriptions of democracy by Plato and also by Aristotle we perceive the elements of equality and social, though not necessarily political liberty. Envy was written large and excellence was suspect. The fear of a monarchical restoration was a permanent feature and thus all concentration of power was dreaded. If anybody excelled in merits and prestige, exile through ostracism menaced him. Yet, while social liberties were perhaps marked, political liberties were few, though here we have to bear in mind that the concept of the person as we know it did not exist in antiquity. It makes its appearance in the Western World—and solely in the Western World—only with the advent of Christianity. When Aristotle called man a zoon politikon he meant a creature practically absorbed by the city or by the state.

The hostility of Plato toward democracy (more apparent in the Politeia than in the Nomoi) was similar to that of Aristotle, who finally fled the democratic rule of Athens and went to Chalcis on Euboea admittedly in order to avoid the fate of Socrates. Plato’s antidemocratic bias was not only the automatic reaction of the intellectual against a form of government which puts no premium on reason or knowledge; it was also the result of the deeply felt experience of his master’s death. The average educated American or European, though aware that Socrates had been put to death on account of his “impiety” in introducing strange gods and for “corrupting” the young, rarely knows the full story. The last charge (far from having anything to do with sex) was subdivided (according to Xenophon) into several accusations: (1) that he taught his disciples to treat the institutions of the state with contempt; (2) that he had associated with Critias and Alcibiades; (3) that he had taught the young to disobey their parents; and (4) that he constantly quoted Homer and Hesiod against morality and democracy (especially Iliad, II, 198-206). Not only the democratic government, but the “dear people” were opposed to Socrates and he can, without exaggeration, be called a victim of democracy, of the vox populi.1

Salvador de Madariaga has said that Western civilization rests on two deaths—the death of Socrates and the death of Christ. And indeed the Crucifixion was also a democratic event. When our Lord was brought before Pilate and told him that He had come as a witness to the Truth, the governor, as a true agnostic, asked Him, “What is Truth?” And without waiting for an answer, he passed Him by and consulted “the people.” The vox populi condemned our Lord to death as it had Socrates more than three centuries earlier. But if we despair of truth, if we believe that truth either does not exist or can humanly not be attained, we either have to leave things to chance or look for mere preferences—personal preferences or “preferences statistically arrived at” (which often means accepting the “verdict of the majority”). This is a handy means to settle differences of opinion, yet it neither tells us the truth nor does it offer rational solutions to burning problems.

Greek democracy was buried under the power drive of Macedonia, but this was applauded by Isocrates.2 Rome was never a real democracy, not even in the broad sense of the term used by antiquity. Yet Marius represents most certainly the Roman left and his wife’s nephew, Caesar, actually became a leftist dictator, thereby figuring as a fulfillment of the anakyklosis as defined by Polybius3 and foreseen by Plato, that is, the evolution of monarchy into aristocracy, aristocracy into democracy, democracy into tyranny, and tyranny again into monarchy. We have to ask, however, whether Roman Caesarism was ever genuine monarchy or only, as Metternich argued,4 a form of “Bonapartism”—military dictatorship. Until the days of Diocletian the Romans were hardly aware of the fact that their Res Publica no longer existed, since it still bore that label. “Emperor” (Imperator), after all, only meant “general,” “prince” (princeps)—“First Man.” (“First Lady” is the unofficial title of the American President’s wife.) With Diocletian the situation at long last became clear: He had himself crowned with a golden crown and demanded proskynesis in the best oriental fashion; the Senate lost all its importance. At that point even the simplest Romans presumably realized that the Republic had gone the way of all flesh and that Rome now had a fundamentally different constitution, a fact that Tacitus already had strongly suspected.5

