LIBERTY OR EQUALITY

Other books in English by the same author:

Novels:

GATES OF HELL

NIGHT OVER THE EAST

MOSCOW 1979

BLACK BANNERS

Socio-political work:

THE MENACE OF THE HERD

(under pseudonym “Francis S. Campbell”)

LIBERTY

OR

EQUALITY

The Challenge of our Time

By

Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

Edited by

JOHN P. HUGHES

1952

THE CAXTON PRINTERS, LTD.
CALDWELL, IDAHO

ALL RIGHTS OF REPRODUCTION RESERVED

MADE AND PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
AT THE CHAPEL RIVER PRESS
ANDOVER, HANTS
10.51

To my friends and former students at
Chestnut Hill College, Philadelphia

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author wishes to express his thanks to a number of American publishers and copyright holders who permitted him to quote from these various books:

The Atlantic Monthly Press: The Letters of William James, edited by H. P. Bowditch.

Messrs. Brandt and Brandt: The Letters of Franklin K. Lane, edited by A. W. Lane and L. H. Hall (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1922).

Harcourt, Brace and Company, Incorporated: Gustav Stolper, This Age of Fable (Reynal and Hitchcock, New York, 1942).

Harper and Brothers: Count Herman Keyserling, America Set Free; D. W. Brogan, France Under the Republic.

The Harvard University Press: The Holmes-Pollock Letters (Volume II) edited by Mark DeWolfe Howe.

The Houghton Mifflin Company: Henry Adams and His Friends, compiled by H. D. Cater; Letters of Henry Adams, edited by Chauncey Ford Worthington; Henry Adams, The Formative Years, edited by Herbert Agar.

Alfred A. Knopf, Incorporated: J. Fenimore Cooper, The American Democrat; Peter Viereck, Metapolitics—From the Romantics to Hitler; D. W. Brogan, The American Character; Gilberto Freyre, The Masters and the Slaves, translated by S. Putnam; Maurice Baring, Have You Anything to Declare?

Little, Brown and Company: Ogden Nash, I’m a Stranger Here Myself.

Longmans, Green and Company: Josef Bernhart, The Vatican as a World Power, translated by George N. Shuster; W. E. H. Lecky, Democracy and Liberty.

The Macmillan Company: E. A. Robinson, Collected Poems; Henry Adams, The Tendency of History; Karl Adam, The Spirit of Catholicism, translated by Dom J. McCann.

William Morrow and Company, Incorporated: Albert Jay Nock, Our Enemy, The State.

Sheed and Ward, Incorporated: Nicholas Berdyaev, The End of Our Times, translated by Donald Attwater.

The University of Chicago Press: Euclides da Cunha, Rebellion in the Backlands, translated by S. Putnam; Donald Pierson, Negroes in Brazil: A Study of Race Contact in Bahia.

The Viking Press, Incorporated: The Portable James Joyce.

The Yale University Press: William Graham Sumner, The Challenge of Facts and Other Essays, edited by A. G. Keller.

W. W. Norton and Company: Everett Dean Martin, Liberty.

PREFACE

NOT without an inner emotion and a certain feeling of hesitancy am I offering these pages to the English-speaking public. The emotion is due to the fact that I lived for over ten years on the hospitable soil of the United States of America—the native land of my second child—which to me is my second home. The hesitancy, on the other hand, is the result of the grim foreboding that this volume will be the cause of several misunderstandings and, in a number of cases, of downright resentment. Yet, as Léon Bloy has insisted, it is “later than we think,” and the time for flattery, self-delusion and cheap optimism is over.

An involved situation—a complicated problem—a complex issue cannot be dealt with in a few pages or in a simple way. This task has taxed the mental powers and the physical energies of more than one person; the author had to be assisted by an editor with a greater mastery of English than his own. Of course, as far as the material, the facts, and the views are concerned, these are entirely the author’s responsibility.

The reader might conceivably ask himself why this book was written and published in this particular situation and at this particular time. Another edition, a German translation, will be published soon in Switzerland. But the author, an Austrian who will never forget his “American decade,” and his years in Britain, believes that directly as well as indirectly he has dealt with problems which not only lie at the core of that particular internal crisis which darkens the horizons of the Occident’s future, but also form the very substance of the great and fatal misunderstanding between the Continent and the English-speaking nations.

This catastrophic lack of comprehension of the rather opaque world east of Calais, aggravated by confusion about technical terms, is largely responsible for the grave disappointments America—and Britain also—have suffered after each major war won for their ideals. Each triumph for “democracy” has ended, on the Continent, with a frightening set-back for the cause of liberty. The years 1917, 1918, 1922, 1933, 1938 were a chain of defeats for the cause of freedom. The Second World War resulted in military victory and political defeat.

In order to help Englishmen and Americans to distinguish more clearly between the forces of light and the forces of darkness the material for this book has been collected, arranged and annotated. It is our fervent hope that we have not altogether failed in this endeavour.

KUEHNELT-LEDDIHN

Lans,

Tyrol, June 28, 1951

CHAPTER I

DEFINITIONS AND BASIC PRINCIPLES

THIS book is an essay in the narrowest sense of the term—an effort to throw some light on certain phases and aspects of the century-old struggle between the principles of freedom and those of equality, between the ideologies of liberalism and of democracy (in their classic sense, of course). It is obvious that this study cannot be exhaustive; nevertheless, the subjects of our analysis have not been chosen at random, but have been selected for special reasons.

Before defining our terms we think it important to “show our hand” and to declare our philosophical baggage. It is obvious that any writer trying to analyze political or sociological phenomena critically and methodically will be motivated by a more or less coherent system of philosophy. Since the present author is a Catholic, his philosophy has an intimate relationship with the theology of his Church—a relationship which can best be defined as co-ordination. The principle that “philosophy is the handmaid of theology” has for him only a personal, but not an intellectual meaning. Although his philosophy is predominantly Thomistic, he is also deeply influenced by a theistic existentialism, and by certain cognitions of the phenomenological school. The Catholic reader who is curious as to the reasons which prompt him to deviate from Neo-Thomism—today so strongly dominating the philosophical scene in Catholic North America—is invited to peruse the note on this subject on pages 164–167.

The non-Catholic reader will not, we hope, be discouraged by the admission just made. We want to assure him that Thomism, the basis of our philosophy, is not a strange, esoteric creed full of mysterious allusions; it is, on the contrary, a philosophy characterized by the utmost respect for human reason and one which strives towards objective reality. It is a philosophy of “horse-sense” with no patience for solipsism, the denial of sensory apperception and the rejection of the simple laws of logic. Its realism will insist that if statement A is correct, and statement B contradicts A, the latter must be considered to be false. There is nothing magical or mysterious about the tenets of Thomism insofar as they underlie the philosophy of these pages; they represent common sense.

At the same time we are deeply concerned about the psychological reactions of man (either as a person or as an individual lost in a crowd), and about myths and superstitions. Yet we will, naturally, subordinate psychology to philosophy, and feelings, emotions and affections to objective reality—without forgetting the existence of the former.

When we talk about freedom and equality we must realize that we are faced here, to all practical purposes, by relative, not by absolute terms; by trends and tendencies rather than by unalloyed abstractions. Freedom in this study means the greatest amount of self-determination which in a given situation is feasible, reasonable and possible. As a means to safeguarding man’s happiness and protecting his personality it is an intermediary end, and thus forms part of the common good. It is obvious that under these circumstances it cannot be brutally sacrificed to the demands of absolute efficiency nor to efforts towards a maximum of material welfare. Man does not live by bread alone. Here, as in some other basic matters, most readers will probably admit that they see with us eye to eye because, although not belonging to the Church, they are nevertheless adherents (and beneficiaries) of the Hebrew-Greek-Christian tradition which has something approaching a common denominator.

When we speak about equality we do not refer to equity (which is justice). Even the so-called “Christian equality” is not something mechanical, but merely subjection under the same law—in other words isonomy. Yet to the Christian two newly-born babes are spiritually equal, but their physical and intellectual qualities (the latter of course in potency) are from the moment of conception unequal. We shall not go into the psychological reasons for the egalitarian and identitarian tendencies of our age, which we have dealt with elsewhere;¹ it suffices to say that the artificial establishment of equality is as little compatible with liberty as the enforcement of unjust laws of discrimination. (It is obviously just to discriminate—within limits—between the innocent and the criminal, the adult and the infant, the combatant and the civilian, and so on.) Whereas greed, pride and arrogance are at the base of unjust discrimination, the driving motor of the egalitarian and identitarian trends is envy, jealousy² and fear. “Nature” (i.e., the absence of human intervention) is anything but egalitarian; if we want to establish a complete plain we have to blast the mountains away and fill the valleys; equality thus presupposes the continuous intervention of force which, as a principle, is opposed to freedom. Liberty and equality are in essence contradictory.

Of all political labels none have been more frequently misused than the terms “liberal” and “democratic.” A liberal is a man or a woman who is interested in having people enjoy the greatest reasonable amount of liberty—and this regardless of the juridical type of government they are living under. It is true that the affinities between liberty and the various political forms are not identical; it is also true that while some political establishments show marked liberal trends they harbour nevertheless (through their dialectics) the danger of far-reaching enslavement. The fact remains that the true liberal is not pledged to any specific constitution, but would subordinate his choice to the desire to see himself and his fellow-citizens enjoying a maximum of liberty. If he thinks that a monarchy would grant greater liberty than a republic, he would choose the former; under certain circumstances he might even prefer the actual restrictions of a military dictatorship to the potential evolutions of a democracy. Thus any liberal accepting Plato’s evaluation of democracy (Republic, Book viii) would reject this form of government because, according to this philosopher, it is fatally doomed to develop into tyranny. In this whole discussion of liberty it should never be forgotten that the highest liberty—which is at one and the same time inalienable—is ascetic liberty.³

As anybody with a real knowledge of Europe might expect, the term “liberal” in its political sense is of Spanish origin. It appears for the first time after 1812 in the Iberian peninsula, and was soon adopted by the French. Southey (in the Quarterly Review) wrote in 1816 for the first time about “British Liberales,” and ten years later we see Scott using the expression “Liberaux.”⁴ This term was used for the radical wing of the Whigs—which is not quite identical with the connotation we attribute to this label. In the United States “a liberal” has come to mean a person who welcomes change, and thus would not be averse to embracing or fostering a totalitarian ideology. Thus, genuine liberals (as, for example, the late Oswald Garrison Villard), in order to distinguish themselves from communist sympathizers, like to call themselves “old-fashioned liberals.” On the European continent the situation was not dissimilar; there “liberals” often engaged in a veritable persecution of all those who preferred a different scope of views. Professor Carlton J. H. Hayes very adroitly called them “sectarian liberals.”⁵

The philosophical and psychological motives for the liberal position show a great variety. The driving force in a Christian liberalism will always be affection and generosity. Yet we also know of a liberalism derived from a basic philosophic nihilism, which declares that truth is either a mere prejudice, a piece of intellectual arrogance, a sensory fraud, or that it is humanly unattainable, outside the reach of the faculty of reason. It is obvious that such a philosophy of despair—which we reject—does not necessarily result in a liberal attitude; it may wind up in its opposite, and the type of its evolution thus depends merely on personal preference or temperament.

There is another possible motive which can be harmonized with the Christian position—namely, the conviction that illiberalism is bad strategy. While fully accepting the distinction between truth and untruth, and even acknowledging the tenet that untruth has no intrinsic right or claim for toleration, the “strategic liberal” will reject coercive measures simply because they do not lead to the desired result. For instance, it has been suggested that the Middle Ages died of a sort of “uremic poisoning” because of the practical impossibility of an individual seceding from the Church.⁶ The strongly coercive tendency which crept into the late medieval Church—partly as the result of an invitation by the State⁷—took a couple of centuries to subside. Already in 1818 Pius VII found strong words against the coercive principle,⁸ and the Code of Canon Law is explicit on the point that nobody (i.e., no adult) can be forced to become a Catholic.⁹ It must be admitted that during the Middle Ages the lower clergy were rather confused on this point; note the frequent insistence that Jews forcibly baptized were subject to the jurisdiction of the Church.¹⁰ Nevertheless it could only be a question of time until the full impact of Catholic theology could be felt on the problem of force and coercion;¹¹ not only did the Catholic teaching of the supremacy of conscience over all visible authority militate against the late medieval policy, but so also did the precepts of charity. Thus when handing over a person found guilty to the secular authorities, the inquisitors uttered a standard formula asking the State not to subject the culprit to capital punishment: “We cast thee out from our ecclesiastical court and give thee over, or rather leave thee to the secular arm and the power of the secular court, efficaciously entreating said secular court that it temper its sentence close to and on this side of the shedding of blood and the peril of death.”¹²

These changes of attitude, on the other hand, have nothing to do with the adamant insistence on the infallibility of the Teaching Church in dogmatic matters. Today the possibility of an honest, tragic conflict between conscience and truth is fully admitted; it was bad psychology, not bad philosophy, which imputed bad faith to every heretic or dissenter.

In this connection it must also be borne in mind that true liberalism is hardly compatible with an unlimited capitalism of the Manchester school. Property is also a means to freedom. Since private capitalism tends to concentrate property in fewer and fewer hands it is, from a genuinely liberal point of view, only a lesser evil in comparison with state capitalism (socialism).¹³ For the truly liberal solution of the problem of production we have to look to other prophets than Smith and Stalin.

The terms “democracy” and “democratic” are political. Democracy implies “power (rule) of the people”;¹⁴ the various sociological and social misuses of these expressions do not interest us here. (We have, for example, to place a label like “the democratic way of life” in that category.) Mere affection for the lower classes is not “democracy” but “demophily.”¹⁵ The reader is thus solemnly warned that we are dealing with a political concept only.

There is a classic concept of democracy, which lasted with minor variations from 500 B.C. until the middle of the last century. Some people still cling to the classic sense of the term because it alone has a modicum of conciseness and clearness. Plato, Aristotle, St. Thomas, St. Robert Bellarmine, Father Mariana, S.J., Alexander Hamilton, Marshall, Madison, Gouverneur Morris, Fustel de Coulanges, all vaguely agreed on the content of the term “democracy.”

There does seem to have been among some of the American Founding Fathers a tendency to identify democracy rigorously with one of its manifestations—direct democracy: a limitation of the term for which Rousseau might have to be held responsible. This is evident when we read Madison’s definition of democracy in The Federalist (Nos. 10 and 14), or John Adams’ attack on democracy in his Defense of the Constitution of the United States of America.¹⁶ Yet the case of John Adams is not entirely clear; a more complete perusal of his writings gives evidence of a strong opposition to the egalitarian principle,¹⁷ and we also know that he had qualms of conscience for having abetted the American Revolution insofar as it was the forerunner of the French Revolution and its sanguinary aftermath.¹⁸ Alexander Hamilton vehemently criticized democracy in his speeches on June 21, 1788 (“On the Compromise of the Constitution”) and in the Federal Convention on June 26, 1787. In fact Gouverneur Morris ascribed Hamilton’s opposition to republicanism to his confusion of republicanism with democracy.¹⁹ There should be no doubt whatever that the vast majority of the Founding Fathers not only detested and opposed direct democracy but, as strict republicans, they were also deeply critical of most of the principles of indirect democracy.²⁰

Thomas Jefferson is often glibly called a “democrat” and the founder of “Jeffersonian democracy” (as opposed to “Jacksonian democracy”). Yet when we analyze the contents of democracy in its direct as well as in its indirect form, we must come to the conclusion that his stand was not democratic at all. Dr. Mortimer Adler quite rightly rejects Jefferson as a democrat and insists that “the dawn of American democracy really begins with Jackson.”²¹ What, then, are the precepts of democracy? It has only two postulates: (1) legal and political equality (franchise) for all,²² and (2) “self-government” based on the rule of the majority of equals. Depending on the manner of exercise of this “self-government”—by the whole populace or by representatives—we speak of direct or indirect democracy.

It is also obvious that the representatives in an indirect democracy have the duty of repeating the views of the electorate; in the opposite case we have a republic rather than a democracy. The respect of minorities, moreover, the freedom of speech, the limitations imposed upon the rule of majorities²³ have nothing to do with democracy as such. These are liberal tenets—they may or may not be present in a democracy.

Jefferson actually was an Agrarian Romantic who dreamt of a republic governed by an élite of character and intellect, and based on the support of a free yeomanry. This is evident when he writes in a letter to John Adams, dated October 28, 1814:

The natural aristocracy I consider as the most precious gift of nature, for the instruction, the trusts and government of society. And indeed, it would have been inconsistent in creation to have formed men for the social state, and not to have provided virtue and wisdom enough to manage the concerns of society. May we not even say that that form of government is the best which provides most effectually for a pure selection of these natural aristoi into the offices of government?²⁴

And in another page of the same letter he adds:

Every one by his property, or by his satisfactory situation, is interested in the support of law and order. And such men may safely and advantageously reserve to themselves wholesome control over their public affairs, and a degree of freedom, which in the hands of the canaille of the cities of Europe, would be instantly perverted to the demolition and destruction of everything public.²⁵

His rejection of an urban proletariat was so outspoken that it is difficult to see how he could have been elevated, even temporarily, to the august position of Patron Saint of the Common Man. He wrote, for instance:

The mobs of great cities add just so much to the support of pure government, as sores do to the strength of the human body. . . . I consider the class of artificers as the panderers of vice, and the instruments by which the liberties of a country are generally overturned.²⁶

In his later age his views mellowed somewhat, but he seems to have opposed female suffrage at all times.²⁷ His agrarianism never subsided, although it found its most concrete expression in his younger years. In that spirit he wrote to Madison a letter, dated December 20, 1787:

I think that our governments will remain virtuous for many centuries; as long as they are chiefly agricultural: and this will be as long as there are vacant lands in any part of America. When they get piled upon one another as in the large cities of Europe, they will become corrupt as in Europe.²⁸

The expressions “democrat” and “democracy” hardly occur in the Monticello edition of Jefferson’s works. In a letter addressed to Washington on May 17, 1792, he called himself a “republican federalist,” and in his first inaugural address he insisted that he was a “federalist and a republican.” But when Andrew Jackson ran against John Quincy Adams for the presidency in 1828, he was called by some of his supporters a “democratic-republican” (since both candidates used the “republican” label). Van Buren prided himself on being a republican, but the term “democratic “was again used by Pierce in 1852. Yet the founder of American democracy undoubtedly remains Andrew Jackson, whose monument in Washington is in front of the White House—surrounded by the statues of four European noblemen who fought in America for liberty, but not for equality or majority rule: Tadeusz Kościuszko, Baron von Steuben, the Marquis de Lafayette and the Comte de Rochambeau. (Pulaski and Baron de Kalb have their representations in stone elsewhere.)

Those who want to avoid confusion, and insist on clarity in political thinking, by carefully trying to distinguish between liberalism and democracy and between democracy and republicanism, are probably fighting a losing battle.²⁹ Most people are not usually aware of the fact that one of the most important differences between the Continental and the Anglo-Saxon tradition of representative government has to be found in the important alloy which has been, so far, the almost inseparable concomitant of the latter: whiggery, or liberalism in the classic sense. The names and works of nineteenth- and twentieth-century thinkers who have carefully distinguished between democracy and liberalism will be found in the next chapter (Note 58). But the vast majority of Americans and Englishmen talking about “democracy” always include the liberal element in their concept of democracy—and this in spite of the fact that democracy and liberalism are concerned with two entirely different problems. The former is concerned with the question of who should be vested with ruling authority, while the latter deals with the freedom of the individual, regardless of who carries on the government. A democracy can be highly illiberal:³⁰ the Volstead Act, quite democratically voted for, interfered with the dinner menus of millions of citizens. Fascism, National and international Socialism repeatedly insisted that they were in essence democratic—a claim which must be viewed in a strict philosophical and historical setting, and in this view becomes less hypocritical than observers in the Western hemisphere are wont to admit. The Soviet use of the “democratic” label is by no means a shrewd political manœuvre of recent years, but a terminology already adopted by Lenin and continued by Stalin throughout the nineteen-twenties.³¹ If we accept St. Thomas’ definition of democracy (De regimine principum, i. 1) we will find that the “dictatorship of the proletariat” (provided the proletariat forms a majority) is more democratic than the American Constitution—in which, in contrast to the sacred books of communism, the word “democracy” never figures.

On the other hand we can imagine an absolute ruler—an autocratic emperor, for instance—who is a thoroughgoing liberal . . . although it is obvious that he cannot be democratic in the political sense. Fifty-one per cent of a nation can establish a totalitarian régime, suppress minorities and still remain democratic; while an old-fashioned dictator might reserve to himself only a very few prerogatives, scrupulously refraining from interfering in the private sphere of the citizens. There is little doubt that the American Congress or the French Chambers have a power over their nations which would rouse the envy of a Louis XIV or a George III, were they alive today. Not only prohibition, but also the income tax declaration, selective service, obligatory schooling, the finger-printing of blameless citizens, premarital blood tests—none of these totalitarian measures would even the royal absolutism of the seventeenth century have dared to introduce.

After having established the character of the difference between democracy and liberalism, we would like to give a few hints as to the plan of this book, which consists of selected chapters on this subject—studies and essays which do not cover the whole ground, but represent an effort to throw some light on various aspects of the problem.

The first, “Democracy and Totalitarianism: the Prophets,” deals with the apprehensions of thinkers and observers who lived between 1790 and 1914 and, in true Platonic fashion, feared the rise of totalitarian tyranny as an evolutionary or dialectic process from the very essence of democracy. We have tried to co-ordinate their views with those of our contemporaries, and thus to offer to the reader a sample of the history of ideas.

The second, “A Critique of Democracy,” which has been previously published in a somewhat different form (in New Scholasticism, July, 1946), deals with the weaknesses and inherent dangers of the democratic doctrine. In this as well as in the two following essays our field of investigation is that of political sciences, and our investigation itself is based on a specific philosophy.

The third, “Democracy and Monarchy,” a study in comparative government, is a continuation of the second; while the fourth, “The Political Temper of Catholic Nations,” tries to revise the picture as to the inherent liberalism (and anarchic tendencies) of the Catholic nations, as well as to analyze the probability of democracy becoming a “going concern” in the larger part of Europe. The fact that only thirteen per cent of the European continent is Protestant, and that Catholicism is also the dominant religion in the Western Hemisphere, shows the importance of such research.

The next two studies are of a historical nature. The fifth, “Hus, Luther and National Socialism,” traces the direct influence of Hus on Mussolini, his Italian interpreter, and on the Czech National Socialists of 1897; and also the influence of Hus on Luther and of Luther on the German National Socialists. The last contribution tries to clear up a most dangerous misunderstanding; it deals with the historical and intellectual background of the Nazi party, and we have given it the title “The Rise of the National Socialist Party.” It is based on thorough factual documentation. A slightly condensed version has already appeared in the Journal of the History of Ideas, IX, No. 3 (June, 1948), 338–71.

We conclude with a short summary, pointing out some conclusions from the facts assembled. We leave it to the reader to draw others. And although at present the dice are heavily loaded, only time will tell whether freedom, equality, or, perhaps, inequality with a new servitude will prevail.

CHAPTER II

DEMOCRACY AND TOTALITARIANISM: THE PROPHETS

Verzeiht, es ist ein gross Ergetzen

Sich in den Geist der Zeiten zu versetzen;

Zu schauen, wie vor uns ein weiser Mann gedacht,

Und wie wir’s dann zuletzt so herrlich weit gebracht.

—J. W. GOETHE, Faust

Above all things, men and women, believe me, the world grows better from century to century, because God reigns supreme, from generation to generation. Let pessimism be absent from our minds, and let optimism throw its glory over all our souls and all our lives henceforth and ever.

—W. E. GLADSTONE

1. THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY POLITICAL THINKERS

THE notion that tyranny evolves naturally from democracy can be traced back to the earliest political theorists; there are allusions to it in Aristotle’s Politics (v. 8. 2–3, 18), but the description of this evolutionary process in Plato’s Republic (Books viii, ix) provides us with a picture which, without exaggeration, can be called an almost perfectly accurate facsimile of the insidious transition which took place in central and eastern Europe after 1917 and, especially, after 1930. Here we find a description of the mass rebellion against the élites, the deification of youth, the ever mounting expropriation of the well-to-do until they begin to defend themselves, whereupon the masses select a “leader” whose task it is to protect “the people”; we see the bodyguards paid by the demagogue, the flight of the wealthy and of the intellectuals, the rejection of democracy by the desperate upper classes as a result of this development, the evolution from “protection” to tyranny, the spoliation of the temples, the militarization of the masses, the recruiting of criminals into the police force, the provocation of military conflicts in order to impose emergency measures at home and thus a stricter national discipline, finally “purges” and a mounting wave of corruption.

From then on until the advent of the eighteenth century there was not much speculation about the nature of political evolution, but the debate about the intrinsic qualities of the various governmental forms continued in full vigour from St. Thomas to Montesquieu. Still, the character of these analyses and investigations suffered somewhat from the relative uniformity of the political scene up to the American and French Revolutions; democracy, for instance, apart from certain city governments, had been restricted to very small areas. The political theorist had to rely largely on antique and certain medieval patterns.

The French Revolution, offering the spectacle of quickly-following transitions, revived interest in organic political changes; France, the most populous and powerful country of Europe, from 1789 to 1815 had run the whole gamut of political evolution. And, though the purely external forms of the ancien régime had to all appearances triumphed, the democratic trend was, in the eyes of more far-seeing observers, bound to gain the upper hand after recovering from its temporary set-back. The ancien régime had suffered grievous defeats before it smashed the Revolution, and from now on it could not, in a psychological sense, any longer be “taken for granted.” Joseph de Maistre exhorted the supporters of royalism to defend the monarchic form of government with intellectual arguments³²—a sure sign that the patriarchal régimes henceforward were phenomena under discussion, and thus had ceased to belong to an “organic” order. (For an explanation of these terms see below, pp 155–156.)

Those observers, on the other hand, who were convinced of the “ultimate” victory of democracy—the historical “ultimate,” of course—were sharply divided between those who expected from it a new stability, balance and legitimacy, and those who—mindful of the experiences of 1789—regarded it merely as a preliminary step to tyranny, Caesarism or totalitarian servitude. Some of the latter, like Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859), P. J. Proudhon (1809–1865), Herman Melville (1819–1891), J. J. Bachofen (1815–1887) and, to a certain extent, also Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) and F. Nietzsche (1844–1900), expected the rise of what Mr. Hilaire Belloc aptly calls the “servile state.”

Others, overlooking the possibility of a peaceful and gradual evolution, were fascinated by the potentialities of the “dialectics” of democracy and democratism. They followed a direction of thought indicated by Plato and, up to a point, by Aristotle also. Among these we find Walter Bagehot (1826–1877), J. Burckhardt (1818–1897), Constantine Leontyev (1831–1891), F. M. Dostoyevski (1821–1881), Ernest Renan (1823–1893), Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872), Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855), B. G. Niebuhr (1776–1831), J. Donoso Cortés (1809–1853) and Benjamin de Constant (1767–1830).

To the aforementioned, a group of other analysts should be added, thinkers who varied in their affinity and enthusiasm towards democracy. Some of these were outright enemies, others again were friends of the democratic ideology; but they all had very concrete fears and apprehensions, which in time proved to be well founded. Among such men should here be mentioned Edmund Burke (1729–1797), Alexander Herzen (1812–1870), Count Montalembert (1810–1870), Royer-Collard (1763–1845), Lord Acton (1834–1902), Prévost-Paradol (1829–1870), J. S. Mill (1806–1873), Lord Bryce (1838–1922), Sir Henry Maine (1822–1888), Orestes Brownson (1803–1876), W. E. H. Lecky (1838–1903), Henry Adams (1838–1918), H. F. Amiel (1804–1881), Alexandre Vinet (1797–1847) and Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881).

Contemplating this list it is certainly no exaggeration to state that, during the nineteenth century, some of the best minds in Europe (and in America) were haunted by the fear that there were forces, principles and tendencies in democracy which were, either in their very nature or, at least, in their dialectic potentialities, inimical to many basic human ideals—freedom being one among them. It is important to note that about half the men mentioned could be called liberals; and there is no doubt that the liberals in this group were the most concrete and the most vocal in their denunciation of the impending evil.³³

2. THE CONTAGION OF UNIFORMISM

Before we turn to our inventory of prophetic views concerning the second quarter of the twentieth century, however, we ought to recall the fact that at the very bottom of all socio-political problems we find, among others, certain recurrent psychological factors. One of them we might call man’s subjection to the influence of two powerful, mutually antagonistic drives: the identitarian instinct and the diversitarian sentiment. Whereas the first-mentioned belongs, in a certain sense, to the animal nature of man, the latter is purely human.³⁴

Yet there can be no doubt that our modern civilization decidedly favours the excessive development of the former. Democracy, mass production, militarism, ethnic nationalism,³⁵ racialism and all tendencies toward “simplification” put the emphasis on identity and uniformity—a fact of which John Stuart Mill was deeply conscious. It is precisely from this process of levelling and assimilation that he expected some of the worst menaces to liberty. In his essay On Liberty, after enumerating the various technical causes for this general trend, he demonstrated his independence from an orthodox Benthamite utilitarianism by declaring that this development should be resisted even at the cost of material sacrifices. And then he added:

The demand that all other people shall resemble ourselves grows by what it feeds on. If real resistance waits till life is reduced nearly to one uniform type, all deviations from that type will come to be considered impious, immoral, even monstrous and contrary to nature. Mankind speedily become unable to conceive diversity, when they have been for some time unaccustomed to see it.³⁶

This craze for uniformity had been criticized by Montesquieu a hundred years earlier. He insisted that “there are certain ideas of uniformity which sometimes take hold of great minds (they affected Charlemagne), but infallibly strike small ones.”³⁷

Benjamin de Constant, who belonged to the eighteenth no less than to the nineteenth century, recognized the paralyzing qualities of uniformism when he wrote: “Variety is organization; uniformity is mechanism. Variety is life; uniformity is death.”³⁸

It is uniformity again which figured so prominently in the French Revolution, when democracy appeared in its full totalitarian garb. Reviewing its powerful Napoleonic aftermath, Constant wrote in 1814:

It is quite remarkable that uniformity never met with more favour than in a revolution raised in the name of the rights and the liberty of men. The systematic spirit at first went into an ecstasy of symmetry; the love of power soon discovered what immense advantage this symmetry gave it. Though patriotism exists only as a lively attachment to the interests, manners, and customs of a locality, our self-announced patriots declared war on all these things. They dried up this natural fount of patriotism, and wished to replace it by a fictitious passion for an abstract being, a general idea, deprived of all that strikes the imagination and speaks to the memory. They began building the edifice by breaking up and pulverizing the materials they should have used. They came close to naming cities and provinces by numbers (as they did the legions and army corps), so much did they seem to fear that a moral idea might attach itself to what they were instituting!

Despotism, which replaced demagogy and made itself heir of the fruit of all these labours, very adroitly followed the blazed trail. The two extremes at first found themselves in agreement on this point, because at bottom in both extremes was the desire of tyranny. The interests and memories which are born from local habits contain a germ of resistance which authority only reluctantly endures and hastens to uproot. It has an easier road with individuals: it rolls its enormous weight over them as easily as over sand.

Today the admiration for uniformity—a real admiration in some small minds, an affected one in many servile of spirit—is received as a religious dogma by a host of assiduous echoes of every favoured opinion.³⁹

It was, indeed, no secret to Constant that the imperialistic methods of aggression practised by the French Revolution and the military dictatorship which constituted its aftermath resulted in a strengthening of the principle of uniformity. Not only the original domains of France, but also the newly conquered and incorporated territories had to suffer from this mania which proved to be so infectious.

Contemporary conquerors—peoples or princes—want their empires to present only a uniform surface, on which the proud eye of power can range without meeting any unevenness which may offend it or restrict its view. The same code of law, the same system of weights and measures, the same regulations, and (if one can arrive at it) eventually the same language—this is what one proclaims the perfection of any social organization. . . .

On all the rest today’s great word is UNIFORMITY.⁴⁰

Donoso Cortés, who belonged to the following generation, in no uncertain terms denounced⁴¹ this madness, which increased in intensity with every decade until it reached a climax in our time.⁴² Constantine Leontyev saw clearly how the basic “uniformistic” ideas of the French Revolution triumphed along the whole line; these had influenced the structure of the two French Empires under the Bonapartes, and now affected even the German victor of 1871:

The “pure race” centralization, egalitarianism, a constitution (of sufficient strength so that a man of genius will not dare to engineer a coup d’état), support to industry and trade and, in opposition to all the aforementioned—a strengthening and a union of all elements of anarchy; finally, militarism. Point for point Imperial France! The nuances [of difference] are, from the broader and higher point of view which we are now taking, so insignificant that it is not worth while even to think about them.

The victory of the national, racial [tribal] policy has thus brought to the Germans a loss of national personality; Germany after her victories has been more “gallicized” than ever before—in her [very] being, her administration, her structures, her laws; important aspects of her personal, local culture have suddenly faded away.⁴³

Jacob Burckhardt, commenting with implicit bitterness on a speech of President U. S. Grant, remarked:

The complete programme contains Grant’s latest address, which points to a single state with one language as the necessary aim of a purely acquisitive world.⁴⁴

His apprehensions were based on the fear of revolutionary risings using totalitarian methods and envisaging totalitarian aims:

It seems that an essential condition for crises is to be found in the existence of a highly developed system of communications and the spreading of a homogeneous mentality over vast areas.

But when the hour and the right material are at hand, the contagion spreads with the speed of electricity over hundreds of miles, and affects the most diverse populations, which hardly know each other. The message flies through the air and they all suddenly agree on that one issue, if only on a sulky admission that “there’s got to be a change.”⁴⁵

The interrelationship between dictatorship and equality, known to Aristotle (cf. Politics v. 9, 4–8), was no secret to Walter Bagehot either. The latter wrote about the French Second Empire:

In France, égalité is a political first principle; the whole of Louis Napoleon’s régime depends upon it; remove that feeling, and the whole fabric of the Empire will pass away. We once heard a great French statesman illustrate this. He was giving a dinner to the clergy of his neighbourhood, and was observing that he had no longer the power to help or hurt them, when an eager curé said, with simple-minded joy: “Oui, monsieur, maintenant personne ne peut rien—ni le comte, ni le prolétaire.”⁴⁶

The Marquis de Sade, one of the most original defenders of democratic dictatorship, combined his immoralism with the notion that the principle of equality should be extended to plants and animals, not only to man.⁴⁷ N. D. Fustel de Coulanges considered levelling tendencies to be instrumental in keeping the power of the tyrants of antiquity:

With two or three honourable exceptions, the tyrants who arose in all the Greek cities in the fourth and third centuries reigned only by flattering whatever was worst in the mob and violently suppressing whoever was superior by birth, wealth or merit.⁴⁸

This technique, already noted by Plato, is intrinsically democratic—in the classic sense. It must be remembered that ostracism, as a political institution, flourished in democratic Athens, and was primarily directed against outstanding persons.

Dostoyevski, on the other hand, with his interest turned toward the future rather than the past, saw in the egalitarian madness the cause rather than the result of tyranny. Thus he speaks of Shigalyov, the leftist ideologist in The Possessed:

Shigalyov is a man of genius. He has discovered “equality.” He has it all so beautifully written down in his copy-book. He believes in espionage. He wants the members of society to control each other and be in duty bound to denounce their neighbours. Everybody belongs to all and all belong to each single one. All are slaves and equals in slavery. As a final resort there will be calumny and murder; but the most important thing remains equality.⁴⁹

Already Blake had remarked that “one law for the lion and the ox is oppressive.” To Burckhardt, egalitarianism as such was a destructive element, a mania which would have to run its course before an equilibrium could be found again and a more constructive period in history re-entered:

The refrain of the song is that human inequality will somehow again be reinstated. Yet what the state and the concept of the state are going to suffer in the meantime only the gods know.⁵⁰

Still, the modern state with its demo-liberal “prehistory” would be the full executor of an egalitarian majoritism. Thus Burckhardt wrote in a letter:

But I know only too well the modern state, whose irresponsible omnipotence is going to manifest itself in a very crude and practical manner. It will simply take the approximate majority of the popular mind as a measuring-rod and regulate the rest according to it in a strictly disciplinary way.⁵¹

These horrors, according to the great seer of Basel, are already conditioned by tendencies which can be found in earlier forms of democracy. He insisted:

Democracy, indeed, has no enthusiasm for the exceptional, and where she cannot deny or remove it, she hates it from the bottom of her heart. Herself a monstrous product of mediocre brains and their envy, democracy can use as tools only mediocre men, and the pushing place-hunters give her all desired guarantees of sympathy. Yet it must be admitted that a new spirit, coming from below, gets hold of the masses so that they, driven by dark instincts, are looking again for the exceptional. But herein they may be surprisingly badly advised, and take a fancy to a Boulanger!⁵²

The terribles simplificateurs whom Burckhardt expected to be the coming masters were far more potent and destructive than M. Déroulède’s melancholy hero. And the egalitarian tendency envisioned by Burckhardt and so typical of modern dictatorship, has its obvious democratic background; for the totalitarian democrat of the type of Mr. Herbert Read it is admittedly irrational, but has, nevertheless, the character of a necessary mystique.⁵³ Alexis de Tocqueville, on the other hand, clearly recognized the psychological roots of the levelling mania:

Equality is a slogan based on envy. It signifies in the heart of every republican: “Nobody is going to occupy a place higher than I.”⁵⁴

No wonder that the modern dictatorships with their “equality in slavery” are so strongly based on the egalitarian system and on mass support, not on élites or existing aristocracies (save those coming into existence through the new bureaucracies). National Socialism of the German pattern has been no exception to the rule.

3. THE ILLIBERALISM OF DEMOCRACY

An inevitable result of all levelling tendencies is an anti-liberal attitude. Already in earlier stages of our history we encounter complaints about indifference towards liberty. Dante has reminded us that even the freedom of the will (libertas arbitrii) has not always been taken seriously (De monarchia i. 12), while Gerrard Winstanley, writing in 1649, avows that he has become disgusted with much empty talk about liberty.⁵⁵ Yet these authors, being in a sense “pre-democratic,” have not fully faced the burning problem of the deep antagonism between liberty and equality—an antithesis to which we alluded in the Introduction, and which has been blissfully overlooked by the man in the street no less than by popular agitators and pamphleteers. Donoso Cortés had no illusions about the alternatives of equality (which has to be enforced) or liberty, which is by its very nature opposed to coercion.⁵⁶

John C. Calhoun, the “Cast Iron Man” of the Southern States, was quite aware of this difficulty. He said:

There is another error, not less great and dangerous, usually associated with the one which has just been considered. I refer to the opinion, that liberty and equality are so intimately united, that liberty cannot be perfect without perfect equality.⁵⁷

Modern thinkers go far beyond this careful understatement.⁵⁸ They insist with varying degrees of emphasis on the fact that democracy and liberalism are two entirely different principles dealing with different problems.⁵⁹ To practically all of these analysts, who have seen the rise and the preliminary victories of contemporary totalitarianism, it was self-evident that this form of tyranny has its roots in the democratic (plebiscitarian, majoritarian, egalitarian), and not in the liberal-libertarian, principle. Thus, writing about National Socialism, a contemporary author remarked:

True Hitlerism proclaims itself as both true democracy and true socialism, and the terrible truth is that there is a grain of truth to such claims . . . but one fact stands out with perfect clarity in all the fog: Hitler has never claimed to represent true liberalism. Liberalism then has the distinction of being the doctrine most hated by Hitler.⁶⁰

This would not have surprised Orestes Brownson, who wrote a century ago:

We are republicans, because republicanism is here the established order, but we confess that we do not embrace and never have embraced, as essential to liberty, the popular democratic doctrine of this country.⁶¹

This pessimism was shared by Macaulay, who wrote to H. S. Randall, an American friend, in 1857:

I have long been convinced that institutions purely democratic must, sooner or later, destroy liberty, or civilization, or both. In Europe, where the population is dense, the effect of such institutions would be almost instantaneous . . .

. . . You may think that your country enjoys an exemption from these evils. I will frankly own to you that I am of a very different opinion. Your fate, I believe, is certain, though it is deferred by a physical cause.⁶²

Lord Acton was no less articulate when he remarked, in his “Lectures on the French Revolution “:

The deepest cause which made the French Revolution so disastrous to liberty was its theory of equality. Liberty was the watchword of the middle class, equality of the lower.⁶³

He was even more forceful in his review of Sir Erskine May’s Democracy in Europe, where he wrote:

The effective distinction between democracy and liberty, which has occupied much of the author’s thoughts, cannot be too strongly drawn. Slavery has been so often associated with democracy, that a very able writer pronounced it long ago essential to a democratic state; and the philosophers of the Southern Confederation have urged the theory with extreme favour. For slavery operates like a restricted franchise, attaches power to property and hinders socialism, the infirmity that attends mature democracies.⁶⁴

Even more insistent was William Lecky, whose judgment was correct although his views seemed exaggerated to his contemporaries and at least “premature” to the generation succeeding him. He said:

A tendency to democracy does not mean a tendency to parliamentary government, or even a tendency towards greater liberty. On the contrary, strong arguments may be adduced, both from history and from the nature of things, to show that democracy may often prove the direct opposite of liberty. In ancient Rome the old aristocratic republic was gradually transformed into a democracy, and it then passed speedily into an imperial despotism. In France a corresponding change has more than once taken place. A despotism resting on a plebiscite is quite as natural a form of democracy as a republic, and some of the strongest democratic tendencies are distinctly adverse to liberty. Equality is the idol of democracy, but, with the infinitely various capacities and energies of man, this can only be attained by a constant, systematic, stringent repression of their natural development . . .⁶⁵

Yet since democracy cannot relinquish its egalitarian heritage, the jealousy, envy and insecurity of the voting masses tend to give new impetus to the egalitarian mania as well as to ever increasing demands for “social security” and other forms of “economic democracy.” These cravings and desires result in specific measures, and thus we see finally a bureaucratic totalitarianism restricting personal liberties.

Lecky wrote, in the same place:

. . . in our own day, no fact is more incontestable and conspicuous than the love of democracy for authoritative regulation.

. . . The expansion of the authority and the multiplication of the functions of the State in other fields, and especially in the field of social regulation, is an equally apparent accompaniment of modern democracy. This increase of state power means a multiplication of restrictions imposed upon the various forms of human action. It means an increase of bureaucracy, of the number and power of state officials. It means also a constant increase of taxation, which is in reality a constant restriction of liberty.⁶⁶

While P. J. Proudhon, knowing that “every state is by nature annexionistic,”⁶⁷ declared that “democracy is the ideal of the state projected to infinity,”⁶⁸ Jacob Burckhardt formulated his ideas on the totalitarian tendencies of democracy in a more intuitive and poetic way:

. . . we have besides as the common expression, in part of the ideas of the French Revolution and in part of the demands of modern reform movements, what is called democracy, that is, an ideology merged from a thousand different sources and highly differentiated according to the various layers of her supporters, yet in one respect invariable; that for it the power of the state over the individual can never be sufficient. As a result the boundary lines between state and society are obliterated, and the state is expected to carry out all tasks which society might possibly neglect. At the same time everything will be kept in a state of mobility and indecision. Finally, certain groups and castes will be given a special guarantee of work and a living wage.⁶⁹

Orestes Brownson went even further when he wrote:

Democratic or democratically inclined governments are, for the most part, cruel and hard-hearted. Like corporations, they have no souls and are incapable of tenderness.⁷⁰

This judgment is similar to that made by modern authors, who have despaired about the ability of democracies to shorten wars by a negotiated and humane peace.⁷¹

Yet the preparation of the masses for totalitarian dictatorship through their “penetration” by politics was another, though more oblique, blow against liberty. Thomas Mann in his younger years had such apprehensions,⁷² and they have been voiced in our days by certain political sociologists also.⁷³ Nietzsche, in the past century, had no doubt that:

The democratic idea favours the nurturing of a human type prepared for slavery in the most subtle sense of the term. Every democracy is at one and the same time an involuntary establishment for the breeding of tyrants, taking the word in all its connotations, including those of a spiritual nature.⁷⁴

The view that there is within the framework of democracy ample opportunity for anti-libertarian tendencies, or even openly totalitarian trends, is shared by a whole score of modern authors.⁷⁵

A contemporary of Nietzsche on the opposite side of the Atlantic, Herman Melville, was haunted by the same fears in relation to his own country. Allowing himself to be swayed by the picture of a purely collectivistic China grimly opposed to all individuality, he wrote with bitterness:

How of the teeming Prairie-land?