During the Middle Ages “democracy” had a bad connotation among intellectuals who alone knew its meaning. It existed, however, in small private societies as, for instance, in the high villages of the Alps and the Pyrenees, in Iceland and Norway, and in Slavic villages in the form of the vyetche. The larger and more developed political societies had for the most part mixed governments with a monarch at the top who owed his status either to birth or to election by a small elite. The Regimen Mixtum normally had a diet (or even two “Houses”) composed of representatives of the three or four estates. (Originally only the nobility and clergy were represented. Then came a new element, the “Third Estate,” i.e., the burghers, and in many cases the peasantry as a Fourth Estate, as in Sweden and the Tyrol.) The mixed governments are balanced ones. The king was not at all powerful. Rex sub Lege6 was the standard formula. He had no right to levy taxes and the penury of monarchs is a permanent feature of medieval and post-medieval society. The king’s power was curtailed by powerful vassals, the Church, the diet in which the Estates were represented, and the free municipalities who had great privileges. Absolutism and totalitarianism were unknown in the Middle Ages.7

All during that period the word “democracy” appeared only in learned treatises, but it is important to remember that insidious religious sects with leftist social and political programs were active over, or rather under, the larger part of Europe. The Albigenses (Bogumilians, Catharoi) were not egalitarians, but a strong leftist character can be discerned among the earlier Waldensians (founded by Peter Waldo). The object of their scorn is not only the “rich, sinful Church” but also all the high and mighty, luxury, ostentation, and power. The dualistic sects with their Manichaean roots made their way from the Near East into the Balkans and from there to northern Italy, southern France, Belgium, Bohemia, and England (in other words, a geographic migration roughly from the southeast to the northwest). They had apocalyptical visions of the wickedness of wealth, the punishment of the arrogant, the destruction of the two great organizations, Church and State. Naturally these visions were not uniform. The accents changed and compromises with reality were frequent. But there is a red thread that is very distinct: As far as their ideas went, the sects did have certain influence on the origins of the Reformation.8

What distinguished them from the Reformers was the cult of poverty as we find it, for instance, among the “Poor of Lyons,” an early Waldensian group. The Waldensians from Lombardy (as distinct from those of France) insisted that their faithful live from the fruits of manual labor. Especially as weavers they lived together, worked together, were hostile to military service, rejected oaths, and hated sumptuous churches. They also seem to have had an anti-intellectual bent. From Lombardy they spread as far as Bohemia.

The English Forerunners

In northern France we encounter the Turlupins, a Christian sect preaching human equality. They had apparently been somehow connected with the ideas of the monk Joachim de Floris, who preached a pantheistic chiliasm, and they may have been behind that big peasant rising, the Jacquerie. The revolt of the farmers in England, led by John Ball and Wat Tyler, also had a certain religious motivation. (John Ball was a priest and his revolutionary sermons were frequently on the theme, “When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?”)9 These risings were connected with the teaching of Wyclif, whose new doctrines had far-reaching political effects: Naturally, every infringement of the precept that one should let sleeping dogs lie starts off a series of questions, movements, and criticisms.

Wyclif began by first denouncing papal supremacy, thus earning the sympathies of his king. He then proceeded to question transubstantiation and the prerogatives of the clergy for which he received the support of the nobility. Finally he advanced democratic theories and denounced wealth altogether, and so gave impetus to the agrarian revolt. An analogous development took place when Luther (who knew the writings of Wyclif) declared the Pope to be antichrist and received the protection of the princes against the Emperor; and then, when he denounced the clergy and the monastic institutions, he won the applause of the nobility. Luther never went further. When the enormous wave of criticism of the existing order reached the peasantry and resulted in violent rebellion, and the lower middle classes in certain regions embraced Anabaptism (Münster, for example), or engaged in iconoclastic orgies, Luther applied the brakes and denounced this extremism. Wyclif also once halfheartedly protested against Ball and Tyler (who insisted they were followers of Wyclif), but he died before the full development of Lollardy. Wyclif’s “Poor Preachers” are definitely an effort toward a “democratization” of religion, a “populism” along semiecclesiastical lines. The Poor Preachers were often pastmasters in exploiting the envy of the masses.