There shall the plenitude expand

Unthinned, unawed? . . .

Myriads playing pygmy parts—

Debased into equality:

In glut of all material arts

A civic barbarism may be:

Man disennobled—brutalized

By popular science—atheized

Into a smatterer;

Dead level of rank commonplace

An Anglo-Saxon China, see,

May on your vast plains shame the race

In the Dark Ages of Democracy.⁷⁶

This vision is, admittedly, cultural rather than political; but neither to Melville, nor to John Stuart Mill, nor to De Tocqueville, were the deeper interconnections hidden. Mill also became a victim of this misinterpretation of China (largely a visual error); but the analysis and premonition of this fervent, though conditional, friend of democratic values are as timely today as ever. He wrote:

The modern régime of public opinion is, in an unorganized form, what the Chinese educational and political systems are in an organized; and unless individuality shall be able successfully to assert itself against this yoke, Europe, notwithstanding its noble antecedents and its professed Christianity, will tend to become another China.

What is it that hitherto preserved Europe from this lot? What has made the European family of nations an improving, instead of a stationary proportion of mankind? Not any superior excellence in them, which, when it exists, exists as the effect, not the cause; but their remarkable diversity of character and culture.⁷⁷

Mill then continued to analyze, first, the character and the effects of the element of diversity in the European scene; and after emphasizing the interdependence between diversity and freedom, he gave a short survey of all the forces opposed to diversity and favouring equality and identity. In summing up he wrote:

The combination of all these causes forms so great a mass of influences hostile to individuality, that it is not easy to see how it can stand its ground. It will do so with increasing difficulty, unless the intelligent part of the public can be made to feel its value—to see that it is good there should be differences, even though not for the better, even though, as it may appear to them, some should be for the worse. If the claims of individuality are ever to be asserted, the time is now, while much is still wanting to complete the enforced assimilation. It is only in the earlier stages that any stand can be successfully made against the encroachment.⁷⁸

In these pages Mill shows himself to be an unorthodox utilitarian. Of the egalitarian spadework of democracy he seems to have been less conscious—quite unlike J. J. Bachofen, the cultural anthropologist and friend of Burckhardt, who could write:

Since the victory of Lucerne the dogma of popular sovereignty and the omnipotence of democracy has become the practical basis of our public institutions. I don’t doubt that this ideology is going to proceed to all, even its most extreme conclusions, if the conditions of Europe permit it and if great catastrophes do not lead the people back to the true foundations of a sound political life. Yet complete democracy is the end of everything good. Republics have the most to fear from it. I tremble at the thought of its expansion, not on account of property, but because democracy throws us back into barbarism . . . for this is the curse of democracy, that it carries its devastations into all domains of life, affects church, home and family most severely, and distorts the true point of view on all questions, even the smallest ones. Because I love freedom, I hate democracy.⁷⁹

With Burckhardt, Gonzague de Reynold⁸⁰—and, to a certain extent, even with Amiel and Denis de Rougemont—Bachofen belonged to the anti-democratic Swiss school, to which we might also add Oskar Bauhofer, who is a Catholic like De Reynold but a convert. (De Rougemont, a Calvinist—and existentialist—is rather sceptical towards democratic claims than anti-democratic. His attitude is similar to that of the nineteenth-century Genevan H. Amiel.) This is a school of thought which places its emphasis on the person, on decentralization, on an organic continuity of tradition. Bachofen’s trend of thought, unlike Mill’s, had a religious foundation. He was not so much afraid of the egalitarian mania as of the vagaries of the masses torn away from the moorings of their faith, destroying the liberties in a blind furore of irrationality and emotional frenzy.

In Bachofen’s allusion to his indifference towards Hab’ und Gut (i.e., property) we sense a hint of a fear already expressed by Madison, who said in a letter to Jared Sparks that laws must be “capable of protecting the rights of property against the spirit of democracy.”⁸¹ A similar idea is expressed in the Federalist papers by the same author. And notwithstanding the Founding Fathers’ identification of direct democracy with democracy as such, there are constant efforts made to instill the spirit of pure democracy into the political structure of the United States⁸²—efforts which might easily lead to the results dreaded by James Madison, who found pure democracy “incompatible with personal security or the rights of property “(The Federalist, No.10). The confiscation (“nationalization”) of property by “progressive, young democracies” with full majority support, as well as the deportation of whole minorities (Nisei in the United States, Sudeten Germans in Czechoslovakia, etc.), have shown Madison’s fear to be not unfounded. Friedrich Engels was convinced that the democratic republic was the ideal form of government to serve as an arena for the class struggle, ending in the dictatorship of the propertyless classes.⁸³ The notion that socialism (i.e., an authoritarian state capitalism) is the final, logical consequence of the democratic postulates has been supported in our days by the most divergent thinkers.⁸⁴ Naturally, we should not forget the partly Hegelian fatherhood of socialism: De Tocqueville, visiting Germany in 1852, clearly recognized this interconnection.⁸⁵

It was also De Tocqueville who foresaw, in a more precise and concrete way than all his contemporaries, the danger of an evolution from democracy—and especially from democratic republicanism—to tyranny. He envisaged this evolution not as a process of dialectics, but in a direct and logical sequence. Because of his objectivity and balance in judgment, this Norman count has often been declared to be an outright supporter of democracy—which he decidedly was not.⁸⁶ It was with horror and melancholy fear that he contemplated the coming victory of democracy, which, it must be admitted, he detested less than the “next stage.” With resignation this great liberal wrote:

The absolute monarchies have dishonoured despotism; let us be careful that the democratic republics do not rehabilitate it.⁸⁷

De Tocqueville’s Catholic background prevented him from becoming a cultural or historical determinist⁸⁸; nevertheless, the chances for the survival of liberty in the “present” democratic age he thought to be less than in the preceding aristocratic periods. He wrote to Gobineau:

In my eyes human societies, like individuals, are nothing if not by the use of liberty. I have always said that liberty is more difficult to establish and to maintain in democratic societies, like ours, than in certain aristocratic societies which have preceded us. But that this should be impossible I would never be rash enough to believe.⁸⁹

Yet the picture he painted of the coming servitude—grandiose and depressing by its very depth and accuracy—shows a more pessimistic outlook. We find it in the second volume of his Democracy in America, contained in two chapters entitled “What sort of despotism have democratic nations to fear?”⁹⁰

He begins his speculation by remarking that during his sojourn in the United States (1831–32) and after his return to Europe, he was haunted by the spectre of a new despotism which would engulf the nations of Christendom. After analyzing tyranny in antiquity, he comes to the conclusion that in spite of all the arbitrariness, brutality and vindictiveness of despots and emperors, the totalitarian element was fairly absent: the natural and historical obstacles for a complete regulation of civic and political life over vast areas would have proved insurmountable. About these early despots he remarks that:

their tyranny rested very heavily on a few but did not extend to a great number; it was focussed on a few main objects and neglected the rest; it was violent but limited in its scope.

It seems to me that if despotism were to be established among the democratic nations of our days, it would have different characteristics: it would be more extensive and more mild, it would degrade men without tormenting them.⁹¹

He then insists that the coming form of tyranny is going to be so fundamentally new that there is absolutely no term, no label, no appropriate appellation he could use for it. “The thing is new, and since I cannot name it, I have to define it.”

His descriptive analysis starts with a vision of masses of men “alike and equal” attracted by small and vulgar pleasures. Yet:

above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications, and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent, if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labours, but it chooses to be the sole agent and arbiter of that happiness: it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances—what remains but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?⁹²

This is an accurate picture of the totalitarian state, only seemingly marred by the author’s emphasis on the element of mildness. Here we have to bear in mind that brutality and cruelty in the totalitarian state are merely means to achieve specific ends. The vistas of De Tocqueville relate to a peaceful evolution (or, if we prefer, degeneration)—a slow process of interaction and decline, with men becoming gradually more like mice, and states more like Leviathans. His error is merely one of “timing.” If the political process is faster than the sociological (psychological, cultural, characteriological) decay; in other words, if full political totality is reached before individuals are ready for it—a reign of terror and brutality must set in, so that the population can be “weeded out” (and thus “homogenized,” as well as paralyzed) by abject terror. Such a situation will prevail if democracy has not had enough time to prepare the stage—if, for instance, the religious background is too personalistic, if racial diversities are too pronounced, or if class differences are too divisive a factor. Under these circumstances mildness will have to be replaced by concentration camps, mass exiles, deportations and gas chambers, until and unless a totally new and uniform generation grows up.

Yet if the whole process happens in an “orderly fashion” these excesses can be avoided. Men whose civilian valour finds its supreme expression in pulling a lever behind a protective curtain will not have the courage to rebel, and concentration camps (actually a “healthy sign” because they denote resistance) will not exist. Governmental paternalism will be acclaimed. And De Tocqueville remarks:

The principle of equality has prepared men for these things: it has predisposed men to endure them, and oftentimes to look on them as benefits.⁹³

He then continues to add a score of other details to the sordid picture, which sometimes reminds us of the democratic and at other times of the dictatorial governments of our days. Our author admits that the new tyranny not only might use libertarian slogans but even be established in “the shadow of the sovereignty of the people.” Torn between the (surviving) demand for liberty and the desire to be led, the masses are prone to make a compromise by electing masters who give them the illusion that they are ruled by “themselves” after all.⁹⁴ It is at the end of this chapter⁹⁵ that he meditates on the result of a form of government with an elected head but an unbending absolutism in the scope of its legislation and the execution of all regulations and laws:

A constitution which would be republican in its head and ultra-monarchical in all its other parts has always seemed to me to be a monstrosity of short duration. The vices of the governors and the imbecility of the subjects could not fail to bring about its ruin. And the people, tired of its representatives and of itself, would create freer institutions or would soon give up and prostrate itself at the feet of a single master.⁹⁶

This meditation is continued in the next chapter (vii) where De Tocqueville insists again that the danger of a new tyranny is at hand:

Despotism . . . appears to me peculiarly to be dreaded in democratic ages. I should have loved freedom, I believe, at all times, but in the time in which we live I am ready to worship it.⁹⁷

It is in the second volume of Democracy in America that De Tocqueville arrives at this pessimism. Our author confesses that the primary interest in his research and analysis was not the United States as a country, but democracy as such: “America was only my frame, democracy the subject.”⁹⁸ He found precisely the same phenomena and developments in Europe—and this was the experience which, largely, prompted him to return to this theme, which forced him to deal with the cultural and political rather than the legal aspects of the rising democratic trend. The United States were ideal as a “case history,” not so much because Andrew Jackson had just risen to power when De Tocqueville visited the country, not even because the term “democracy” was then on everybody’s lips, or because America is, as Léon Ferrero, Guglielmo Ferrero’s prematurely deceased son, called it, a “magnifying mirror of Europe”⁹⁹—but, we think, simply because recent developments in the United States were bound to “stick out” more clearly than in the Old World. Europe, with its manifold, transparent historical layers, obscures the clarity of political phenomena; after all, it is easier to read handwriting on a fresh sheet than on a paper already covered with numerous notes.

It cannot be sufficiently emphasized that De Tocqueville’s vistas were evolutionary rather than revolutionary. Still, he saw very clearly the autocratic element in democracy, which has also been recognized by modern authors.¹⁰⁰ It is doubtful whether he would have agreed with Polybius, who (in his Histories, vi, 8–11) saw democracy ending in bestiality and savagery; but his remark about a turning of the people to “freer institutions” can be interpreted as predicting a resurgence of anarchist leanings—a reaction unfortunately far less likely than the trend to “stretch out at the feet of a single master.”¹⁰¹ His analyses were not those of Plato nor of Aristotle; but they have found echoes of varying faithfulness in the writings of many contemporary observers.¹⁰²

Herman Melville, the great American seer, knew only too well that the disappearance of the old traditional values in our civilization would leave the empty and evil shell of a naked democracy the future:

. . . Ay, Democracy
Lops, lops; but where’s her planted bed?
The future, what is that to her
Who vaunts she’s no inheritor?
’Tis in her mouth, not in her heart.
The Past she spurns, though ’tis the Past
From which she gets her saving part—
That Good which lets her Evil last.¹⁰³

Dostoyevski, however, saw a fateful germination of the seed of destructive ideas; he distinguished between the old-fashioned liberal—the representative of the late Russian Enlightenment—and the following far more radical, if not nihilistic, generation. The drift the great Russian novelist sensed was revolutionary. This is evident when we read of the reactions of Stepan Trophimovich, the old liberal, to a recently published book:

“I agree that the author’s fundamental idea is a true one,” he said to me feverishly, “but that makes it only more awful. It’s just our idea, exactly ours; we first sowed the seed, nurtured it, prepared the way, and indeed, what could they say new, after us? But, heavens! How it’s all expressed, distorted, mutilated!” he exclaimed, tapping the book with his fingers. “Were these the conclusions we were striving for? Who can understand the original idea in this?”¹⁰⁴

The liberal who continued to cling to a revealed religion and thus had an immutable basis for his philosophy, was, naturally, in another position. Still Count Montalembert, who was a convinced Catholic and a liberal, rejected democracy for political rather than for religious reasons. When elected to the Academy to take the chair of M. Droz he insisted in his inauguration speech (talking about the French Revolution):

Not being able to read in the book of history, which shows that democracy degenerates everywhere into despotism, it undertook to establish democracy in France . . . thus it dared to fight in every way the two foundations of all societies, authority and inequality; inequality which is the obvious basis of all activity and fecundity in social life; which is at the same time the mother and the daughter of liberty, since equality cannot be imagined outside of tyranny. To be sure, I am not speaking about Christian equality, whose real name is equity; but about this democratic and social equality, which is nothing but the canonization of envy and the chimera of jealous ineptitude. This equality was never anything but a mask which could not become reality without the abolition of all merit and virtue . . .

. . . No, property, the last religion of bastard societies, cannot resist alone the onslaught of the levellers. Have we not seen in our days that the privileges even of intellect have been challenged, and that appeals have been made to ignorance in order to save the revolution? It cannot be doubted that the dogma of equality, quite logically, should not respect merit or wealth more than birth.¹⁰⁵

To Fustel de Coulanges it was not less evident that every and any inequality would be more bitterly resented in a democratic civilization than under other conditions.¹⁰⁶ In order to establish a fuller equality the masses would submit to a Leader who would carry out their anti-libertarian wishes, or at least pretend to bring their desires to full realization. Goethe’s verse describes this situation in simple terms:

Ich habe gar nichts gegen die Menge;
Doch kommt sie einmal ins Gedränge,
So ruft sie, um den Teufel zu bannen,
Gewiss die Schelme, die Tyrannen.

I have nothing at all against the masses;
But whenever they get into a tough spot
In order to protect themselves against the devil,
They call those scoundrels, the tyrants.

The Genevan Henri Frédéric Amiel, with his Calvinistic background, had similar apprehensions. Speaking about the decline of authority in the social sphere, he remarked in his diary on March 20, 1865:

The only counterpoise to pure equality is military discipline. In military uniform, in the police court, in prison, or on the execution ground, there is no reply possible. But is it not curious that the régime of individual right should lead to nothing but respect for brutal strength? Jacobinism brings with it Caæsarism; the rule of the tongue leads to the rule of the sword. Democracy and liberty are not one but two.¹⁰⁷

Thus one should not be surprised when we hear genuine liberals of our own century demand the maintenance or the restoration of monarchies in order to preserve liberty.¹⁰⁸ France, of course, was for a long time “ahead” in the downward evolutionary trend towards diminished liberties, always officially emphasizing with increasing vehemence her adherence to the principles of freedom—a sure sign of menaced position. William James’ estimate of the French national character at the end of the last century¹⁰⁹ is therefore almost similar to that made today of the Germans.

Alexander Herzen had his interest focused on the political rather than on the psychological problem. Analyzing the trend in France he wrote in his diary:

Have we not seen that a republic with governmental initiative, a despotic centralization, an enormous army, favours the development of liberty far less than the English monarchy without initiative, without centralization? Have we not seen that French democracy, i.e. equality in slavery, is the form nearest to limitless autocracy?¹¹⁰

This political evolution went hand in hand with a social evolution; the statist Leviathan demanded a social Behemoth, and vice versa. A monolithic society was prepared by the rise of numerous mammoth associations and “coalitions.” These frightened such observers as Kierkegaard, Dostoyevski and Ernest Hello, who wrote his critical essays in the second half of the last century. He said:

The people of the world are not friends; but they are in coalition. Unity is motivated by love. Coalition is motivated by hatred. Those who are associated in coalitions are private enemies who band together against the public enemy. The people of the world have a common hatred which gives them a common occupation, which determines the goal of their activities.¹¹¹

Kierkegaard wrote in a similar vein:

Nowadays the principle of association (which at the most is valid only where material interests are concerned) is not positive but negative; it is an escape, a distraction and an illusion. Dialectically the position is this: the principle of association, by strengthening the individual, enervates him; it strengthens numerically, but ethically that is weakening. It is only after the individual has acquired an ethical outlook, in face of the whole world, that there can be any suggestion of really joining together. Otherwise the association of individuals who are in themselves weak, is just as disgusting and as harmful as the marriage of children.¹¹²

Yet Dostoyevski ridiculed the concept even of a union based on purely material interests:

When a nation abandons its religious concepts a wicked and fear-inspired craving for union is generated which has as its goal the salvation of the belly. In this case social union has no other aim.

Here, then, is precisely the reason why the French bourgeoisie bands together with no other reason than to save the belly, opposing the proletariat which knocks at its door. But the “salvation of the belly” is the most impotent of all concepts of union. This is the beginning of the end. What, after all, can be saved by their “institutions” considered by themselves? If there are no brothers no institution will establish a feeling of fraternity.¹¹³

But whether the efforts of an egalitarian association will succeed or not, the “horizontal pressure” of the masses will help to produce a human type which, quite naturally, will not be able to resist the encroachment of the total state. De Tocqueville was surprised at the phenomenon of group control in the United States.¹¹⁴ He wrote:

I do not know a country where there is in general less intellectual independence and less freedom of discussion than in America. . . . In America the majority builds an impregnable wall around the process of thinking.

The Inquisition was never able to prevent the circulation in Spain of books opposed to the religion of the majority. The majestic rule of the majority does better in the United States; it has removed even the thought of publishing them.¹¹⁵

This statement is supported by the observations of James Fenimore Cooper, who wrote about his country in roughly the same period (1838):

It is a besetting vice of democracies to substitute public opinion for law. This is the usual form in which masses of men exhibit their tyranny . . .

. . . Although the political liberty of this country is greater than that of nearly every other civilized nation, its personal liberty is said to be less. In other words, men are thought to be more under the control of extra-legal authorities, and to defer more to those around them, in pursuing even their lawful and innocent occupations, than in almost every other country. . . . It is not difficult to trace the causes of such a state of things, but the evil is none the less because it is satisfactorily explained.¹¹⁶

Especially in the history of small American towns do we see the tremendous influence exercised by public opinion—a drive sometimes using physical force; and this not only in the more retarded regions of the Deep South, but also in the Middle West or in New England.¹¹⁷ Neither is Britain, in spite of her aristocratic overtones, entirely exempt from the blessings of good-neighbourly interventions.

As a preparation for the absolute rule of the tyrannical state these corrosive forces play a fatal rôle in relation to human personality. (Observe that effective civilian resistance during World War II came only from “backward” nations.) John Stuart Mill, fully conscious of these degenerative trends among his co-nationals, wrote:

Our mere social intolerance kills no one, roots out no opinions, but induces men to disguise them, or to abstain from any active effort for their diffusion. With us, heretic opinions do not perceptibly gain, or even lose, ground in each decade or generation; they never blaze out far and wide, but continue to smoulder in the narrow circles of thinking and studious persons among whom they originate, without ever lighting up the general affairs of mankind with either a true or deceptive light. . . . A convenient plan for having peace in the intellectual world, and keeping all things going on therein very much as they do already. But the price paid for this sort of intellectual pacification is the sacrifice of the entire moral courage of the human mind.

. . . In England, from the peculiar circumstances of our political history, though the yoke of opinion is perhaps heavier, that of the law is lighter, than in most countries of Europe.¹¹⁸

And in a pessimistic vein he added:

The majority have not yet learnt to feel the power of the government their power or its opinions their opinions. When they do so, individual liberty will probably be as much exposed to invasion from the government, as it already is from public opinion.¹¹⁹

The picture painted characterizes the evolutionary rather than the revolutionary transition towards totalitarian dictatorship—as befitted a Protestant nation. At the same time there is little doubt that an analogous process also took place in continental and Catholic nations, as soon as they were or became “progressive.” As to Mill’s oblique reference to the British dislike of the removal of “labels” (without minding the emptying of concepts of their very essence and substance) we have to keep in mind that this corrosive process is likely to happen wherever conservatism is coexistent with an absolute rule of public opinion and a superficiality in thinking. One has only to remember Thomas Huxley’s dictum that “we do not much mind heterodoxy over here if it does not proclaim itself as such.”¹²⁰ This forms a curious parallel to Huey Long’s famous pronouncement that fascism in the United States could only be victorious if it called itself “Anti-Fascism” or “democracy.”

The intellectual hypocrisy and decomposition was yet only one part of the picture. The totalitarian and dictatorial menace was, according to so many nineteenth-century thinkers, increased by an ever growing homogeneity, a Gleichschaltung, of the social scene. Even a Thomas Jefferson had believed in “natural aristoi,” “those rising above the swinish multitude”;¹²¹ and Madison had demanded political privileges for those better qualified for the task of statesmanship.¹²² To Matthew Arnold, at a later period, the connection between aristocratic privileges and freedom was fairly obvious. He said about the political tendency of aristocratic bodies that

. . . they have a sense of equality among themselves, and of constituting in themselves what is greatest and most dignified in the realm, which makes their pride revolt against the overshadowing greatness and dignity of commanding executive. They have a temper of independence, and a habit of uncontrolled action, which makes them impatient of encountering in the management of the interior concerns of the country, the machinery and regulations of a superior and peremptory power.¹²³

Similar ideas have been expressed in this century.¹²⁴ The opposition against the hierarchies of birth—an opposition in itself often very healthy—shifts easily against the acceptance of all superiority; the levelling then, as Albert Jay Nock remarked,¹²⁵ takes an intellectual character, and new steps have thus been made into the direction of totalitarianism. Emerson’s warning that “without great men, great crowds of people in a nation are disgusting; like moving cheese, like hills of ants, or of fleas—the more, the worse,” has found in our time a faint echo only.

Once the social hierarchies were destroyed or weakened beyond repair, the political responsibilities were placed squarely on the masses; yet the common man’s love for liberty and his readiness to make sacrifices for this ideal has not stood up too well to the test of recent history.¹²⁶ The petty-bourgeois character of fascism and nazism is today doubted by no serious observer.¹²⁷

All these tendencies and trends are deeply connected with the emergence of the new emphasis on quantity fostered by the democratic principle of majority rule. Jacob Burckhardt remarked in 1866:

Even more serious is the steady increase of complete despair about every kind of smallness; anybody who does not belong to a nation of at least thirty millions shouts: “Help us, oh Lord, we are drowning!”. . .

. . . The Philistine tries with diabolic determination to eat from a big kettle; he could not enjoy the food otherwise.¹²⁸

To Friedrich von Preen he wrote at a later date:

Your analysis is right; efforts are occasionally made to educate people for mass meetings. As a result people will begin to howl if there are not at least a hundred of them in an assembly.¹²⁹

The danger of this mass rule, based on quantity and majority, resulting in an immense “horizontal pressure” has been commented upon by political theorists from Madison to René Schwob.¹³⁰ The concept of a tyranny of a majority was very well known to J. S. Mill—whom it would be difficult to accuse of anti-democratic sentiments. This tyranny, Mill emphasized, could be political in character, but also might assume purely social forms.¹³¹ He added:

Society can and does execute its mandates; and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself.¹³²

De Tocqueville, even less encumbered by illusions than Mill, commented dryly on the power exercised by the “greatest number”; “This irresistible power is an enduring phenomenon, and its employment for the good is a mere accident.”¹³³

Lord Canning, who had a sharp eye for the signs of the times, stated that “the philosophy of the French Revolution reduced the nation into individuals, in order afterwards to congregate them into mobs.”¹³⁴ And while Walt Whitman crooned in his Leaves of Grass:

One’s self I sing, a simple, separate person

Yet after the word democratic, the word en masse,

Kierkegaard thundered against the oppressive rise of the masses. Thus we read in his diary:

Books are written for “the masses,” who understand nothing, by those who understand how to write for “the masses.” . . . The battle against princes and popes—and the nearer we come to our time the truer this is—is easy compared with struggling against the masses, the tyranny of equality, against the grin of shallowness, nonsense, baseness and bestiality.¹³⁵

Orestes Brownson with no less pessimism bewailed the insidious influence of the masses on American government which, in its original concept, he called an “elective aristocracy.” Its slow replacement by democracy under the pressure of the masses, and the coming rule by demagogues moved by the “caprice of the mob,” was for him a certainty. Yet he preached resignation. “Evil, or no evil, such is the fact, and we must conform to it.”¹³⁶

In our days we have seen a whole host of thinkers dealing with the menace of the masses to sanity in government, personality, and liberty.¹³⁷ They all saw clearly the tidal wave of collectivism which not only was used by the totalitarian mob-masters but, as Emil Lederer pointed out, was artificially fostered by other agencies, since crowds could more easily be dealt with than true personalities.¹³⁸

Burke, who foresaw the rise of Bonapartism (see below, p. 61), was deeply conscious of the character of its democratic prelude. He said:

Of this I am certain, that in a democracy, the majority of the citizens is capable of exercising the most cruel oppressions upon the minority, whenever strong divisions prevail in that kind of polity, as they often must; and that oppression of the minority will extend to far greater numbers, and will be carried on with much greater fury, than can almost ever be apprehended from the dominion of a single sceptre. In such a popular persecution, individual sufferers are in a much more deplorable condition than in any other. Under a cruel prince they have the balmy compassion of mankind to assuage the smart of their wounds; they have the plaudits of the people to animate their generous constancy under their sufferings: but those who are subjected to wrong under multitudes, are deprived of all external consolation. They seem deserted by mankind; overpowered by a conspiracy of their whole species.¹³⁹

It seems obvious that these mass hatreds for dissenting minorities need an organizer and director. And this is precisely the rôle the modern as well as the historic dictators wanted to assume.¹⁴⁰

4. THE PROPHETS OF TOTALITARIANISM

Among those plagued by visions of the character of modern tyranny Juan Donoso Cortés, Marqués de Valdegamas, was surpassed only by De Tocqueville in the accuracy of his expectations. In his famous speech before the Madrid Diet on January 4, 1849, this grim Spanish prophet made a public profession of his views concerning the future of Western civilization.

The reasoning of Donoso Cortés, a conservative-liberal Catholic (though he was a personal friend of Veuillot, as an opponent of Carlism he was hardly an “ultra-conservative,” the label freely applied to him), has similarities with that of De Tocqueville, Joseph de Maistre and even of Arthur Koestler. With the French count, our marqués shared the fear of the effect of the modern means of communication; with De Maistre and Koestler he had in common the concept of external and internal forces. He conceived an interconnection between what he called the “political and the religious thermometers”; Christianity, for Donoso Cortés, was the religion of liberty, and each weakening of this religious force was bound to be accompanied by an increase of “external pressure.” His whole outlook was therefore deeply pessimistic. Beginning his analysis of the general political situation he then said:

Gentlemen, these words may sound terrible, but we should not refrain from terrible words if they express the truth—and I am decided on pronouncing them. Liberty is dead! She is not going to rise again, not on the third day, not in three years, perhaps not even in three centuries. . . .

The basis, gentlemen, of all your errors [addressing himself to the left of the Chamber] consists in the fact that you do not know in what direction the world is moving. You believe that civilization and the world go ahead, when civilization and the world merely undergo changes. The world, gentlemen, marches with rapid steps towards the establishment of the greatest and darkest despotism in human memory. This is the goal of civilization, this is the goal of the world. In order to be able to foretell these things one does not have to be a prophet. For me it is sufficient to contemplate this terrible maze of human events from its only genuine point of view—from the heights of Catholicism.¹⁴¹

Then the speaker launched into an explanation of his theory of the “two interconnected thermometers”: he surveyed the ethics of Christianity, and added a critical analysis of history based on his theory. He insisted that the Reformation had fostered the rise of absolute monarchies all over Europe which, finally, established permanent armies boasting millions of men. (These figures, if applied to the eighteenth century, are certainly greatly exaggerated.) But what are soldiers if not “slaves in uniform”?

This was still not the end. The religious thermometer continued to go further down and the political thermometer did not cease to climb. What new institutions were then created?

The Governments said: we have a million arms [brazos]. They are not sufficient; we need more; we need a million eyes; and so they established the police; and with the police a million eyes. In spite of this, gentlemen, the political thermometer and political repression continued to rise—since, in spite of everything the religious thermometer went down—and they kept on rising.

For the governments, gentlemen, a million arms were not enough; a million eyes were not enough; they wanted a million ears. And they found them in the centralization of the administration.¹⁴²

Even this was not the end of the downward trend of the religious thermometer. It kept on falling. More repression, more supervision was necessary. The governments decided that a million arms, a million eyes and a million ears were not enough. They insisted that they had to be everywhere at the same time. Thus the telegraph was invented.

Continuing to talk about the mutual relationship between religion and government, Donoso Cortés emphasized that the alternative to the rising despotism was a religious reaction (which he thought highly improbable). He said finally:

Consider one fact, gentlemen. In antiquity tyranny was savage and pitiless, and yet this despotism was physically limited because all states were small and because international relations were altogether non-existent. As a result there could be in antiquity no tyrannies on a large scale with the exception of Rome. But today, gentlemen, how things have changed! Gentlemen, the paths have been cleared for a gigantic, colossal, universal and immense tyranny . . . there are no physical obstacles, because with the steamships and the railroads there are no boundaries left; there are no physical obstacles because, thanks to the electric telegraph, there are no distances; and there are no moral obstacles because all minds are divided and all patriotisms are dead. Tell me, then, whether or not I am right in being preoccupied with the immediate future of the world; tell me whether, in dealing with this problem, I am not dealing with the real question.¹⁴³

Here again we find a minor miscalculation, in time rather than in essence; Donoso Cortés rightly expected the end of (a “geographic”) patriotism and the rise of a “rootless” internationalism; but the intermediary stages of other, more limited collectivisms like ethnic nationalism cannot be found in his calculations. His eyes were fixed on a world-wide tyranny. That he had very specific fears is evident from his address of the following year in the Cortés. We will return to this issue later.

While Donoso Cortés saw, not exactly in democracy, but rather in “progress,” the basis of the coming tyranny, Jacob Burckhardt followed Plato more closely. He said:

Democracies, in particular, abdicate very easily. In ancient Greece those who broke the grip of their aristocracies or threw them out were acclaimed as tyrants; it was always taken for granted that these without fail would unceasingly carry out the will of the masses.¹⁴⁴

An even darker view of the character of democracy was taken by Fisher Ames, who had declared at an earlier date that

It has never happened in the world, and it never will, that a democracy has been kept out of the control of the fiercest and most turbulent spirits in the society; they will breathe into it all their own fury, and make it subservient to the worst designs of the worst men.¹⁴⁵

Walter Bagehot, the keen analyst of Bonapartism, after commenting on the tactics and political strategy of Cæsar, had him address “the numerical majority of Roman citizens” with these words:

“I am your advocate and your leader: make me supreme, and I will govern for your good and in your name.”

This is exactly the principle of the French Empire. No one will ever make an approach to understanding it who does not separate it altogether and on principle from the despotisms of feudal origin and legitimate pretensions. The old monarchies claim the obedience of the people upon grounds of duty; they say they have consecrated claims to the loyalty of mankind; they appeal to conscience, even to religion: but Louis Napoleon is a Benthamite despot; he is for the “greatest happiness of the greatest number”; he says, “I am where I am because I know better than any one else what is good for the French people, and they know that I know better.” He is not the Lord’s anointed, but he is the people’s agent.¹⁴⁶

A democratic despotism is like a theocracy: it assumes its own correctness. It says: “I am the representative of the people; I am here because I know what they wish, because I know what they should have.” As Cavaignac once said, “A government which permits its principles to be questioned is a lost government.” All popular discussion whatever which aspires to teach the government is radically at issue with the hypothesis of the Empire; it says that the Cæsar, the omniscient representative, is a mistaken representative, that he is not fit to be Cæsar.¹⁴⁷

The democratic aspects of modern dictatorship have also been emphasized by numerous other authors.¹⁴⁸ Both Hitler and Mussolini insisted on the democratic character of their political systems.¹⁴⁹ Proudhon, who has recently been accused of fascist leanings, had no illusions about the despotic implications of democracy. This early socialist, who lacked the ostentatious admiration of modern totalitarians for the “common man,” wrote:

. . . because of this ignorance of the primitiveness of their instincts, of the urgency of their needs, of the impatience of their desires, the people show a preference towards summary forms of authority. The thing they are looking for is not legal guarantees, of which they do not have any idea and whose power they do not understand; they do not care for intricate mechanisms or for checks and balances for which, on their own account, they have no use; it is a boss in whose word they confide, a leader whose intentions are known to the people and who devotes himself to its interests, that they are seeking. This chief they provide with limitless authority and irresistible power. The people, considering everything to be just which they consider useful to themselves, since they are the people, ridicule all formalities and do not impose conditional limitations on the depositories of power, Inclined towards suspicion and calumny, but incapable of methodical discussion, they believe in nothing definite save the human will. Their only hope is man. They have confidence only in their creatures: In principibus, in filiis hominum. They expect nothing from principles—which alone can save them. They do not have the “religion of ideas.”¹⁵⁰

He then continued to analyze the foundations of the imperial autocracy in Rome through democratic forces, reminding the reader:

The curious thing about it is that this democracy was sincerely convinced of its liberalism, and it boasted of representing equality and progress.¹⁵¹

How deeply this desire for a personal leadership is rooted, not only in democracy, but also in socialism, becomes manifest when we read of the outcry of H. van Kol (“Rienzi”) in his Socialisme en Vrijheit:

To those who are called to lead us we promise loyalty and submission, and we say to them: “Men, ennobled by the choice of the people, show us the way into battle; we follow you!”¹⁵²

Among modern authors the theme of the “charismatic leader,” as distinguished from the strictly non-democratic ruler, has been dealt with by Max Weber.¹⁵³ Yet he was far from being alone in delineating and characterizing this contemporary phenomenon in connection with democratic demands. Others¹⁵⁴ have successfully analyzed these populistic dictators, Burckhardt’s terribles simplificateurs, the “handsome fellows with the talents of non-commissioned officers”¹⁵⁵—a truly remarkable prophecy (but not quite as accurate as it seems; Hitler was never a non-commissioned officer, only a Gefreiter—lance corporal or p.f.c).

These nineteenth and early twentieth century vistas were not basically new. Aristotle knew only too well that the tyrants have to come—as stalwart defenders of the lower classes against wealthy, unpopular minorities (aristocrats, plutocrats, etc.).¹⁵⁶ These tyrants have to be “regular fellows” (“ordinary, decent chaps”), and, as we have repeatedly emphasized, of the “leading” rather than the “ruling” type. In this as in many other respects they fit completely into the democratic pattern—as President Eliot of Harvard would have been forced to admit.¹⁵⁷ President Wilson’s definition of a democratic leader¹⁵⁸ is, actually, identical with that of a totalitarian dictator. The difference is in degree, not in essence. Wilson’s concept implies a complete union of the leader with the people as well as with the spirit of the times; it implies a certain (subconscious) cunning and shrewdness, but a lack of originality. The closer this co-operation between leader, people and the integrating spirit of the times, the less the total aggregate of liberty. Finally we get the picture of the successful party leader as painted by Lord Brougham:

It is, if possible, worse in the case of there being no division of parties, and all, or nearly all, the people inclining one way. The popular chief in such a case is armed with the power of a tyrant, without feeling any of the tyrant’s dread either of the public indignation expressed by way of censure, or of the same indignation breaking out in acts of violence.¹⁵⁹

Talking about the “popular chief,” he adds:

While his power continues, however, his tyranny is less tolerable than that of any despot; it leaves no escape to its victim, and no redress or consolation under oppression.¹⁶⁰

Still, Max Weber is right in maintaining that there is something magical in these unoriginal but nevertheless “charismatic” leaders. Not only Hitler but perhaps even Antonio Conselheiro, the half mad “counsellor” of the ecstatic backwoods revolutionaries in Brazil,¹⁶¹ were not simply personifications of the masses and hence “born leaders.” Involuntarily one is reminded of Goethe’s description of the “daimonic man” in the course of history:

The demoniacal element has the most terrifying aspects if it is strongly represented in a human being. I have had during my life-time the occasion to observe several such men, partly from a distance, partly close to. These men are not always exceptional either in intellectual capacities or in talents, and rarely in kindness. Yet they emanate a frightening magnetic force and exert an incredible power over all creatures and even over the elements. Who can tell how far such influence will extend? All the united moral forces are powerless against them, and the more intelligent part of humanity tries in vain to unmask them as simpletons or frauds; the masses are attracted by them. Seldom or never can one find several men of that type as contemporaries, and nothing is able to overpower them except the Universe itself, against which they have picked their fight. And it may well have been from such observations and remarks that that terrible sentence found its origin: Nemo contra deum nisi deus ipse.¹⁶²

The reference to the masses, who feel attracted to these leaders although the more intelligent people reject them, is highly revealing. Finally, especially dangerous is the influence exercised by “the demoniac” as formulated by Goethe on Burckhardt’s “awful simplifiers” preaching what Henri Hauser called fausses idées claires. The result of that is only too often Irving Babbitt’s “efficient megalomaniac” who—in the words of Burke—wants to “improve the mystery of murder.”

5. THE MENACE OF THE STATE’S GROWTH

Not only from a variety of political processes, but from the ever-growing state itself, did many nineteenth-century thinkers fear a distinctive menace to person and personality. The lie of the identification of “state” and “people,” of “state” and “nation” moved Nietzsche to write these famous lines:

Thus spake Zarathustra:

State, what is that? Well then, now open your ears; now I will tell you my tale about the death of nations.

State is the name of the coldest of all cold monsters. It lies coldly and this lie crawls out from its mouth: “I, the State, I am the People!”

Where there is still a real people it does not understand the State and hates it as the evil eye, as sin against morals and rights . . .¹⁶³

Merezhkovski, calling the Church—in opposition to (Nietzsche’s) state—“the most burning of all miracles,” hinted at an antithesis bound to culminate in a fatal crisis.¹⁶⁴ This view has been repeated by other authors.¹⁶⁵ It is also evident that this tug-of-war would be of a different character in a Protestant country, where the Lutheran concept of a state based on the “radical wickedness of man” was and still is dominant.¹⁶⁶

In order to crush all opposing forces and to facilitate the perfecting of the totalitarian machinery, it became necessary to step up the process of centralization. This alone is able to foster uniformity and egalitarianism, and to ensure swift execution of governmental orders. Yet centralism is opposed to the whole Christian tradition, with its libertarian and personalistic outlook.

Constantin Frantz, the anti-Prussian ideologist of German federalism (federalism in its European sense, implying emphasis on “states’ rights”—the opposite of centralism), declared in the past century: “Federalism is nothing else but the secular aspect of the development of Christianity.”¹⁶⁷ Frantz, to whom even the concept of a German capital remained distasteful,¹⁶⁸ was disappointed in his hopes for a loose German federalism—which would have been in a much better position to preserve Germany’s universalistic, Christian and European character than the centralistic Second Reich.¹⁶⁹

There are also economic aspects to the mania of centralization. Henry Adams alluded to them in a rhapsodic statement:

All Civilisation is Centralisation.

All Centralisation is Civilisation.

Therefore all Civilisation is the survival of the most economical (cheapest). . . .

Under economic centralisation Asia is cheaper than Europe.

The world tends to economic centralisation.

Therefore Asia tends to survive, and Europe to perish.¹⁷⁰

This analysis is, naturally, true only if we accept the Teutonic (Spenglerian) definition of civilization as opposed to culture. As to purely administrative centralization, it must be kept in mind that its roots in western Europe go back to Louis XIV, if not further,¹⁷¹ but that it received its most powerful impetus under the Jacobins.¹⁷² Bakunin, the anarchist, recognized this clearly, and mercilessly flayed the centralistic excesses of the French Revolution with its “liberal” pretensions and aspirations:

We are convinced that if France has lost her liberty on two different occasions, and seen her democratic republic transformed into a dictatorship and a military democracy, the fault does not lie with her people but with her political centralization.¹⁷³

Deploring the fact that the French Revolution, which for the first time in history had proclaimed the liberty of the citizen as well as the liberty of man, had artificially revived a “monarchical state absolutism,” he concluded:

Reinstated anew by the Constituent Assembly—opposed, it is true (though with little success), by the National Convention—Robespierre and Saint-Just actually restored it; nothing was missing in this new governmental machine, not even a Supreme Being with a state worship. This machinery waited only for a clever engineer to show to a surprised world all the capabilities for oppression with which it had been furnished by its rash designers . . . and then Napoleon I appeared on the scene.¹⁷⁴

A “clever engineer” (habile machiniste) could also take over the centralized Weimar Republic and the Italian state unified by Cavour, Mazzini and Garibaldi. Yet Bakunin forgot that while royal absolutism desired centralization for mere “efficiency,” republican centralism of the democratic pattern is also motivated by a craving for uniformity and equality. Georges Sorel saw this more accurately,¹⁷⁵ and Paul Bourget, returning from a trip to the United States, knew well that there was an organic connection between America’s liberty and her federalistic constitution emphasizing states’ rights—a structural characteristic so obviously lacking in France.¹⁷⁶

Irving Babbitt, fearing the rise of naked power without ethos or wisdom,¹⁷⁷ was preceded in his visions by Jacob Burckhardt. Centralism can serve as a “truncheon,” through which “order” can be maintained—or terror and servitude installed. Burckhardt saw the preparation of the coming slavery, unlike De Tocqueville, in a dialectical process rather than through a straight evolution. The result would be the same:

The biggest mischief in the past century has been perpetrated by Rousseau with his doctrine of the goodness of human nature. The mob and the intellectuals derived from it the vision of a Golden Age which would arrive without fail once the noble human race could act according to its whims. The result was, as every child knows, a complete disappearance of the concept of authority in the brains of all mortals. As a result man becomes periodically a prey to naked power.¹⁷⁸

This “naked power” has to be exercised by an enormous army of civil servants (the “ears” in the prophecy of Donoso Cortés). Centralization and the efforts to control all details of civic and private life necessitate these unlimited hordes of bureaucrats, such as we see today in the U.S.S.R.¹⁷⁹ It is evident that these regulating organs, at first considered to be a nuisance, create a certain “predictability” of human existence which satisfies people of minor intelligence or vitality. (Compare the story in Keyserling’s Südamerikanische Meditationen, p. 43, about the Italian boy repatriated from Leningrad who was afraid of freedom.) The bureaucratic careers themselves become desirable, and finally the best talents in the country are attracted by public service, leaving, as J. S. Mill feared, private enterprise and the liberal professions to the mediocrities.¹⁸⁰ The state thus, quite automatically, increases in “weight” and prestige. This danger was no less apparent to Herbert Spencer.¹⁸¹

The fact that a totalitarian bureaucratic rule has its origin in a spiritual crisis was no secret even to a positivist like A. Comte, who could write:

The final general result of the dissolution of spiritual power is the establishment of that type of modern autocracy which has no exact counterpart in history and which, in the absence of a better label, one might call ministerialism or administrative despotism. Its basic character is the centralization of power extended more and more beyond all reasonable limits. Its general medium of action is systematized corruption.¹⁸²

This whole interconnected process of democratization, centralization and bureaucratization is characterized by a furious hatred of personality and tradition. Its inorganic individualism evokes the spectre of collectivism. Royer-Collard admirably portrayed this crisis in a speech before the Chamber of Deputies, saying that:

We have seen the old society perish and with it this great number of local institutions and independent tribunals which formed part and parcel of it. These were powerful symbols of personal privileges, true republics within the framework of the monarchy. These institutions, these tribunals, it is true, did not share the prerogatives of sovereignty; but they set limits to it which honour defended with stubbornness! Not one of them has survived, and no new ones have been put in their place. The Revolution has left nothing standing but individuals. The dictatorship which set an end to it has, in this respect, completed the work of its predecessor . . .