Wyclif, however, does not stand at the beginning of a new development. He was a reader of Marsilius of Padua and, much later, so was Luther. Marsilius, in support of Emperor Ludwig I and trying to undermine the political claims of the papacy, also attacked its hierarchical status and finally developed a democratic theory of government.10 He declared that original political power resides in the people collectively or at least in its better (valentior) part. Another source of Wyclif’s inspiration came from extreme factions of the Franciscan order with their emphasis on poverty. It is significant that the mendicant orders strongly supported Wyclif at the beginning of his activities.11 As we shall see later in this book, there is a curious relationship between a misconceived notion of the monastic idea and the leftist currents in every age. It reminds one of the outcry of St. Thomas, Corruptio optimi pessima (“When the best is corrupted, it becomes the worst”).

Lollardy, which survived Wyclif for generations and could still be observed at the beginning of the sixteenth century,12 was not solely a poor people’s religious attitude, it also had a good deal of support from the landed gentry. Its basic psychological drive was material and intellectual envy. The wealth of the Church was heavily criticized as inconsistent with the teachings of Christ. Nor was this attack confined to the Church. By that time the legend already seems to have been firmly embedded that Christ was the indigent son of a poor carpenter and that His Apostles were a bunch of paupers anxious to avoid any contamination by the rich.13

The other type of envy was nonmaterial: Theology was looked at askance as something complicated, not necessarily comprehended by the uneducated, and as the “private property” of the intellectually beati possidentes. As a matter of fact, even in the Franciscan Order, soon after its founding, there had been a bitter struggle between an intellectual and a nonintellectual faction ending in the victory of the former. Thanks to it we have in St. Bonaventure, Alexander Hales, Occam, and Duns Scotus outstanding representatives of Christian theology.

And, last, a third kind of envy made its appearance, an envy that had a spiritual cause: The clergy reserved the Chalice for itself.

Thus the demand for equality, the rebellion against differences and privileges was mounting. It is no coincidence that the cry first went up in England, one of the most class-conscious countries in Western civilization. It was repeated there in similar forms during the seventeenth century when egalitarian sects arose again in great numbers and when, for the first time in Christian European history, a king was formally put to death.

The first truly concrete, “systematized” identitarian revolution in Europe is Taboritism, the radical form of Hussitism. Hus was not only the translator and commentator of Wyclif, he was his most faithful copyist. And here again we see how automatically and inevitably all religions change, how new religious doctrines affect political ideas. All the new currents were hostile to hierarchies and differentiations; they stood for brotherhood and assailed fatherhood. The attack on the Pope (Pápa) was directed against the father image. Psychologically this invited a revision of the concept of God as father and, therefore, of the Trinity. (Several attempts were made in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries to found antitrinitarian, i.e., unitarian faiths; in Transylvania, in Poland, in England, in Scotland, and in New England.) Descending to the political sphere, this meant a questioning of monarchy as well as of mixed government with a monarchic head. Finally this development inevitably shook the position of the father in the family, which is not surprising since the patriarchal14 order forms a coherent unity; man’s mind, after all, is an organic whole.15

It is obvious that psychological sequiturs are not necessarily of a logical order. It is possible for one to be a Lutheran monarchist or a tyrannical paterfamilias belonging to the Unitarian religion. We have Catholic republicans who think (erroneously) that every papal encyclical is an infallible document, and we have agnostic monarchists who are not enthusiastic about physical fatherhood and reject the papacy as they reject the Father-in-Heaven. Yet psychological affinities should never be overlooked. The New Englanders at the end of the eighteenth century who were convinced that George III had secretly become a Catholic were factually in error16 as far as the person of the British monarch was concerned, but in regard to the institution their suspicion, though wrong, was not grotesque. Kierkegaard (to quote just one example) thought that all genuine royalists lean towards the Catholic faith.17

Like Wyclif, Hus is not really the champion of the “common people.” Like Wyclif he got support largely from the lower nobility, and like Wyclif he was a nationalist. Wyclif was an “English Firster” while Hus became the spokesman of the Czech people against the German element in Bohemia-Moravia. And there, in the lands of the Crown of St. Wenceslas, we see for the first time in European history outbreaks of national hatred, clashes at the university between national student organizations, and that type of collective fury which brought ruin to Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The stage for leftist mass movements was set. On top of it there existed in Bohemia for some time a fairly strong late-Waldensian underground movement supplemented by the Beghards (Pickarts), the male counterpart of the Béguine Order, but disorganized and riddled with heretical ideas.18

The martyr-death of Hus, who was burned at the stake in Constance, led to a fiery outbreak of popular wrath in the Czech parts of Bohemia. John XXIII was then counter-pope and the responsibility for the ignoble death of Hus was partly his.19 Even more responsible, however, was the Emperor who had given Hus safe conduct which was not honored by the Council.