. . . . From a society ground to dust emerged centralization. Centralization has not arrived, as so many other no less dangerous doctrines, with bold arrogance and the authority of a principle; it has insinuated itself modestly, as a consequence, as a necessary evil. Indeed, where we have nothing but “individuals,” all matters which are not properly theirs are public affairs, affairs of the State . . .

. . . This is how we became an administered nation.¹⁸³

In a purely revolutionary period the bureaucratic machinery is still weak and the terror of revolutionary groups supplants the police force. The épurations (“purges”) of the Jacobins¹⁸⁴ were imitated later on by the “cleansings” (chistka) of the Russian communists. Yet the period of “consolidation” produces—as Benjamin Constant has already remarked¹⁸⁵—a full-fledged police system and a network of espionage which, in keeping with Aristotle’s observations (Politics v, 9. 7–8), helps to keep distrust among the citizens. In modern, “progressive” societies, with their great technical vulnerability, the hopes for a successful revolt are fatally reduced.¹⁸⁶

The methodical suppression of all dissent and criticism by modern dictators is the result of their nervousness towards public opinion—a basically democratic attitude, as a contemporary analyst points out.¹⁸⁷ Public opinion is “manufactured” and strictly supervised. Jacob Burckhardt had in his mind a clear picture of these terroristic aspects of the coming mob-masters when he wrote to Friedrich von Preen:

My vision of the terribles simplificateurs who are going to rule our old Europe is not a pleasant one; sometimes in my imagination I can already see these fellows quite vividly; and I am going to describe them to you over a glass of beer this coming September. Occasionally I ponder in anticipation what the fate of our scholarly endeavours, for example, is going to be when these developments are only in their first stage and the level of our culture has receded only a hand’s breadth. Then, I can conceive also of one of the lighter sides of the great movement—how the pale fear of death is going to affect the whole pushing, ambitious pack; because naked power is going to preside again, and keeping one’s trap shut will be obligatory for everybody. Yet what seems to be at the present moment the most profitable policy? Obviously, only to amuse people as intensively as possible.¹⁸⁸

All these horrors would have no activating force without the collectivistic notion of the “common denominator”—which can be class, ethnic nationality, race, or citizenship. The enthusiasm for (ethnic) nationality is a tendency of the lower rather than the upper classes,¹⁸⁹ and thus harmonizes well with “proletarian” or lower-middle-class movement, with the accent on the “common man.” Today the myth of the Prussian Junker as the trail-blazer of ethnic nationalism in Germany has all but evaporated;¹⁹⁰ his feeling was dynastic and particularistic, not “pan-German.”

The double meaning of the German Volk—“ethnic nation” or “lower classes”—has a deeper significance, which has its perfect parallel in the Slavic narod. The violent ethnic nationalism of the French Jacobins is too well known to be in need of further elucidation.¹⁹¹

Franz Grillparzer, with great foresight, could write as early as 1849:

Der Weg der neuen Bildung geht
Von Humanität
Durch Nationalität
Zur Bestialität

(“The way of modern evolution leads
From humanitarianism
Through nationalism
To bestiality.”)¹⁹²

And Austria’s great dramatist enlarged on that theme in 1859 when he wrote laconically on “Conditions in France”:

Legitimität
Autorität
Nationalität

Absurdität
Servilität
Bestialität

(“Legitimacy
Authority
Nationality
Absurdity
Servility
Bestiality.”)¹⁹³

The Protestant Alexandre Vinet saw these possibilities of a further decline when he commented on the attack of the Radicals against the monasteries in the Swiss canton of Argovia in 1840:

They are going to abolish a lot of other things, if they are given a free hand; but, naturally, they cannot do everything at once. They have now laid the axe to the monasteries and the Catholic Church. But they have not told us where they will stop.¹⁹⁴

Constantine Leontyev, writing not much later, accused Napoleon III of having committed a whole series of crimes against the cultural and political foundations of Europe, which were motivated by his leftist nationalism.¹⁹⁵ Leontyev also feared a general drying-up of the cultural well-springs by a destruction of originality through the uniformistic forces of the age, nationalism being the foremost among them.¹⁹⁶ Of the Slavic “tribal (folkic) policy” (plemënnaya politika) he wrote scathingly:

Thus it is clear that tribal politics, usually termed “national,” are nothing but the blind instrument of the world-wide revolution which we Russians, unfortunately, have supported since 1861.¹⁹⁷

It is natural that Leontyev thoroughly condemned Panslavism.¹⁹⁸ Yet he saw even further than that. He knew that nationalism and internationalism were only different in degree but not in essence¹⁹⁹—desiring uniformity merely for areas of different sizes; he vigorously insisted that both phenomena were basically democratic, revolutionary, anti-personalistic, anti-traditional and anti-Christian.²⁰⁰

Sir Henry Maine, on the opposite side of Europe, had come to similar conclusions, noting that “democracies are paralyzed by the plea of nationality.”²⁰¹ Fearful of the ultimate effects of nationalism (in an ethnic as well as in a racial sense) on democracy,²⁰² he must have had forebodings of the advent of Woodrow Wilson. W. E. H. Lecky shared these apprehensions.²⁰³ The close interconnections between ethnicism and democracy have become common knowledge in our century.²⁰⁴

Ernest Renan, who had once insisted that the “Semitic race” was inferior in comparison with the “Indo-Europeans,”²⁰⁵ nevertheless became impatient with the claims of German (ethnic) nationalists, who were not free from racial notions. This attitude of the author of The Life of Jesus is clearly expressed in his second letter to David Strauss. Criticizing the German claims on Alsace-Lorraine, which were based on ethnic grounds, he wrote:

Our policy is that of the right of nations; yours is a policy of races. We believe that ours is a better one. The division of mankind into races—apart from the fact that it is based on a scientific error, since very few countries have a pure race—can only lead to wars of extermination, to “zoological” wars. These, if you permit me to be frank, are of the same order as the life-and-death struggles of certain types of rodents and carnivores. This would be the very end of this fertile mixture composed of numerous elements—and all so necessary—which we call humanity. You have carried into this world the banner of ethnographic and archæologic politics replacing liberal policies; and this political trend is going to be fatal to you. Comparative philology, which you have created and which, wrongly, you have brought into the political arena, will play you false. The Slavs are becoming enthusiastic about it. . . .²⁰⁶

Insisting on the effervescence of Panslavism, he prophesied that the smaller Slav nations would join with Moscow. Russia, strengthened by the support of Central Asia, would then overrun Europe.²⁰⁷ The territorial claims of Germany’s eastern neighbours would under these circumstances be based on arguments similar to those raised by victorious Prussia against Alsace-Lorraine:

Don’t put your trust in ethnography or, rather, don’t apply it too much to political matters. Under the pretext of a Germanic etymology you claim this or that village of Lorraine for Prussia. The names of Vienna (Vindobona), of Worms (Borbitomagus), or Mayence (Moguntiacum) are Gaulish, but we are never going to claim these cities from you; but what are you going to say if some day the Slavs decide to reclaim East Prussia, Pomerania, Silesia, Berlin, for the reason that all these names are Slavic; if they install themselves along the Elbe or the Oder as you have done on the Moselle, if they point out on the map Obotritic or Velatabic villages? Nation and race are not synonymous.²⁰⁸

Jacques Bainville, himself no mean prophet, ridiculed²⁰⁹ these predictions of Renan—which came true after 1945. It was the same Renan who showed such extreme pessimism as to the ability of a democratic French republic to resist further German onslaughts.²¹⁰ He had a keener eye for the future than for the past.

It was, naturally, the rise of ethnic nationalism which provoked the rise of (biologic) racialism, an entirely new phenomenon in the European scene, greatly stimulated by the theories of Darwin. Count Gobineau was the first to preach this doctrine in a somewhat coherent form, but Alexis de Tocqueville quickly perceived its dangers. His Catholic and liberal suspicions were aroused; he wrote, in a memorable letter to Gobineau, that this racial determinism seemed to be spiritually connected with the theology of St. Augustine (he evidently accepted the Protestant deterministic interpretation of the Augustinian theology), Jansenius and Calvin. He then added:

This theory of predestination, I have to confess to you, seems to me to be a cousin of pure materialism. You can be certain that if the masses, which always reason along the beaten paths, accept your doctrine, they will be led straight from the race to the individual, and from social capacities to all sorts of capacities . . .

. . . both theories result in a very great limitation, if not in a complete abolition, of human liberty. I must also tell you that after having read you, now as before, I remain in extreme opposition to these doctrines. I believe them to be, in all likelihood, false, and most certainly dangerous.²¹¹

Montesquieu, a questionable liberal, had a century earlier expressed his surprise that God put a soul, and especially a good soul, into the Negro’s black body. If the Africans really are human beings, then one has to doubt whether we ourselves are “Christians.”²¹²

When a hundred years later Darwinism swept Europe like a wildfire, all anti-religious groups picked up this biological hypothesis with great eagerness.²¹³ Among these were also the socialists. Émile Zola, who saw the inherent dangers of this trend, wrote of one of his characters in Germinal:

Étienne now read Darwin. He had read fragments, summarized and popularized, in a cheap pamphlet; it is from this reading, badly understood, that he had arrived at a revolutionary concept of the struggle for existence, with the thin eating the fat, the strong people devouring the pale bourgeoisie. But Souvarine in a rather violent way expatiated on the stupidity of socialists who accept Darwin, this apostle of scientific inequality whose famous law of selection was good only for the philosophic supporters of aristocracy.²¹⁴

The fact which was then largely overlooked was the possibility of “democratizing” and collectivizing the concept of racial superiority by elevating millions—whole nations, vast majorities—into a pseudo-aristocratic status. In spite of Gobineau’s fathership of that theory, and its implicit invitation addressed to all aristocracies of birth, the mischief arising from the concept of racial superiority had actually far wider and more popular implications. It evoked strong echoes on both sides of the Atlantic, in Germany no less than in the United States;²¹⁵ and it is significant that the “Nordic race” was almost invariably put by the racial theorists at the top of the hierarchic ladder of human biology.

On the other hand, we also see conservative thinkers who took the racial element into consideration. Benjamin Disraeli was interested in this problem, as can be gathered from various remarks of “Baron Sergius” in his Endymion. It seems that he considered racial qualities (in a eugenic rather than in an anthropological sense) to be rock-bottom factors which will reassert themselves with the collapse of all higher culture and civilization. He said:

If it be true . . . that an aristocracy distinguished merely by wealth must perish from satiety, so I hold it equally true that a people who recognize no higher aim than physical enjoyment must become selfish and enervated. Under such circumstances the supremacy of race, which is the key of history, will assert itself. Some human progeny, distinguished by their bodily vigour or their masculine intelligence . . . will assert their superiority and conquer a world which deserves to be enslaved. It will then be found that our boasted progress has only been an advancement in a circle, and that our new philosophy has brought us back to that old serfdom which it has taken ages to extirpate.²¹⁶

Racialism, just like ethnicism, is a disease of the democratized masses rather than of the upper classes, or even the very genealogically-minded nobilities. Anti-Judaism was virtually unknown in early American society, with its more pronouncedly aristocratic character.²¹⁷ When the Nazis gained full power in Hungary they were supported in their ferocious persecution of the Jews by neither the nobility nor the peasantry; the middle classes were less steadfast.²¹⁸ It is well known that the Negroes in the United States, especially in the South, are least afraid of the upper class.²¹⁹ Hatred among nations (Völkerhass) is seemingly of bourgeois origin.²²⁰ So are democracy, sectarian liberalism and all the other “progressive” ideas of the nineteenth century.

Still, in spite of the blood-curdling excesses of racialism during World War II, it must be admitted that, in historic perspective, ethnic nationalism has committed more mischief than the biologic mania. Napoleon, as a true son of the French Revolution, with its uniformism, democracy and nationalism, gave orders to the press to campaign for a collective hatred of Britain, attacking her manners, customs, literature and constitution.²²¹ It was Napoleon, again, who introduced the concept of the “enemy alien”; about 10,000 British subjects were interned by this plebiscitarian dictator.²²² Prior to the French Revolution such an attitude was unknown. Laurence Sterne was fêted by the court in Versailles while British and French soldiers fought on the battlefields of North America.

Nationalism was always closely allied with modern militarism, which in turn has strong totalitarian, democratic and collectivistic implications. The principle of the French Revolution that all men have equal rights and hence equal duties, introduced conscription and thus paved the way to our total wars—Foch’s “wars of unrestrained conduct” (guerres aux allures déchaînées). James Bryce, several generations ago, had warned us that “the racial or commercial antagonisms of democracies are as fertile in menaces to peace as were ever the dynastic interest of princes.”²²³

The optimism expressed by some democrats, especially those in the thraldom of Wilsonian expectations, was bound to come to grief.²²⁴ Georges Sorel had no illusions about aristocratic oligarchies having the least enthusiasm for fighting long-drawn-out total wars.²²⁵ And Anatole France, surely no reactionary, flayed the merciless and pitiless cruelty of democratic warfare,²²⁶ with its innate tendency toward unconditional-surrender formulas and struggles to the bitter end.²²⁷ Jacob Burckhardt added cynically that the male tendency to appear brave under the eyes of women was another element adding to the great collective savagery in collective warfare.²²⁸

Yet of all visionaries of the horrors of total war none was more realistic, pessimistic and accurate than Taine. Before his eyes was a picture such as was painted in words by Herman Melville, who wrote prophetically about the forces of democracy:

Behold her whom the panders crown,
Harlot on horseback riding down
The very Ephesians who acclaim
This great Diana of ill fame!
Arch-strumpet of an impious age,
Upstart from ranker villainage,
’Tis well she must restriction taste,
Nor lay the world’s broad manor waste.²²⁹

In his description of the new war, with its collective and coercive nature, Taine, like Ortega y Gasset,²³⁰ was fully conscious of the bourgeois character of the “soldier,” who was not the warrior of old.

Yet, however grim his picture of the past and present, he shuddered at the thought of the developments in the twentieth century. He pointed out correctly that the basis of conscription is a “social contract,” a situation in which the people is “sovereign” (like their former royal masters)²³¹ and thus also collectively “highest war-lord.” He wrote:

From now on if he [i.e., the citizen in a democracy] is born a voter, he is also born a conscript, and has thus been saddled with a new obligation of limitless significance; the state, which so far was a creditor only in relation to its properties, now has become one in relation to its members. Yet a creditor never lets his assets lie fallow, and the state always finds reasons or pretexts to make them “work”. . .

. . . From war to war this institution [i.e., conscription] has grown; like a contagious disease it has propagated itself from state to state; at present it has got hold of all of continental Europe, and it rules there together with the natural companion which always precedes or follows it, with its twin brother, with universal suffrage . . . both blind and formidable leaders and regulators of future history, the one of them placing in the hands of every adult a ballot, the other placing on the back of every adult a knapsack. With what promises of massacre and bankruptcy for the twentieth century, with what bitterness of revenge and international hatreds, with what waste of human labour, with what perversions of productive discoveries, with what perfecting of the means of destruction, with what retrogression towards inferior and unhealthy forms of past militarized societies, with what backsliding in the direction of egoistic and brutal instincts, of feelings, manners and morals, which characterized antiquity and tribal barbarism, we know only too well.²³²

It is obvious that democratic militarism harbours, in its dialectics, the germ of suicide. Thus there is an increasing reluctance among the professionals in the armed forces as well as in the various ministries—but especially so in the branch of the administration dealing with foreign affairs—to give up their independence and secretiveness. They are also unwilling, in their delicate and important field, to submit to the command of parliamentary majorities. These points have been well argued by J. Holland Rose.²³³

The other danger is Bonapartism which, as most modern authors have asserted,²³⁴ is entirely compatible with formal democracy. A century and a half ago we heard John Adams exclaiming that “Napoleon and all his generals were but creatures of democracy.”²³⁵ Burke demonstrated even greater acumen with a prophecy made a few years before the rise of Napoleon, saying in his Reflections on the Revolution in France:

In the weakness of one type of authority, and in the fluctuation of all, the officers of an army will remain for some time mutinous and full of faction, until some popular general, who understands the art of conciliating the soldiery, and who possesses the true spirit of command, shall draw the eyes of all men upon himself. Armies will obey him on his personal account. There is no other way of securing military obedience in this state of things. But the moment in which that event shall happen, the person who really commands the army is your master; the master (that is little) of your king, the master of your assembly, the master of your whole republic.²³⁶

Yet the fear of Bonapartism via the medium of universal franchise rather than through sheer “Boulangisme” was the stronger of the two apprehensions. John Adams saw revolutions as the result of popular franchise,²³⁷ Madison feared the status of property and thus of liberty,²³⁸ Jefferson was tortured by visions of a republic destroyed through urbanization and the canaille of big cities with no stake in liberty. Fisher Ames feared the rise of a military dictatorship:

A democracy cannot last. Its nature ordains that its next change shall be into a military despotism—of all known governments, perhaps, the most prone to shift its head, and the slowest to mend its vices.

. . . A democracy, a party and an army bear a close resemblance to each other; they are all creatures of emotions and impulses.²³⁹

Some Europeans saw in America’s democratic development (leading away from the ideals of Washington and Hamilton) a dangerous turn of events which was bound to strengthen the revolutionary party in the Old World.²⁴⁰ Still, history has shown that a party dictatorship (owing to its intellectual and ideological implications) is a far greater evil than the mere despotism of uniformed simpletons. Modern authors²⁴¹ have stressed the fact that it was basically the ballot-box which helped Hitler into the saddle—thus assailing the conspiratorial legend about the rise of nazism. Nevertheless it must be admitted that the democratic epoch preceding the full totalitarian tyranny has its destructive effects on the higher social layers. This possibility was graphically foreseen by Lecky who, dreading the defection of the upper classes from the cause of constitutionalism, could write:

There are other ways in which democracy does not harmonize well with liberty. To place the chief power in the most ignorant classes is to place it in the hands of those who naturally care least for political liberty, and who are most likely to follow with an absolute devotion some strong leader. The sentiment of nationality penetrates very deeply into all classes; but in all countries and ages it is the upper and middle classes who have chiefly valued constitutional liberty, and those classes it is the work of democracy to dethrone. At the same time democracy does much to weaken among these also the love of liberty. The instability and insecurity of democratic politics; the spectacle of dishonest and predatory adventurers climbing by popular suffrage into positions of great power in the State; the alarm which attacks on property seldom fail to produce among those who have something to lose, may easily scare to the side of despotism large classes who, under other circumstances, would have been steady supporters of liberty.²⁴²

As we have seen, the energy to prevent the “predatory adventurers” from achieving full power may be lacking. The virtual dictatorship of Brüning, Schleicher and Papen was finally replaced by a régime on a “broader” (i.e., more democratic) basis which included the National Socialists as the dominant element, and thus sealed the fate not only of the upper classes but also of Germany, if not all of Europe.²⁴³

The ignorance of the lower classes, so deplored by Lecky, is in the more “progressive” democracies one of half-education rather than of “illiteracy”—which is what renders it so dangerous. It has been pointed out that “more education” usually means a lowered education,²⁴⁴ and an intelligent analyst of the prehistory of nazism has insisted that Hitler’s creed could have hardly appealed to a nation which was not highly literate.²⁴⁵ Arnold J. Toynbee has emphasized the intellectual tyranny of “universal education” which stifles all thought,²⁴⁶ an opinion voiced earlier by Sir Henry Maine.²⁴⁷ There can be little doubt that compulsory education was an extremely important step towards the totalitarian state—a step whose significance was by no means universally recognized.²⁴⁸

The very idea lying at the basis of compulsory education has, naturally, to be found in the notion that the children belong to the state or to “society” rather than to their parents. De Sade, the “divine marquis,” insisted that the children are a property of the republic.²⁴⁹ Jeremy Belknap in an “Election Sermon” preached before the General Court of New Hampshire in 1785 advocated equal and compulsory education for all, emphasizing that children belong rather to the state than to their procreators.²⁵⁰ Benjamin Rush wanted general education for the establishment of a more uniform, homogeneous and egalitarian nation.²⁵¹ In 1791 Robert Coram, significantly, proposed schools in which religion, dead or foreign languages (!) should not be taught²⁵²—the dream of Hitler and Nazi school reformers. Frances Wright, in the middle of the nineteenth century, campaigned for the compulsory education of all children by the state; they should be trained from the ages of two to sixteen in state boarding schools. Food and clothing, as well as the intellectual fare, should be entirely standardized.²⁵³

Still, the improvement of general educational levels could not prevent the deterioration of the standards to be found in the leaders of the democratic state. Intellectual qualifications are contrary to the spirit of democracy,²⁵⁴ and the judgment of Proudhon on the mental qualities of the voting masses made his pessimism well-nigh inevitable. He wrote:

Left to themselves or led by their tribunes the masses never established anything. They have their face turned backwards; no tradition is formed among them; no orderly spirit, no idea which acquires the force of law. Of politics they understand nothing except the element of intrigue; of the art of governing, nothing except prodigality and force; of justice, nothing but mere indictment; of liberty, nothing but the ability to set up idols which are smashed the next morning. The advent of democracy starts an era of retrogression which will ensure the death of the nation and the State. . . .²⁵⁵

In a populace endowed with these fatal propensities it is hard to see how the elected could be superior to the electors. Andrew Jackson, on the other hand, with his New-World optimism could declare in his first Annual Message that “the duties of all public offices are, or at least admit of being made, so plain and simple that men of intelligence may readily qualify themselves for their performance.”²⁵⁶ These views would hardly be shared in our days.²⁵⁷ Spinoza was convinced that men of intelligence would, finally, rebel against the sway of the multitudes whose “instability brings those who have political knowledge to despair, since they are ruled exclusively by emotions, not by reason.”²⁵⁸ Those endowed with knowledge and experience certainly resent the idea of being judged and controlled by the masses. Here we face, needless to say, an invitation to an overthrow of democracy by groups which are not necessarily selfish, but interested in the common weal. Niebuhr, who also saw the dangerous, mounting tide of amateurism, wrote from Rome on March 25, 1820:

. . . People talk now with arrogance and superficiality about political problems and the most sublime aspects of this great art, which needs a talent and an ability for training just as the other arts; so that those who really have an insight—which itself is so rare—are bound to get furious or sad. Without knowing the people involved, without having any comprehension of political affairs, without understanding the aims and means and difficulties, the praising and decrying goes on.

Nobody has the right to ask that persons and conditions should be decisively judged at a distance; yet it can be demanded that those who have not the means of comprehension should restrain themselves.²⁵⁹

This democratic amateurism is hostile to knowledge, which will always be characterized by a certain aristocratic and esoteric quality. This inner antagonism between democracy and knowledge was best expressed by the montagnard who shouted in the face of Lavoisier’s defence lawyer, when the latter insisted that his client was an eminent scientist: La république n’a pas besoin des savants!”

All these elements were working towards the establishment of a new slavery whose deeper, metaphysical basis was well guessed by Dmitri Merezhkovski at the beginning of this century.²⁶⁰ But Niebuhr, well before him, wrote in 1830 (shortly before his death) to his friend Moltke:

The truth of the whole matter is the manifest pitiful poverty of the people, which is unable to suffer it much longer; it is preparing something, not indeed entirely new under the sun, but at least no such thing has happened for centuries, and to our politicians who have put money in the place of God it is still unthinkable: a revision of property. We are in the position of Rome in the period following the Gracchi, a period full of frightful horrors—and whoever does not see it, is blind; and whoever thinks the question is freedom, is a fool. External forms do not protect us any more, and we are going to bless despotism if it insures our life, just as the Romans blessed Augustus. I realized long since that intelligent men could act thus, and now I understand it fully; and now I also understand Catiline.²⁶¹

Describing the coming upheavals he concluded:

Nobody should harbour the illusion that at least free constitutions would be the final result of all that; the development is going to lead very quickly to an absolute military despotism which, far more than that of Napoleon, is going to play havoc with external forms.²⁶²

Ernest Renan was similarly afraid of the dialectics inherent in militarism and revolutionism:

The need for order, which is so acute in our old European societies, coincides with the perfection of weapons. This will give to the governments an increased power in the same ratio as they lose it through the rising revolutionary fervour. Like religion, order is going to have its fanatics. Modern societies are characterized by a great mildness if their principles are not endangered; but they become pitiless if doubts as to their duration are suggested to them. A society which has been afraid is like a man who has been afraid; it does not continue to have full moral balance.²⁶³

This process was all the more likely because there were destructive evolutionary possibilities within the democratic framework. Nietzsche said:

A man who has preserved a strong will together with an open mind has today greater chances than ever. The distinctive quality of people in modern Europe lies in their ability to be easily trained and broken in; people who learn easily, obey easily, are the rule; a herd animal—of a surprising intelligence to be sure—has evolved. He who can give commands quickly finds those who are born to obey.²⁶⁴

The suspicion that modern technological development has strong enslaving qualities was shared by De Tocqueville and Burckhardt. Many contemporary authors would agree with them.²⁶⁵ Burckhardt also detested the concomitant of industrialization—capitalism and socialism—whose fatal clash he foresaw when he wrote to Friedrich von Preen:

All your young people, and ours too, must get into this magnum mare and somehow learn to swim in it. And one day the dreadful capitalism from above and the greedy pressure from below are going to collide like two express trains travelling on the same track.²⁶⁶

Constantin Frantz, a contemporary of Burckhardt, understood the inner affinity between democracy and centralization, as well as the paradox of the fatality of this relation—centralism slowly choking all life out of democracy.²⁶⁷ Nor was Troeltsch fooled by the libertarian promises of parliamentarianism. He said:

Our economic development steers rather in the direction of a new serfdom, and our big military and administrative states are, in spite of all their parliamentary institutions, not entirely favourable to the spirit of freedom.²⁶⁸

Thus we see how the foremost thinkers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were tortured and haunted by the vision of enslavement and tyranny, of major collapses following the democratic interlude, of a complete repetition of Polybius’ νακκλωσις (“turn of the wheel”) ending in Burckhardt’s enigmatic magnum mare—that dark and chaotic ocean of the unknown in which servitude and human degradation was the only certitude.

6. THE AGE OF COLLECTIVISM

It is only too evident that the French Revolution was the real and conscious overture to this age of collectivism, control and combined (horizontal and vertical, societary and governmental) pressure. Hitler, we are told, boasted before his collaborators that “this revolution of ours is the exact counterpart of the French Revolution.”²⁶⁹ The parallels between the two historic events are so numerous that they should not be in need of any further elucidation. A perusal of the second stanza of Friedrich Georg Jünger’s famous poem Der Mohn,²⁷⁰ in comparison with Benjamin Constant’s description of the demoralizing effect of modern tyranny, shows the ethical identity of both systems. Constant wrote:

In a word, despotism [i.e., absolute monarchy] rules through silence and leaves man the right to remain silent; usurpation [i.e., dictatorship] condemns him to speak, it extends this persecution to the private sanctuary of his thought, and by forcing him to lie to his conscience it robs him of the last consolation which is still left the oppressed.²⁷¹

Yet it is obvious that the lack of widespread resistance against tyranny is bound to have deeper reasons. The great crisis and collapse in our days was foreseen, not only by Vladimir Solovyov, who had visions of Christianity being persecuted with means more refined than in the days of Nero,²⁷² but also by Vassili Rozanov, who said:

The deeper reason for everything now happening lies in the circumstance that enormous cavernous hollows were formed in the European part of mankind by the vanishing Christian belief, and into these everything is tumbling.²⁷³

Of this religious or, more correctly, irreligious background of modern slavery Max Weber was fully conscious.²⁷⁴ No less acute was the judgment of Henri Frédéric Amiel, who wrote on June 17, 1852, reacting to the rise of Louis Napoleon whose plebiscitarian tyranny would leave us today unmoved:

All despotisms have an uncanny and superior intuition for that which maintains human independence and dignity, and it is curious to see our radicals pontificating just like our Prince-President. It is equally strange to observe realistic teaching everywhere serving to choke under a compilation of “facts” the freedom to examine applied to moral problems. Materialism is the auxiliary doctrine of every tyranny, be it that of a single man or of the masses. To crush the spiritual, moral, general human being, if I may say so, by turning him into a specialist; to create no longer complete human beings, but wheels of the great social machinery; to give them not conscience but society as a centre, to make the soul subservient to material ends, to depersonalize man—that is the dominant tendency of our epoch. Moral atomism and social unity, substitution of the laws of moral nature (persuasion, constancy, faith); equality, the principle of mediocrity, becoming a dogma; unity through uniformity, numbers becoming “reason”; always quantity instead of quality; a negative liberty which has no internal laws, and finds its limitation only in brute force.²⁷⁵

Materialism can (and in a sense must) assume a deterministic nature. De Tocqueville could not help remarking that:

Historians who live in democratic ages, then, not only deny that the few have any power of acting upon the destiny of a people, but deprive the people themselves of the power of modifying their own condition, and they subject them either to an inflexible Providence or to some blind necessity.

. . . If this doctrine of necessity, which is so attractive to those who write history in democratic ages, passes from authors to their readers till it infects the whole mass of the community and gets possession of the public mind, it will soon paralyze the activity of modern society and reduce Christians to the level of the Turks.²⁷⁶

From this remarkable prophecy of an orientalized form of Marxism we can turn to the “Divine Marquis,” who was even more vehement on that issue when he exclaimed:

Pedantic louts, hangmen, scribblers, legislators, tonsured scum, what are you going to do once we are here? What will happen to your laws, your morality, your religion, your powers, your paradise, your Gods, your hell, when it is demonstrated that such and such a flow of humours, a certain type of fibres, a specific degree of acidity in the blood . . . are sufficient to make of a man the object of your punishments or your rewards?²⁷⁷

It has been rightly maintained that the appeal to inevitability is “an appeal to slaves to accept slavery.”²⁷⁸ The dilemma of the Marxist faced by the paradox of a materialist dogma on one hand and the rule of a party insisting on personal responsibility on the other is, naturally, without a solution.²⁷⁹ There can be little doubt that the intermittent invocation of a creed of predestination and determinism opens windows and doors not only to the worst slavery but also to the most inhuman savagery. The totalitarians made full use of this technique, and it is significant that Pravda featured, on the day of the German attack on the U.S.S.R., a full-page article dealing with the problem of free will.²⁸⁰ In this lengthy essay the notion of a libertas arbitrii was ridiculed as a bourgeois sentimentality. All the horrors descending upon Russia (and invited by Stalin’s anti-Polish policy) were “inevitable.” . . .

The whole issue of determinism versus free will is theological in its nature. Yet orthodox Protestantism has not only taken a more or less predestinarian stand, the forerunner of modern determinism, it also, as Troeltsch admitted,²⁸¹ broke the backbone of all ecclesiastical culture. The weakening of ecclesiasticism inevitably resulted (for psychological rather than philosophical reasons) in a grave impairment of the whole religious basis of our ethics . . . a catastrophe which prepared the road to disaster.²⁸² Napoleon was in this respect more perspicacious than many of his contemporaries and epigones when he said:

Until now we have seen good education only in ecclesiastical institutions. I prefer to see the children of a village cared for by a man who knows nothing but his catechism and whose principles I know, than by some sort of savant who has no [rational] basis for his morality and no stable ideology. Religion is the vaccine of imagination, and protects it from all dangerous and absurd beliefs. It is sufficient when one of the Christian Brothers says to a man of the people: “This life is only a transition.” If you deprive the people of its religion you will have nothing but highwaymen.²⁸³

Herman Melville, the great American prophet—himself not a Catholic—realized better than any of his compatriots that the Church of Rome, enjoying a very central position in the world of religions, would be the main target of irreligious forces. The weakening or fall of Catholicism would hasten the advent of the “Dark Ages of Democracy” so dreaded by the poet. In Clarel he wrote:

He [the Dominican] turned and would have gone; but no,
New matter struck him: “Ere I go
Yet one word more; and bear with me;
Whatever your belief may be—
If well ye wish to human kind,
Be not so mad, unblest and blind
As, in such days as these, to try
To pull down Rome. If Rome could fall
’Twould not be Rome alone, but all
Religion. All with Rome have tie
Even the railers which deny,
All but the downright Anarchist,
Christ-hater, Red and Vitriolist.”²⁸⁴

Yet his apprehensions that Geneva and Wittenberg would side with the forces opposed to historic Christendom were strong:

“Rome and the Atheist have gained:

  These two shall fight it out—these two;

  Protestantism being retained

  For base of operations sly

  By Atheism. . . .”²⁸⁵

In the purely political sphere, the struggle in Europe was accentuated by the bitter antagonism between the two structural forms, monarchy and republic. This antithesis still throws its shadows into our time, when “leaders” seek to eliminate “rulers,” and omnipotent party bosses overshadow surviving crowns. Yet the growth of republicanism and republican institutions with an increase of brutality and totalitarian methods was foreseen by many leading nineteenth-century thinkers. Burckhardt, who was one of them, wrote in 1882 to his friend, Friedrich von Preen, with whom he discussed primarily political problems:

To me it has been clear for some time that the world is struggling against the alternatives of complete democracy or absolute, lawless despotism. The latter naturally could not be exercised by royal dynasties, because these are too soft-hearted, but it can be exercised by supposedly republican military dictatorships. Only one cannot yet contentedly imagine a world whose masters will be completely unconcerned with law, comfort, enriching labour, industry, credits, etc., and are going to rule instead with absolute brutality.²⁸⁶

The fear of an absolute rule of parties under their leaders has also been voiced by Constantin Frantz, who naturally favoured the medieval rather than the Renaissance pattern of monarchy.²⁸⁷ To him, no less than to Max Weber, the real function of the monarch was the protection of the weak and the control of concentrated power.²⁸⁸ B. G. Niebuhr, sensing the drift, wrote with growing despair in 1820:

All of Europe is menaced by wild revolutions and an iron despotism, while Germany is being driven into an alien servitude.

Spain no less so! It is possible that no punishment could be too mild for King Ferdinand, but remember my prophecy; the Constitution, this anarchical monstrosity, if really enacted, will not last six months. A large part of the country will not have anything to do with it—whole provinces, as a matter of fact. And here also no other wisdom seems to be available than the idol of flat uniformity, to whom millions should sacrifice their liberty! Under these conditions nothing else can be expected but a military rule, and this again means mutual antagonisms until one wins and is in turn overthrown. We drift towards conditions reminding us of the Roman Empire, when absolute princes ruled without legal succession. Our hereditary dynasties are our good fortune, which we will realize once we have lost them. Not every hereditary dynasty falls into that category—it is possible that the sins of the House of Spain may have been formidable—but I still feel with complete certitude that a catastrophe in that direction is the gravest misfortune.²⁸⁹

These prophecies—some of them strongly reminding one of J. Ortega y Gasset’s dicta²⁹⁰—have all come true. It is not quite clear what sort of “foreign servitude” Niebuhr expected for Germany. Judging from another letter²⁹¹ he conceivably feared France (der Tiger im Westen), but the passage below seems to indicate Russia:

God help us to bear what we cannot avoid. Gretchen [his wife] recently asked me in all seriousness whether I still plan, as during the Napoleonic period, to emigrate to North America. If we only did not have children—whom I prefer to envisage as Germans under Russian domination than as Anglo-Americans!²⁹²

7. PROPHETS OF THE RUSSIAN PERIL

This alternative (America or Russia) is, according to Max Weber, one between two powers neither of which are, due to their geographic character, destined to be havens of liberty (see below, Note 325). The pessimism of European liberals concerning America amounts almost to a tradition; Heine no less than Keyserling doubted the freedom-loving character of the United States.²⁹³ Yet a far greater fear was manifested about Russia—a fear expressed by Catholics and Protestants, liberals and conservatives alike. And this fear was fanned by numerous Russian writers themselves, from Herzen to Dmitri Merezhkovski.²⁹⁴

Alexander Herzen, with his usual perspicacity, saw the great chances of an extremist revolution in Russia—a possibility not existing in the Occident or in North America, which, for him, was “a mere extension of Western Europe.”²⁹⁵ He said:

Europe and the lower classes are not going to risk everything in a revolution. For such gambling they are too civilized.²⁹⁶

Such unmanly caution Herzen rejected for his fatherland:

We are slaves and have no chance of freeing ourselves, yet we won’t accept anything from our enemies.

Russia is never going to be Protestant.

Russia is never going to be middle-of-the-road.²⁹⁷

The Russian is the right material for a radical change because:

The thinking Russian is the most independent man in the world . . . thrown into compelling circumstances, armed with a clear outlook and an unbribable logic, the Russian quickly frees himself from the faith and the morals of his fathers.²⁹⁸

A despotism would also be a success in Russia because this form of government well suits very young or old and decadent nations.²⁹⁹ Russia is the former, a country which might accept socialism as a national idea.³⁰⁰ In the end a struggle would ensue between the Western world and the Russians, “barbarians who sense the approaching end of the old world and are its memento mori.”³⁰¹ The Slavs would be led by a revolutionary, socialist Russia which would be able to rule Europe as far as the Atlantic, just as Europe once had advanced to the Urals.³⁰² He added grimly:

In any case this war will be an introduzione maestosa e marziale of the Slav world into general history, and at the same time una marcia funebre of the Old World.³⁰³

Dostoyevski had similar presentiments.³⁰⁴ As to an estimate of the Russian character, the views of Constantine Leontyev were also close to those of Herzen. He told us that

Russian society, which is already egalitarian in its customs, will be dragged more rapidly than other societies along the fatal road of general confusion. And who knows whether, like the Jews who unexpectedly produced the teacher of a new faith, we shall not suddenly give birth to Antichrist? He will spring from the bowels of our political system, which will cast off all class distinctions, and then all vestige of an ecclesiastic principle.³⁰⁵

Leontyev’s visions of the Russian revolution were in conformity with the reality of 1917. This bitter, conservative enemy of democracy, nationalism and “liberalism” nevertheless saw clearly that the relationship between capital and labour would have to be basically readjusted if the threat of a revolution were to be avoided.³⁰⁶

The Marquis de Gustine, on the other hand, saw Russian egalitarianism as the result of a strong, absolute central power:

The Emperor of Russia is social power personified; under him there is an equality to be found which otherwise appears only in the dreams of the French and American democrats and the supporters of Fourier.³⁰⁷

Nor could Chateaubriand (1768-1848), the liberal, Catholic aristocrat, be more optimistic than Leontyev. He feared for the future of Europe and he was afraid of Russia. We owe to George Ticknor an account of his gloomy prophecies. “I don’t believe in European society,” the brilliant author of Le génie du christianisme exclaimed in a social gathering:

. . . In fifty years there will not be a legitimate sovereign in Europe; from Russia to Sicily I foresee nothing but military despotism; and in a hundred,—in a hundred! the cloud is too dark for human vision; too dark, it may almost be said, to be penetrated by prophecy. There, perhaps, is the misery of our situation; perhaps we live, not only in the decrepitude of Europe, but in the decrepitude of the world.³⁰⁸

Asked what an individual should do in such a tragic epoch, he answered:

If I were without a family I would travel, not because I love travelling, for I abhor it, but because I long to see Spain, to know what effect eight years of civil war have produced there; and I long to see Russia, that I may better estimate the power that threatens to overwhelm the world. When I had seen these I should know the destinies of Europe, I think . . .³⁰⁹

Alexis de Tocqueville, who belonged to the next French generation, was afraid of Russia as a nation rather than of her revolutionary potential. In a letter to N.W. Senior he wrote in 1855:

I think with you that Russia is a great danger to Europe. I think so more strongly because I have had peculiar opportunities of studying the real sources of her power, and because I believe these sources to be permanent, and entirely beyond the reach of foreign attack (I have not the time now to tell you why). But I am deeply convinced that it is not taking from her a town, or even a province, nor by diplomatic precautions, still less by placing sentinels along her frontier, that the Western powers will permanently stop her progress.

A temporary bulwark may be raised against her, but a mere accident may destroy it, or a change of alliances or of domestic policy may render it useless.

I am convinced that Russia can be stopped only by raising before her powers created by the hatred which she inspires, whose vital and constant interest it shall be to keep themselves united, and to keep her in. In other words by the resurrection of Poland, and by the reanimation of Turkey.

I do not believe that either of these means can now be adopted. The detestable jealousies and ambitions of the European nations resemble, as you say in your letter, nothing better than the quarrels of the Greeks in face of Philip. Not one will sacrifice her passions or her objects.³¹⁰

The Russian peril was also seen by Jules Michelet: “It will be seen,” Michelet wrote prophetically, “whether the Danube, according to the vain promises of Bismarck to his patriots, is a German river.”³¹¹ Constantin Frantz had a similar vision; he talks about Russia “who derived, so far, from every conflict between Western nations, some direct or indirect profit.”³¹² He was convinced that Russia would invade Western Europe³¹³ and that in this coming war between Britain and Russia the United States would play a decisive rôle.³¹⁴ The future belonged to the United States and Russia.³¹⁵

Burckhardt, as could be expected, was deeply worried about Russia’s westernization. He wrote to F. von Preen from Basel, January 2, 1880: “In Russia the Petrean system of enforced occidentalization, imposed on the nation almost 200 years ago, is now avenging itself. The national character of the Russians in a minor sort of barbarism would have been much better and healthier, and so would western Europe—that is, not in its own barbarism, but in a continuation of that of the Russians.”³¹⁶

Custine deplored the westernization of Russia with equal intensity. Thus he wrote about “Russia in 1839”:

It is in Russia that we find the result of this terrible combination of European science and intellectuality (esprit) with the genius of Asia; and this synthesis I find all the more menacing because ambition and fear—passions which elsewhere ruin people by making them talk too much—create silence over here. And this violent silence engenders an enforced calm, an order apparently stronger and more terrible than anarchy, because the evil behind it seems eternal.³¹⁷

De Tocqueville’s picture of a disunited Europe conquered by a Russian Philip was painted in the same colours and described in the same words by Irving Babbitt.³¹⁸ And Henry Adams decided in the last year of the nineteenth century:

The sum of my certainty is that America has a very clear century start over Russia, and that western Europe must follow us for a hundred years, before Russia can swing her flail over the Atlantic. Whether she can do it then is no conundrum that I can settle. I imagine that my grandpapa, sitting here in this study ninety years ago, could see ahead to me now, better than I can see ahead to the year 2000: and yet it was not easy guessing even for him.³¹⁹

Henry Adams’ geopolitical instincts were well-developed, as can be seen from his meditation on a German-Russian cooperation. “If they work together,” he wrote, “they are bound to be the biggest mass, in the most central position, unassailable to us, and able to overwhelm us at any point of contact.” He doubted America’s active policy overseas, and concluded that “the whole of Europe already centres in Russia, except England which centres in America.”³²⁰

In 1901 he wrote cautiously to Elizabeth Cameron³²¹ that Russia and America ought to be friends, but in his next letter thoughtfully added:

Now, in the long run, the passive character exhausts the active one. Economy of energy is a kind of power. Russia and Asia may clean us all out, especially if Germany helps to run her.³²²

And when Germany started to crumble and Russia was in the throes of Communism, Adams, then already a dying man, changed his mind somewhat:

Sometimes I think that we are to be told to seek at Potsdam our ally against the tempests of Eastern Europe, and their after-outbreaks in the West.³²³

Little did he realize that it would be in Potsdam that Russia would terminate a series of the most brilliant diplomatic victories in all history. The Western powers had no men of the calibre of Henry Adams in responsible positions; as a result the head start of at least a hundred years, of which Adams spoke,³²⁴ was brutally reduced.