The death of Hus resulted in the establishment of two groups: A more moderate one, the Utraquists, content with administration of communion under both species, bread and wine, and a radical one, the Taborites, which found its center in the newly established city of Tábor. (Tábor in Czech means camp.) The Taborites were extreme fanatics, and they were organized militarily. Their leader at the beginning was Jan Zižka, scion of a recently nobilitated family of German origin. Their ideology was chiliastic, nationalistic, puritanical, democratic, and socialistic. Here we have a real and concrete prefiguration of all the isms of our times in a dynamic synthesis. By filiation perhaps more than by analogy the mass movements of our days are related to Taboritism.

Taboritism, however, was more deeply influenced by the Waldensians and the Beghards than by pure Hussite theology. In its earlier phase the socialist and puritanical ideas were more in the foreground and the ultra-extremists, the nudist Adamites, were severely persecuted by Zižka. Still, the Taborites believed in the coming of a millennium in the form of a Third Kingdom (taken from the prophecies of Daniel). A radically socialist program regarding property was adopted in the first years, but after the death of Zižka of Trocnov the egalitarian spirit weakened under the leadership of Prokop Holý (who apparently also was of German origin). Hussite armies invaded the surrounding German areas and a crusade was preached against the Taborites. The army of the crusaders was routed near Domažlice (Taus) and only then did the old leading classes become fully aware of the danger. In alliance with the Utraquists, who had kept the original moderate Hussite spirit, the Taborites were finally defeated in the battle of Lipan, and Prokop was killed. This furious explosion of a synthetic mixture of nationalism, socialism, and radical democracy with communist innuendos not only had devastated large parts of Bohemia, Moravia, and Upper Hungary, but also had deeply shaken the social and spiritual fabric of Europe. In their perennial ramifications the shadows of this profound revolution are still with us and will continue to be for some time.

Proudhon said that it is surprising how at the bottom of politics one always finds theology.20 The reader might feel inclined to believe that our emphasis on theological (“religious”) ideas, movements, and arguments so far are merely due to the profoundly religious character of the Middle Ages. This is by no means the case. Looking way back at the tragedy of Socrates we see clearly how it was largely conditioned by an intermingling of political, philosophical, and religious sentiments and concepts. This interconnection persisted during the first 1,700 years of Christian history whereas in the last 200 years it has become evident that the isms cannot coexist peacefully with theistic religions, but have to fight them with all the means at their disposal. And vice versa. It is precisely this fact that the modern totalitarian ideologies—from simple leftism to national socialism, international socialism, and communism—have not only a pseudomonastic but also a “heretical” aspect that make them so unacceptable and so incompatible with the great religions of the West: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. They derive most of their strength, as we shall see later on, from the secularized version of a few Christian tenets. Therefore they are all Religionsersatz (substitutes for religion) and the parties representing them are secular “churches” with hierarchies, rituals amounting to a real liturgy, secular equivalents to the sacraments, “orders,” (general) confessions, ministries of propaganda,21 a system of worldwide missions, etc. The efforts to draw comparisons between the Vatican and the Kremlin are usually made in a spirit of hostility, but they are not without substance if we bear in mind that the various isms, as fundamental heresies, are indeed evil caricatures of fragments of Christian doctrine, of Christian institutions. Our isms could not have grown, in the first instance, on non-Christian soil even if they can be transferred to such areas where Christianity is not indigenous. The reason for the latter phenomenon is twofold: All human beings have a “naturally Christian soul” (anima naturaliter Christiana) and the entire globe is in a process of Westernization, i.e., of accepting secular forms of Christianity.