Certain contemporary analysts foresaw the rise of a strongly nationalistic Russia, bent on conquest, once she had overcome the growing pains of her revolution;³²⁵ but certainly the most clearsighted prophet of all was Donoso Cortés. He was more strictly geographically-minded than Alexis de Tocqueville, who reckoned with a coming world dominated by Russia and America.³²⁶ Donoso Cortés, in his second great speech before the Cortés,³²⁷ painted the following picture of a European Continent torn by discord, chaos and revolution:

. . . the Slav nations, gentlemen, amount to eighty million souls. Now, when there is in Europe no patriotism, that having been extinguished by the socialist revolutions; when in the East the great confederation of all Slavic peoples has been established; when nothing is left in the West but two camps, that of the despoilers and that of the despoiled—then, gentlemen, the hour of Russia in the clock of time will have struck. Then Russia will be able to march peacefully, arms shouldered, into our lands; then, also, gentlemen, the world will witness the greatest chastisement in all history; this tremendous chastisement, gentlemen, will be the chastisement of England. Her ships will be useless against the colossal empire which grips Europe with one hand and India with the other. Of no avail whatsoever will be her fleet. This immense realm will fall and break into pieces; and the echo of its lugubrious groan and its all-pervading lament will be heard from pole to pole.³²⁸

Donoso Cortés, it must be admitted, did not, like Herzen, envisage the conquest of Europe through a revolutionary Russia. In his opinion the revolutionary process in Russia would set in after the subjugation of the West. For the internal Russian scene he lacked the insight and acumen of De Maistre, who had spent many years in St. Petersburg and expected a “Pugatscheff d’université” to become the dictator of this Eastern empire—a brilliant and prophetic characterization of Lenin.³²⁹

Custine similarly recognized that a definite ideology, preferably of an altruistic character, would always animate Russia. “Peter I and Catherine II,” he wrote,

. . . have given the world a great and useful lesson, which Russia had to pay for; they have shown us that despotism is never a greater menace than when it claims to do good. Under these circumstances it excuses its most revolting acts by its intentions; and evil posing as a remedy has no limits.³³⁰

But speaking about the conflict between Western Europe (led by France and the Catholic Church) and the East (dominated by Russia and Greek Orthodoxy), Donoso Cortés wrote that this struggle will be one of liberty versus absolutism. Since we are living in one world, the spheres of these two domains will tend to overlap, and thus the clash is inevitable:

. . . if civilization is to a certain point progressive, and if the human race is to a certain point perfectible, it is unavoidable that mankind in the future will follow the same principles in political no less than in religious matters; thus both for men and for societies one pattern and one law will prevail.³³¹

As to the possible new master of the world the general views of Donoso Cortés were not optimistic:

Russia will fight in order to inflict defeats, and defeats in order to protect the defeated country. And in the moment the defeated nation considers itself an ally it becomes Russia’s victim and prey. The victories of Russia lead to “protection”—her protection to death.³³²

The vistas of this Spaniard on the Russo-British conflict were shared by his compatriot Juan Valera, who pessimistically judged Britain’s assimilating and colonizing rôle in Asia. The English, according to Valera, were able neither to transform the Asiatics into Britishers nor to settle Anglo-Saxons in larger numbers. Hence they were automatically beaten by the Russians, who already “belonged” to the Asiatic scene.³³³

Donoso Cortés was not less vocal about Prussia, which he disliked and distrusted. In a letter to Count Raczyński, his Polish friend in the Prussian service, he poured out his heart:

If you had not been my friend I would have attacked Prussia in the Parliament, because I am neither a friend of Prussia, nor of her policy, nor of her aggrandizement, nor even of her existence: I believe that Prussia has been tied to the cause of Satan since she was born, and I am convinced that she is, due to a historical fatality, forever condemned to this bondage.³³⁴

It is obvious that the reasons for his dislike were partly of a religious nature. Donoso Cortés, who was also ambassador to Berlin, wrote of Prussia in 1849 that that country was bound to aspire for absolute leadership in the Protestant North. And he continued:

Prussia cannot be more nor less, until the day when Protestantism folds up and disintegrates; when this happens Prussia will enter a period of rapid decadence. Prussia lives in Protestantism, for Protestantism and by Protestantism. The mystery of her glories lies in her Protestantism, and so does the mystery of her death.³³⁵

Donoso Cortés was not anti-British, but he considered England’s influence on the Continent and its efforts to imitate her political structure dangerous. In this view he was strongly supported by his friend Count Raczyński.³³⁶ In a letter written in Paris in 1852 he said:

In this matter, my friend, one should not have illusions: England and the Revolution is one and the same thing: this was so in the past, this is the situation today and so it will be tomorrow, and it makes no difference whether or not a conservative cabinet in London replaces a revolutionary one; if you analyze the contemporary policy of the United Kingdom you will discover two facts: first, that England is always supporting order in times of war; and that in peaceful periods she is in favour of revolution. This is the reason she has turbulent ministries in times of peace and conservative cabinets in times of stress. . . .³³⁷

The similarity between this passage and the Durnovo Memorandum is obvious.³³⁸ Khomyakov, on the other hand, was certain that Toryism in Britain was doomed and that materialistic and Protestant Whiggism of a leftist type was bound to get the upper hand permanently.³³⁹ Alexander Herzen discounted England’s ability in judging matters Continental, especially Russian affairs, because she is “blind.” Her blindness stems from her inability to conceive that nations might actually blaze entirely new trails and disdain old roads.³⁴⁰

Herzen’s hopes constituted the liberal Abbé de Pradt’s apprehensions. This contemporary of Metternich tried in a famous little book to gain the nations of the Continent for an Anglophile policy in order to protect themselves against Russia. He too saw far into the future. Of that great Slavic state he remarked that “it has as neighbours merely frightened countries and trembling vassals.”³⁴¹ He very intelligently compared Russia with the United States,³⁴² but admitted that conditions in the big Eastern realm were not too well known, because:

. . . on the other side of the Vistula there is a curtain, behind which one cannot see clearly what happens inside the Russian Empire. After the fashion of the Orient, from which it took its origins and mannerisms, the Russian government is limited to the study of the ruler; he alone talks, but writes rarely and publishes nothing. In a country where methodical efforts are made to hide everything from the public, one is more or less limited to guesswork; and this limitation also applies to the Russian army.³⁴³

He then remarks:

Since the days of Peter the Great the policy of Russia has never ceased to be one of conquest; one can say that for a whole century the government of that country has been constituted by one and the same man, by one and the same idea—that of methodical aggrandizement.³⁴⁴

Not only do these allusions to an “Iron Curtain” and the Politburo strike us, but so also does the description of the end of the Wars of Coalition in 1814–15:

Having had a major rôle in the alliance which defeated Napoleon, Russia could not be excluded from the affairs which his downfall left unsettled; but, once this happened, Europe should have closed her ranks and reached mutual agreements in order to exclude from meddling in her affairs a power which has no legitimate interests in them, but which is strong enough always to turn the balance in its own favour. To the large number of reproaches that have been addressed, rightly or wrongly, to certain members of the Holy Alliance, I will without hesitation add the accusation of a lack of prudence for having admitted Russia to the decision relating to the affairs of Southern Europe. . . . Yet the most pressing European problem is to prevent Germany from becoming the highway of the Russian armies. But they are just about to open the avenue for them! Nay, they are even inviting them to use it!³⁴⁵

Especially impressive was De Pradt’s comparison between an Anglo-Saxon and a Russian policy of intervention on the Continent.³⁴⁶ Still, his principal fear was the Russification of Germany.³⁴⁷

In matters of world politics one of the best prophets was Lucien Romier, who later became a moderate Vichyite. In 1925 he foresaw the following coalitions: Germany, Italy and Japan against England, France, Russia and, perhaps, the United States. Emperor Wilhelm II in his defeat was also something of a clairvoyant; he prophesied a “second Carthaginian War” and an Anglo-American alliance against Japan.³⁴⁸

8. SUMMARY

The visions and expectations of the nineteenth-century prophets of totalitarianism and tyranny were by no means comforting. Many of them, like De Tocqueville and Amiel, already saw the increase of societary pressure. Amiel wrote in his diary:

Listening this evening to the conversation of some of our cultured men, I thought of the Renaissance, of the Ptolemies, of the times of Louis XV, when a joyful anarchy of the intellect was counterbalanced by a despotic power. And on the other hand I remembered England where political liberty is bought at the price of a party spirit and necessary prejudices.³⁴⁹

This dilemma was recognized by a greater number than we probably assume. The best of them were disobeying Kierkegaard’s ironical recommendation not to make themselves unpopular by thinking ideas to their last logical conclusions;³⁵⁰ they were meditating on the final results of democracy, sectarian liberalism, agnosticism, materialism, industrialism, progressivism. They saw that civilization was thriving on merely the “whiff from an empty bottle,” and that once the time-lag³⁵¹ drew to its close and ethical precepts without a religious basis were seriously challenged, barbarism and absolute savagery would return. They could not help being pessimistic seeing their cherished ideal of liberty gravely endangered by the democractic, egalitarian and technical trends of their own time.

They have been joined in our days by those who have a clear concept of the basically democratic and “progressive” character of present-day totalitarian tyranny.³⁵² Yet between the cool analysis of our contemporaries and the tortured, grim and prophetic visions of their forerunners is a certain qualitative difference. We hear sadness, bitter irony and a controlled rage in Burckhardt’s words when he says:

The basic political character of nations is like a wall into which one can drive this or that nail, but the nail no longer takes hold. This is the reason why authority in that pleasant twentieth century will lift her head again—a frightful head! At last the tendency to declare everything provisional, this assumed a priori right to every innovation, this privilege of all cupidity, will find its limits and its end.³⁵³

Nor would the “common man” find heaven on earth:

There is a curious future in store for the workers. I have a vision which may look quite foolish at present, but I cannot get rid of it: the militarized state must become a mass manufacturer. These human agglomerations in the workshops cannot be left in all eternity to their despair and envy; what, quite logically, should be introduced is a certain controlled degree of misery with promotions and uniforms, started and concluded every day under the beating of drums.³⁵⁴

Indeed, there was not much hope left and it was . . .

. . . possible that a few more or less tolerable decades, something in the style of the Roman Empire, are still ahead of us. In fact I am of the opinion that democracy and the proletariat, even if they are mad enough to attempt resistance, will have to give way to an increasingly harsh despotism.³⁵⁵

Henry Adams was not a whit more optimistic when he wrote:

Yet it is quite sure, according to my score of ratios and curves, that, at the accelerated rate of progression shown since 1600, it will not need another century to tip thought upside down. Law, in that case, would disappear as theory or a priori principle, and give place to force. Morality would become police. Explosives would reach cosmic violence. Disintegration would overcome disintegration.³⁵⁶

When these prophecies did not come true by 1900, 1910, or even 1930, the voices of the visionaries were treated with ridicule and contempt. Even Spengler’s Decline of the West did not break the ice. M. Virgile Rossel, former president of the National Council of Switzerland, preserved his optimism until 1934, when he wrote that “the terrifying predictions of Guizot, the disdainful defiances of Renan, the ardent questioning of Edmond Schérer, the contemptuous condemnations of Maurras, are only out-dated eloquence.”³⁵⁷ Yet at that time the foundations were already collapsing. Mr. H. G. Wells painted the future in rosy colours, but contemporary history later taught him a lesson. The prospects of humanity during the last years of World War II had lost their earlier glamour. Thus Britain’s leading progressivist was finally forced, shortly before his death, to write about “our world of self-delusion”:

It will perish amidst its evasions and fatuities. It is like a convoy lost in darkness on an unknown coast, with quarrelling pirates in the chartroom and savages clambering up the sides of the ship to plunder and do evil as the whim may take them.³⁵⁸

And later:

After all, the present writer has no compelling argument to convince the reader that he should not be cruel or mean or cowardly. Such things are also in his own make-up in a large measure, but none the less he hates and fights against them with all his strength. He would rather our species ended its story in dignity, kindliness and generosity, and not like drunken cowards in a daze or poisoned rats in a sack. But this is a matter of individual predilection, for everyone to decide for himself.³⁵⁹

In this lament we also see the bankruptcy of logical ethics without a religious basis obliquely admitted. Indeed there is no “compelling argument” not to slit anybody’s throat except the Commandments given on Mount Sinai. Though the late Mr. H. G. Wells was the last man to admit it, the religious breakdown was one of the most basic reasons for our rapid decline. Aut Deus aut nihil: God or nothing. And it was God which our civilization rejected.

Every decay, every deeper crisis, every agony has a termination. Thus some day humanity will return to the path from which it strayed. New life is going to blossom on the ruins of our civilization. Whether we are going to see these “better days” matters very little. Edmond Schérer, sixty years ago, put before his readers a very pertinent question. He said:

It is important to know whether at the end of this crisis, humanity will have lost any of what our present prejudices call genius, beauty, greatness; we ought to know whether in this tragedy of mediocrity, in this dreary and dreadful adventure of nations there is anything which will disappear from history.³⁶⁰

Yet today we live in an epoch for which the words of Goethe are fully valid:

What kind of a time is this, when one has to envy those who have already been buried?³⁶¹

CHAPTER III

A CRITIQUE OF DEMOCRACY

“. . . for the few shall save
The many or the many are to fall
Still to be wrangling in a noisy grave.”

—E. A. ROBINSON, “Demos”³⁶²

The belief that the liberty of the people can be guaranteed by parliamentary government has ceased to exist for some time. . . . The world is fed up with parliamentarism, but nobody has a better solution, and the knowledge that this despised institution has to be carried over as a necessary evil into the twentieth century fills the minds of the best of our contemporaries with anxiety.

EDUARD VON HARTMANN³⁶³

1. THE BASIC PROBLEM

IN our investigation of the modern pattern of democracy, as in every other analysis of political phenomena, we should always remain firmly grounded on philosophical soil, yet never lose sight of the historical realities—in the widest sense of the term. Don Luigi Sturzo in one of his essays very correctly says:

Philosophy and history will always remain two branches of one knowledge and speculation of man. If their convergence and reciprocal influence ceases, philosophy becomes sterile tautology and history an incoherent succession of meaningless facts.³⁶⁴

Which reminds one of Diodorus’ statement (i.2): “ —history is the fatherland of philosophy.”

The record of democracy has been of an entirely different character in Protestant as compared with Catholic nations, not to mention the examples of democracy in antiquity. We are convinced that religion—or, to be more precise, the character of a culture’s religious basis—is the most important element in determining the affinities between nations and political forms. The success of specific political forms depends on the closeness and harmony of such affinities. The interrelation between democracy and religion will be dealt with in Chapter V.

We know very well that there are also other factors involved, as, for instance, a collective historical experience (as well as historical memories), the influence of geographic environment (i.e., geopsychological aspects), economic realities or, in given moments, the “charismatic” qualities of outstanding rulers, leaders or demagogues. It is extremely difficult to establish a valid hierarchy of these factors; but we are inclined to put the religious realities first and the geographic element in second place. Race, for instance, would figure a great deal lower in our tabulation. And last, but by no means least, there is always an x of a purely historical character, in which even accidents play an important rôle.

In our Introduction we have alluded to the fact that the main difference between Continental (primarily Catholic) and Anglo-Saxon (primarily Protestant) representative government is to be found in the important alloy of the latter: whiggery, or liberalism in the classic sense, which has so far been the inseparable concomitant of Atlantic democracy. The vast majority of Americans and Englishmen talking about “democracy” always include the element of liberalism³⁶⁵ in their concept of it—and this, as we have noted before, in spite of the fact that democracy and liberalism are concerned with two entirely different problems.

Democracy, let us repeat, is concerned with the question of who should be vested with ruling power; while liberalism deals with the freedom of the individual, regardless of who carries on the government. A democracy can be highly illiberal, while on the other hand an absolute ruler could be a thorough liberal—without being for this reason the least bit democratic. Even a dictator, theoretically, could be a liberal (see above, pp. 3, 10). Though admittedly the likelihood of a modern dictator having this propensity is very small because, as the leader of an ideologically-inclined mass party, he will have strong majoritarian (and thus totalitarian) tendencies. A purely military dictatorship based on the bayonets and sabres of a handful of professional soldiers has greater liberal potentialities (one has only to compare Franco, Oliveira Salazar and Pétain with Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin).

It should be self-evident that the principle of majority rule is a decisive step in the direction of totalitarianism. By the sheer weight of numbers and by its ubiquity the rule of 99 per cent is more “hermetic” and more oppressive than the rule of 1 per cent. (Of course unanimity, which was an early medieval principle of government, is not oppressive. Yet the question remains whether “unanimity” does not, in a sense, obviate “rule.” Psychologically, rule stemming from a person considered superior is less oppressive than coercion exercised by equals—not to mention that exercised by those felt to be inferior.) Even 51 per cent of a nation can establish a totalitarian and dictatorial régime, suppress minorities, and still remain democratic; there is, as we have said, little doubt that the American Congress and the French Chambre have a power over their respective nations which would rouse the envy of a Louis XIV or a George III were they alive today.³⁶⁶

If we accept different categories of existence in regard to democracy and freedom (which is the postulate of liberalism), we have to ask the question whether the two principles of democracy—egalitarianism and majority rule—are actually and teleologically compatible with freedom. Fisher Ames denied these possibilities.³⁶⁷ The Western, liberal democrat is convinced that the democratic process is the best means for the safeguarding of liberty—assuming, somewhat arbitrarily, that the vast majority of the people (the macrocosm of the “average man” rather than of the “common man”) aspires to liberty.

Now liberty is, as a matter of fact, an intermediary end—a condition (or precondition) rather than an ultimate goal. There are certain ends which presuppose the existence of liberty (which itself is, for the purposes of our investigation, of necessity relative and not absolute). These specific ends we have in mind seem to be predominantly of a non-material nature—of a human, not an “animal” nature. Although it cannot be denied that mankind, by and large, prefers a subjective feeling of freedom to coercion, we also know of a craving for material goods which frequently can only be satisfied at the expense of liberty. Conversely, we know of “freedoms” which can only be preserved with sacrifice of material values. This is a tragic dilemma which neither the Manchester liberal nor the communist wants to face.

Nor must it be forgotten that it is by no means easy to draw the exact line in individual cases. The profiteers have frequently paid lip-service to the ideals of freedom in order to gain purely material advantages. Still, freedom is the average man’s indispensable precondition for the development of his personality (of course only the saint—that is, the person accepting death and poverty—is free at all times) and thus also of his deeper, implicit happiness, which does not necessarily rise to the surface of his consciousness. Goethe’s lines remain eternally true:

Höchstes Glück der Erdenkinder
Ist doch die Persönlichkeit!

—“the highest happiness of the children of earth is personality.”³⁶⁸

There is, needless to say, also another equally well-known dilemma which knows of no “practical” solution—the problem of the toleration of error (to which we will refer in Chapter V of this study). Akin to this problem is also the question of the toleration of propaganda and agitation attacking the very foundations of a state. This dilemma in a political democracy with a liberal society is completely insoluble.³⁶⁹ If—for reasons which we will discuss later on—we insist on freedom of discussion, we must sacrifice either one thing or the other. The wise liberal, in our opinion, will part with political democracy—the democratic doctrinaire with the liberal society; those who insist on all three elements will sooner or later have to face the rise of a totalitarian dictatorship.

If we investigate the propensities of the masses we find that they frequently sacrifice freedom, this condition so fundamental to various intellectual and spiritual ends, in order to enjoy material or psychological advantages. Only certain élites have a real stake in the liberty of self-expression. Thus liberal revolutions come from above while their democratic counterparts come from below. To the former belong the risings and rebellions of 1215, 1222 (Golden Bull, Arany Bulla), 1688, 1776, 1789 (Lafayette, Noailles, Mirabeau), 1825 (Dekabrists). Yet it must not be forgotten that liberal revolutions (by the very fact of being revolutions) suffer from the inner contradiction of having to use force, a principle opposed to liberty. Moreover, by breaking up familiar patterns they create uncertainties and fluctuations which cannot be easily controlled, and result in conditions which are the very opposite of the liberal blueprints. The devotees of Voltaire never suspected the rise of a Robespierre or a Napoleon; the Madrid professors who hailed the establishment of a republic in 1931 hardly envisaged the rise of a Negrín or a Franco; little did the Russian intelligentsia expect a Red October, and to the enthusiasts of the Weimar Republic it was by no means manifest that the fall of the Hohenzollerns rendered the rise of Hitler possible.

Egalitarianism and liberty are sometimes seemingly compatible but, as we pointed out in the Introduction, they are alternatives in their teleological aspects. A word of caution has to be said about the misuse of the term “equality” in connection with Christian doctrine. Christianity was by no means egalitarian, but merely established new values and new (physical as well as metaphysical) hierarchies. Human equality, theologically analyzed, is restricted to the equality of souls in the very beginning of their existence; but this equality is not continuous throughout a person’s lifetime.³⁷⁰ Potentiality and actuality should not be confused. The spiritual equality of two new-born babes in the sight of God is merely a “start.” Judas Iscariot expiring in the noose and St. John the Evangelist closing his eyes on Patmos are spiritually not equals. If we focus our attention upon the biological, characteriological, intellectual and physical status of the individual, the inequalities are even more apparent.

Egalitarianism under the best circumstances becomes hypocrisy; if sincerely accepted and believed in, its menace is greater. Then all actual inequalities appear without exception to be unjust, immoral, intolerable. Hatred, unhappiness, tension, a general maladjustment is the result. The situation is even worse when brutal efforts are made to establish equality through a process of artificial levelling (“social engineering”) which can only be done by force, restrictions, or terror, and the outcome is a complete loss of liberty.³⁷¹ The egalitarian and anti-personalistic terror of the French Revolution was perhaps partly prepared by the views of Abbé Mably, who traced the victory of Rome and the decline of Greece to the egalitarian statism of Rome and the individualistic disunity of the Hellenes.³⁷² Even today our liberties are menaced by the same basic obsession.

2. MORAL ASPECTS OF DEMOCRACY

Conceptually, as distinct from practically, the choice between quality and quantity, the best or the most, is crucial, and will not admit of compromise.

—ROSALIND MURRAY³⁷³

One of our modern authors has made the remark that, from a Christian point of view, the efficiency of democracy remains a secondary question; any form of government has to be judged by the Christian primarily as to its ethical content.³⁷⁴ The validity of this statement cannot be doubted, and it is theoretically possible that the Christian here, as in other matters, is faced by a tragic dilemma between the good and the useful. Only a Benthamite would refuse to see a potential antithesis between these two notions. The days are also past when infinite wisdom has been attributed to collective judgments.