It is not our task here to investigate the influence of Hus, Wyclif, and Marsilius on Luther and the first stage of the sixteenth-century Reformation. We have done this elsewhere.22 It is important, however, to remember that the Reformation, contrary to an obsolete concept still surviving in English-speaking countries and finding its way into textbooks and films,23 was by no means the “beginning of liberalism” (genuine or fake), nor anything like the fulfillment of the Renaissance, but a late medieval and “monastic” reaction24 against humanism and the spirit of the Renaissance. To Luther the Renaissance (no less than Humanism) was a foul compromise between Christianity and paganism. After all, Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle, according to him, all were broiling in the eternal fires of Hell.25

Unfortunately the picture of Luther, a true wrestler with Christ as presented in American Catholic and Evangelical26 education on a popular level, is mostly a radically false one. He was neither a neurotic who wanted to marry a nun; nor was he a libertarian subjectivist who wanted to promote “private interpretation” of the Bible; nor did he yearn for “personal freedom.” He was most decidedly a rigorist who wanted to go back to what he considered the original purity of the Church. That he was shocked in Rome by the depravity of the hierarchy is pedagogical nonsense. The moral situation in Germany was not a whit better. And in scholastic theology the moral virtues had a very low rating.27 (In this respect too, Luther was a typical medievalist.) Far from advocating anything like classic liberalism, Luther taught the omnipotence of the state and opposed all forms of rationalism, Christian or otherwise, as well as the “worship of man.” Soli Deo Gloria was Calvin’s battle-cry, but it also could have been Luther’s who was convinced that man could not really contribute anything substantial to his salvation; only the blood of the Lamb could wash away his sins, and good works were of no avail.

Because the Reformation was a reaction against Humanism and the Renaissance, we should not be surprised that the Middle Ages in a certain sense continued in the Reformed world. Until very recently the Gothic style was the accepted one for churches and colleges even in the United States. Whoever wants to advertise candles, organs, or clerical vestments in America uses Gothic script even today. In the Catholic world, however, the Renaissance style slowly evolved into Baroque and later into Rococo. And while the world of the Reformation evolved in the direction of discipline, commercialism, industry and hard work, of some sort of secular monasticism, the monastic and medieval ideas in the Catholic world remained restricted to real monasteries and convents;28 Catholic life continued to be artistic, intellectual, and anarchical.

From then on, the “wild sects” continued to exist almost solely in the Mundus Reformatus. The sixteenth century saw a furious outbreak of sectarian chiliasm in various parts of Germany—in the southwest along the Rhine and, above all, in Münster. It was Thomas Münster, a German Anabaptist who, after visiting Prague in 1521 to get in touch with Hussite circles, started a series of popular uprisings in the name of religion. He attacked the Reformers for having done halfhearted work, for not having gone far enough in the domain of religion, and for having neglected to change state and society. He preached and wrote in favor of a communistic theocracy he wanted to see established. He was completely opposed by Luther who wanted to have no truck with him. After having taken up contact with the Swiss Anabaptists he (together with the former monk Pfeifer) seized the Upper Alsatian town of Mühlhausen where he succeeded in deposing the local government and plundered the convents as well as the houses of the rich. In 1525 he joined the Peasant Revolt, but his warfare against the “godless princes and priests” ended in failure. Beaten in battle, he and Pfeifer were taken prisoner and decapitated.

Jan van Leyden, also called Jan Bokelszoon, was born in Holland but became the master of Münster after the Anabaptists had taken hold of the town and Jan Matthys, his predecessor and a fanatical preacher, had been killed in a military action. He established a communist “Kingdom of Zion,” based on a weird mixture of socialist and Old Testament notions, and terrorized the entire population. Everybody was given goods “according to his needs.”29 The sexual corruption of his “court” knew no limits. Finally the city was taken back by Bishop Count Bernhard von Galen, and Jan van Leyden was put to death.

It was in Münster that the Anabaptists had set up the most famous model of their political order, but their settlements in southern Moravia in the late 1520s and early 1530s were more concretely communist. Their religious principles in this area were set down in the “Nikolsburg Articles” which feature prominently the opposition to organized government as well as all forms of learning, especially theology. (The Scriptures, admittedly not easy for the common man to understand, are necessary only for the wicked and the heathen. The children of God do not need them. And Christ, obviously, is not the Son of God, but merely a prophet.)30

More interesting than their religious faith was their social organization in that part of the Holy Roman Empire. Carl A. Cornelius gives us a short but vivid description:

The Zürich Doctrines were obeyed in their most uncompromising and radical form. Government offices, oaths and the use of arms were strictly outlawed. Nobody owned property. The stranger who asked for Baptism had to surrender all his earthly goods to the community but in the case of excommunication or banishment nothing was returned to him. Family life, which cannot be imagined without property, was replaced with a different order. The marriages, without consultation of the partners, were decreed and blessed by the Servants of the Word. The children soon after their birth were handed over to wet nurses and later placed in the common school house. Dressed and fed in an identical way, the adults lived according to their occupation in larger households under the supervision of a Servant of the Necessity. The whole life moved, day in day out, within the narrowest limits. Any manifestation of personal independence or freedom led to banishment, which meant to bottomless misery.31

Yet, as in the case of the Low-German Anabaptists (finally centred in Münster), the expectation of an imminent Day of Judgment, dooming the wicked and exalting the faithful, was very strong. In our time, though in a more secular version, the extreme left has also invariably believed in either a millennium or (sometimes anticipating this chiliastic fulfillment) in a very earthly Day of Judgment crowned by the triumph of the chosen race, be they the pure-blooded “Aryans” or the “proletarians” or just the “progressive forces of mankind,” over the Jews, the idle rich, or the dark forces of reaction—to use the Nazi expression, in a “Night of the Long Knives.”

The collapse of Anabaptism in northeastern Germany under the joint blows of the Catholics and the Lutherans terminated in the great leftist wave on the Continent for well over 200 years. This wave was essentially medieval in character, and we have mentioned its pseudomonastic traits. Even the Waldensians have given the impression to their contemporaries that they were “manqués” friars.32 Only in the north of Europe do we see a true continuation of the medieval spirit (owing to the “medieval” and “Gothic” character of the Reformation), and therefore we encounter in England in the mid-seventeenth century another explosion of religious Leftism.

With the downfall of the first Stuart monarchy and the execution of Charles I (a truly world-shaking event), a new outbreak of populism emerged from the lower social layers and even endangered Cromwell’s regime. The movement of the Levellers under John Lilburne threatened army discipline. Lilburne saw clearly that Cromwell’s and Ireton’s leadership led to oligarchic rule and thus he strongly emphasized the prerogatives of the Parliament. Cromwell rejected egalitarianism outright, and even Lilburne defended private property and protested against the “Leveler” label. But the most radical Levellers, the “Diggers,” went even further to the Left.

England in the seventeenth century thus proved a breeding ground of leftist heresies, and certain religious-political notions born there at that time found their way to the United States. It is not easy to put them into right focus, i.e., neither to underestimate nor to exaggerate their impact on the Thirteen Colonies and, later, on the young American Republic. Up till the War of Independence, however, they were hardly articulate. Still, it would be a great mistake to think that there was any specifically leftist or “progressivist” element in New England Puritanism. The anti-Episcopalian (and also anti-Catholic and antimonarchical) attitude of the Pilgrim Fathers and their more immediate descendants had no egalitarian overtones.33 There is no egalitarianism inherent in Calvinist theology: very much the contrary. Predestination brutally separates mankind into those who are damned and those who are saved, and in the best Old Testament tradition the saved already partake of Divine favor. A dim reflection of their eternal bliss already descends upon them on this earth. (Hence the concerted efforts of individuals to prove by deeds and facts that they are saved, which resulted in the tremendous economic upsurge of the Calvinist countries, according to the thesis of Max Weber and Müller-Armack.)34 Paul Kecskemeti said rightly: “ . . . the basic idea upon which the Puritan political system was founded was that Church members alone could have political rights. This ensured that the Puritan commonwealth could be nothing but an oligarchy. As wealth was one of the criteria (though by no means the only one) on the basis of which it was determined whether one belonged to the ‘elect,’ the commonwealth was necessarily controlled by the wealthy.”35