But, on the other hand, the chorus of those defending democracy on ethical grounds has been considerably swelled in recent years; indeed, the ranks of the philosophic defenders of democracy have been strengthened by moral theologians, not only of the Protestant persuasion, but even of the Catholic Church. It has been argued again and again that self-government pertains to man’s nature, and that democracy actually is self-government. In spite of St. Thomas’ condemnation of democracy,³⁷⁵ we have seen Neo-Thomists trying to prove conclusively that democracy is not only a good form of government but even the only truly moral one. These thinkers often insist on debating their problem in vacuo. This is, of course, their right, provided they are able to withstand the temptation to introduce into their deliberations entirely fictitious elements. We believe that their concept of man is artificial, that their notions of the common good are out of focus, that their idea of society is a curious patchwork of opposites partly atomistic and partly totalitarian, and that their desire to make a popular idea plausible may have blurred their vision.

Their mistakes are not only of a philosophical but also of a theological nature. There is a very strong flavour of Rousseau in their arguments. It must, in fact, be admitted that Catholic political theory in general looks, from a strict Lutheran point of view, rather optimistic and even Roussellian.³⁷⁶

Before we deal with the problem of a pure democracy in a more immediate fashion, we have to make a digression into the field of original sin. The reader without religious conviction or theological training has no good reason to become weary of our investigation. As a matter of fact, whatever we have to say in this and the following paragraphs can be translated easily into secular terms.

According to Catholic theology man—originally far more perfect than he is now—because of his Fall was deprived of his extraordinary gifts and weakened in his nature (spoliatus gratuitis et vulneratus in naturalibus). This result is not a punishment in the narrow sense of the term, since we cannot maintain that Adam had any right to the privileges he enjoyed before the Fall. To the first group of losses belongs, for instance, eternal life on earth. The agnostic will readily agree that we are mortal. He will also agree that he could imagine a state of human perfection which man does not possess; it is only too obvious that we are exposed to maladies, that we get tired, that we forget, that our senses fail us, that our whole moral fibre is “shot through” with weaknesses. The agnostic will certainly reject the Judæo-Christian explanation of our imperfections, but he can hardly overlook the reality which interests us here.

Now first of all, let us ask the question whether there would be government at all in a humanity without original sin? St. Thomas Aquinas answers this problem in the affirmative.³⁷⁷ Man, according to St. Thomas, is not only a social animal but also intrinsically a political animal.³⁷⁸ Yet we, to our regret, are unable to agree with the Angelic Doctor. It is perhaps inadvisable to inject historical animadversions into a philosophic or theological argument, but we cannot help thinking of certain evolutions which have taken place in the last few centuries. It seems to us that the state is, in a sense, a “concretization” of society: while society has to act where individuals fail, the state has to discharge functions which unorganized society is unwilling or unable to perform. (Society has also, by the way, suffered by original sin; in fact it might be argued, on the principle that “corruption of the best is the worst corruption,” that the perversion of society has resulted in evils more oppressive than the failings of the state.) These limits between social and political functions were in the Middle Ages extremely unclear. The feudal system was of a social as well as of a political nature. Even monarchy, in our days rated as a “survival,” also has such a dual aspect.

It is evident that modern government has achieved an autonomy from society (we mean auto-nomy: the power to make and live by its own laws) which would baffle and frighten the medieval observer. Nietzsche’s “coldest of all monsters” would terrify pre-Renaissance man. State, the hard shell of society, can now be separated from the body social like the outer hull of a broiled lobster. And if we look now at the essential functions of the modern state—the waging of wars, sanitation, social legislation, regulation of education, inspection of factories and cemeteries, law courts, and so on—then we have to doubt strongly that the state is compatible with Paradise. We have only to remind the reader of the thesis of José Ortega y Gasset, who considers the automobile to be an expression of human (physical) mortality; if we were immortal we could as well walk from New York to Los Angeles. (Hence the indifference towards the time element in originally strongly religious civilizations—the mañana of the Spaniards and the zavtra of the Russians.) Even if automobiles should be manufactured in an eternalized paradise (the reader is reminded that Paradise has nothing to do with Heaven!) human beings would in all likelihood be perfect drivers, and thus not be in need of green lights and traffic policemen. And even if we are wrong in this, it still must be pointed out that man prior to original sin might have enjoyed head-on collisions; being immortal he could not possibly take serious harm. Moreover, without the original sin there would be no universities as we know them—no medicine, no theology (as we understand it), no law school, no polytechnic.

It is obvious that this whole question is a very important one because it is not immaterial to know whether the state belongs to the calamities in the wake of original sin or not—whether it is in the same category as painful childbirth, disease, and stupidity.³⁷⁹ (The secular version of this question is merely an inquiry as to whether the state is a result of the perfection or the imperfection of man.) Luther, with his almost limitless pessimism as to the nature of man, went even a step further than we do; he agreed that the state results from the Fall, yet he does not see in it a simple and logical effect of original sin but rather a specially ordained punishment.³⁸⁰ Protestant “political theology” in Germany has always been deeply affected by this view, which produced fatal consequences during the centuries following the Reformation.

But let us return to the main theme. We know that democracy can be either direct or indirect. Direct democracy is feasible in small units, and it still survives in New England town meetings and in certain Swiss cantons. It is obvious that direct democracy, restricted by size, has a good chance to escape the character of a mass-democracy which, in recent years, has been so severely criticized by Pope Pius XII. We should also remember that even Rousseau found democracy desirable only in small political units. Under such ideal conditions the element of anonymity and irresponsibility can be brought down considerably.

Yet as a result of the many inventions of modern times direct democracy could today be realized in a large nation also. It would certainly be feasible to install black and white pushbuttons in every household, which could work by inserting a latch key. At noon the citizenry could be informed over the radio by a steering committee in the capital about the various political and legislative propositions. In the evening the vote could be taken and registered by electric adding machines in the centre of the nation. At 10 p.m. the results could be announced. Thus a nation could declare a war on Monday, suffer a defeat on Tuesday, sue for an armistice on Thursday and re-open hostilities (if this were still possible) on a new motion on Saturday.

We have not made this proposition as a joke, but as an illustration of what the democratic principle pure and simple would mean: the most far-reaching possible harmonization of the general will (i.e., the majority’s will) with current policies, political practices, laws, and so forth. It is quite evident that this proposition is divorced from any practical value; but we have to ask ourselves whether a good (provided it really is a good) can become an evil if it exists in an unadulterated form. Moral philosophy and moral theology, unlike chemistry, admit of no alloys. To maintain that a thesis is true in the abstract and untrue in the concrete is pure manichæism or bombinatio in vacuo. Valid ethics have to be at least “theoretically practicable.”

We will admit that it is perhaps possible that a direct democracy, carefully synchronized with all popular desires and whims, would be a sound proposition were it based on a population untainted by original sin. (Would it, by the way, turn out to be a government by unanimity? This seems unlikely if we accept St. Thomas’ theory that intellectual gradations would still exist in a population free of original sin.) A humanity consisting of perfect persons—not omniscient, but with limitless and unerring intellectual capacities, endowed with firm, well-grounded characters and with clearness of vision—could be trusted with such an otherwise suicidal constitution. Everybody could become an expert in politics (as well as in other subjects), because the expert—in the narrow sense of the term—is precisely the result of our intellectual imperfection. Perfect man could gradually learn and understand everything; imperfect man has to concentrate on a few matters and listen to the advice of other experts within the society in which he lives. Of symbolic value are the efforts of Adam and Eve, after the Fall, to clothe themselves in aprons of leaves (Genesis 3. 7); this clumsy effort was rectified by the Lord who made them clothes of skins (Genesis 3. 21). Particularly in medicine is the dependence of the layman on the expert noticeable. Society is thus an agglomeration of cripples who have to help each other; and, naturally, those who have a real grasp of politics and statecraft are few and far between.

Yet it is precisely this overlooking of original sin with its moral and intellectual results that seduces the democratic ideologists of the Neo-Thomist persuasion to arrive at their rigid and dogmatic constructions. They have, by necessity, the most daring educational schemes which take into account neither innate intellectual inequalities nor the absolute limitations of our capacities.

The ethical dogmatists of democracy run into equally hopeless difficulties when they have to deal with the problem of territorial allegiances. According to their views the inhabitants of individual provinces, cities or villages should have the right to vote periodically on their status in relation to their state; whether they want to keep their ties, whether they want to join a neighbouring state or whether they want total independence. An interesting dilemma thus arises when the majority of citizens of a nation disapprove of the results of local plebiscites, or when a local General Will in a corner of a province opposes the pan-provincial General Will. Whatever their answer, there will always be sheer arbitrariness in the delineation of territorial categories. There is, for instance, no doubt that the majority of the population of the British Isles would not, on a purely plebiscitarian basis, have given freedom to Ireland. There is equally no doubt that a majority of Irishmen would have voted for secession from the United Kingdom. It is also manifest that the majority of the population of the six northern counties of Ulster would oppose the Irish majority and insist on keeping their ties with Britain. Conversely it must be admitted that at least two counties (Fermanagh and Tyrone) would oppose the majority of Ulstermen and vote for union with Eire.

The problem of boundaries and local allegiance would exist in a world state also. It is rather naïve to believe that borders are felt merely on account of customs officials and passport regulations. No United States of Europe could have been erected over the monstrosities of the 1919 boundaries; disregarding this fact would mean merely to rename international wars “internal conspiracies and revolutions.”

Already the idea has been sounded that a super-Gallup Poll would be a “truer” democracy than the present constitutional order (although the 1948 election may have weakened this idea somewhat). But many calling themselves democrats would voice preference for a mixed form of government³⁸¹ in which the democratic factor is counterbalanced by institutions and political organs which are not democratic in nature. The Senate of the United States, for instance, is from the point of view of the modality of its election a republican rather than a democratic institution (Nevada with 93,000 and New York with 11,000,000 inhabitants elect each two Senators). Whether the Senate is democratic or republican in its function depends on the relationship of the senators to their constituents and on their personal convictions; a senate trying to repeat public opinion is, from a functional point of view, a democratic body. Yet both, republicanism and democracy, are intimately tied up with the history and the institution of parliamentarism—whose background and roots are in aristocratic or oligarchic soil. In some countries the personality of the parliamentarian overshadows his party allegiance; in others the deputy is only the delegate of the party, and the voter can merely choose between parties, not candidates. In the former case we have to distinguish between parliaments in which the party discipline is strict (e.g., Britain) and those in which it is not (e.g., the United States). These categories have, as we are going to see, their important moral aspects.

3. DIFFICULTIES AND ILLUSIONS

Man of the past does not resemble the man of today. He would have refused to form part and parcel of the animal herds which the plutocratic, Marxist or racist democracies keep for the factories and the charnel houses.

—GEORGES BERNANOS³⁸²

Harold Laski thought that a sound parliamentary democracy rests on two pillars: (a) a common “framework of reference,” and (b) a two-party system.³⁸³ We agree wholeheartedly with him, but want to add that the former postulate is even more important than the latter. In the absence of a common political language and a basic common political philosophy a real parlement—a “dialogue” between the parties—and constructive discussions are impossible. Under these circumstances the parties cease to be mere “ins” and “outs,” and elections become minor social and political earthquakes.

It must also be expected that in the case of fundamental differences the constitution and, especially, the spirit of the constitution, will receive support only from a few parties or (as has frequently happened) from no parties at all. It has then the character of a mere provisional arrangement.³⁸⁴

The existence of more than two parties, on the other hand, leads easily to minority rule. A small party which holds the key to the absolute parliamentary majority can quite effectively run the country; and thus the democratic principle of majority rule is eliminated. In Rump-Austria between 1919 and 1933, for instance, none of the three parties really supported the constitution of the democratic republic. The Christlichsoziale were Catholic crypto-royalists; the Sozialdemokraten were Marxians with a totalitarian bent who, as Pan-Germans, together with the Grossdeutsche denied not only the constitution but the very independence of the country.

Yet the establishment and survival of both of Laski’s conditions fall into the domain of society: the free state can decree no common ideological denominator, nor prevent the rise of additional parties. The totalitarian state, with its “annexation” of society, is in a very different position, and desires the number of parties reduced to a single one. In these societal aspects of the Laski premises we get a hint as to the intrinsic connections between state and society. Moreover, they help us to realize that constitutions are mere frames, in which all sorts of pictures may be hung.

An outsider, a European for instance, may conceivably argue that the United States has basically a one-party system. The elections merely determine the strength of the wings. And the vote often becomes, not an ideological manifestation, but simply a protest against persons in power.³⁸⁵ The situation in Britain used to be very similar.³⁸⁶

Part of the success of the democratic and parliamentary régime in the English-speaking countries has to be ascribed to the fact that the societies of these countries (and especially the society of the United States, which lacks the royal alloy) have tried wisely and jealously to preserve the common ideological denominator. In the United States practically a hundred per cent of the population believes in republicanism and democracy, and Professor R. H. Gabriel is right when he points out that democracy is part and parcel of American nationalism. Republicanism and democracy, with all their implications, are taught and extolled in schools and theatres, in daily papers and in periodicals, in commencement speeches and in films, in novels, textbooks and radio comments, in drugstore conversations, in sermons and at cocktail parties.

At first this phenomenon, almost unique in modern history, seems paradoxical in a country made up largely of a variegated immigration; but we have to keep in mind that America is built on a voluntaristic basis. To be an American is frequently not an accident but a matter of choice and free decision. It means conscious assimilation and amalgamation. The word Americanism is not without real significance. And to the voluntaristic principle we have to add the simplicity of the historical background; in Europe almost every historical epoch leaves a distinct political heritage.³⁸⁷ And, last but not least, there is the geographic factor; two oceans gird the United States, and neither Canada nor Mexico are active exporters of political ideologies. The common possession with Great Britain of the English language is not conducive to ideological imports entirely alien to the American scene. And it is interesting to note that National Socialism, repeatedly insisting on its democratic character, envisaged in the far future the restitution of parliamentary democracy of a thoroughly “American” character (see Chapter VI). This is probably the deeper reason why the Reichstag was only packed, never abolished. According to one of our informants the plan existed to revitalize the Reichstag once a new, thoroughly nazified generation had grown up. Then even a plurality of parties could be permitted, since all parties would automatically represent merely various shades of National Socialism. The “Americanization” of Germany then would be complete.

The “common framework of reference” is, obviously, necessary not merely for fruitful parliamentary debate, but also for the very stability of the country in the course of elections. The two-party system alone would never do without the common denominator. In Britain, for instance, the common denominator is already of debatable validity. What happens if the Labour Party actually carries out a very far-reaching programme of socialization—and is defeated at the next elections? Will the Conservatives be able to sell state property to the highest (private) bidder? We must come to the conclusion that the actions of ruling political parties have a certain finality which creates historically irredeemable and irreparable situations. And we have to add that if the difference between the parties is considerable, every election means a bloodless revolution; thus the ship of state will soon be on the rocks.

To the foregoing problem it should be added that a law issued by one legislature can be cancelled by the next one, voted into power in order to remove that unpopular piece of legislation. But if a hasty declaration of war is made and the fight is lost, the electorate can only watch the actions of the government in impotent rage. The illusion of “self-government” breaks down. And the wheel of history having been turned inexorably permits of no erasure of the events which have taken place. Even if the vast majority of the voters disapproves of the decision of the government, no subsequent defeat at the polls is going to bring back to life those who have fallen on the battlefields. Matters are made worse if the deputies have been elected on a “peace platform.”

Yet as we have seen before, the preservation of the tenet “unity in necessary things” presupposes something like an ideologically totalitarian society which condemns dissent and persecutes the non-conformist. Since the politicized individual (not to be mistaken for Aristotle’s “political animal”) is a postulate of political democracy, and the preservation of well-functioning parliamentary democracy demands a politically alert and “mobilized” society, the first steps towards a totalitarianism are already taken. We have, furthermore, to bear in mind that a society consciously and collectively safeguarding a common political ideology is automatically pledged to common cultural values resulting in a rigorous homogeneity as to its “way of life.” (This political-cultural interrelationship has been well expounded by De Tocqueville in his De la démocratic en Amérique. The folly of those who would like to impose political forms on societies unwilling or ill-adapted—though frequently made “receptive” by propaganda or defeat—becomes apparent if we bear this difficulty well in mind.) The establishment and/or preservation of such conformity involves an extraordinary discipline and solidarity, which might rather adversely affect political, religious, racial or ethnic “dissenters”; legislation is obviously helpless in the face of social disdain, pressure or persecution. Said Sholem Ash very correctly in his essay “In the Valley of Death”: “A person’s constitutional rights are secure only when his social standing in the community is secure.”³⁸⁸

Since we have spoken about religious dissent, a warning should be sounded in relation to religion as a sufficient “common denominator” or framework of reference. Just because most religions have—in spite of their numerous ethical and political principles—no concrete uniform political ideology, they would be too “wide” as a common denominator. Let us imagine, for argument’s sake, a country with two roughly equal Catholic parties—one republican, the other royalist. We leave it to the reader to visualize all the difficulties and problems of such a situation. We might, again, conceive of a country with four parties: one royalist, conservative and Catholic; another royalist, conservative and Protestant; a third republican, “progressive” and Catholic; a fourth socialist, non-Marxist and “non-sectarian.” What would happen under such circumstances? In all likelihood the political alignment would cut across the lines of religious allegiance. The Bavarian wing of the Centrist (Catholic) party of Germany broke off in 1919 because the Bavarian Catholic royalists did not see eye to eye with the Prussian Catholic collaborators of the Weimar Republic.

From the foregoing it also becomes fairly evident that an analysis of democracy in action has to use two separate vantage points: one in the case of the existence of a common denominator, the other one in the case of its absence. The ethical problem of self-government, as a principle, postulate and possibility, will be dealt with later on. Here we merely want to point out that the political aspects of democracy on the European continent (with the exception of Switzerland) give us valuable negative insights into the character of parliamentary democracy. There the two Laskian premises are absent, and thus the various constitutions become mere armistice agreements. The famous bon mot that wars arc nothing but continuations of diplomacy by other means may for this case be adapted to read that revolutions and civil wars are merely the continuation of democratic party politics by other means. (In this sense the two Austrian revolutions of February and July 1934 were nothing but the only honest and “direct” forms of the inter-party “dialogue” that had been going on since 1919.) The agreement of parties on a given constitution only indicates the fact that none of them has an absolute majority, and that a final showdown resulting in a one-party dictatorship would be premature. The elections thus receive the character of public manifestations demonstrating numerical strength.

It is significant that, with things standing thus, the plurality of parties becomes a temporary safeguard against one-party dictatorship. It is obvious that parties which cannot hope ever to get a majority incline towards revolutionary tactics. Yet if one party receives an overwhelming majority, the transition to dictatorship can be made through bloodless and constitutional means; this transition often does not even need the expediency of “amendments.” It must not be forgotten, for example, that even after 1933 Germany continued as a republic, and that the Weimar constitution was never abolished, but only suspended in parts. On the other hand, the impossibility of forming a coalition backed by a majority of parties can also lead to a deadlock and thus to a dictatorship of a cabinet. The Nazis came to power by a combination of both situations rapidly following one another.

Even in the United States, with its “common denominator,” the perpetuation in power of one single party does not favour the preservation of parliamentary democracy. If for any reason one party were re-elected with an overwhelming majority twelve consecutive times, most checks and balances (including the Supreme Court) would break down or become obsolete. The safeguards against tyranny of the fairest constitution are relative and not absolute.

After the late Franklin D. Roosevelt’s re-election in 1944 the present author saw this danger in the United States, and wrote on the subject in no uncertain terms.³⁸⁹ In the 1948 elections the United States made further progress on the road to the one-party state. In 1952 the Democratic Party will be able to look back on twenty years of governmental monopoly. There is the added danger that their continued defeats will lead to a real demoralization of the opposition. Yet, since a (far more reliable!) estimate of the Gallup Poll tells us that 42.5 per cent of the American voters are permanent supporters of the Democratic, and only 34.5 per cent die-hard defenders of the Republican party, the repeated victories of the Democrats are not in the least surprising. Still, the higher percentage of permanent Democratic voters is not based upon a miracle either; in spite of its Southern “Bourbon” wing, the Democratic party caters in nationwide relations to the lower—and this means to the bigger—“half” of the social pyramid. The situation in Britain is very similar, and there is little doubt that the Conservative Party has only slight hope of getting back into power. [This remark was written before the elections of February 23, 1950.—ED.] From one point of view the situation in Britain is even more catastrophic, because the socialist ideal has by and large conquered the lower classes, and socialism is capable of far worse blunders than the ideology of a mere lower-class party out only to “soak the rich” and not to “kill the goose which lays the golden eggs.” Socialism in Britain has, moreover, created something like an “irredeemable situation,” since the Tories, if ever victorious, would lack the courage to undo socialism and to auction off the socialized (“nationalized”) industries to the highest bidders. Thus British National Socialism is here to stay; this is all the more likely as the Conservatives, in a frantic effort to gain lower-class support, are prone to sell the soul of the party by repeating Socialist slogans. American Republicanism—we must remember Mr. Wendell Willkie’s “me-too” attitude in face of the New Deal—has gone a very similar way.

As we can see, the warning words of America’s Founding Fathers, who insisted that democracy ends in expropriation (i.e., socialism), have not been heeded. Nevertheless, the developments in America and Britain are perfectly “normal”; they are the logical results of the democratic process, and the author, who was one of the few European writers to predict Mr. Truman’s re-election, claims no originality or inspiration for having done so. His article presaging the event³⁹⁰ was written upon General Eisenhower’s refusal to run for President. Had he run I believed he would have won the elections, just like Hindenburg, who won against the trend of the time by netting the “G.I. vote” of Germany in 1925. Mr. Dewey, who is neither an American aristocrat nor a perfect symbol of the “common man,” could not swim against the current. The development in Canada has reached an even later stage. Mr. MacKenzie King was able to “invest” his successor, M. Louis Étienne St. Laurent, with crown and sceptre. And the hopes of the Conservative opposition were swept away by the tidal wave of the biggest Liberal victory in history in the 1949 elections. A monarchy might become inefficient, unjust or even absolutistic. But unlike democracy it cannot peacefully and legally evolve into its very contrary.

It is thus all the more significant that representative government in Europe—outside of Switzerland—was successful only if the royal, non-democratic alloy was present, as in the case of Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, Norway. Of stable republics of a non-totalitarian character there are only two or three left—if we place the United States, Switzerland and Finland in that category. In this connection it must again be recalled that constitutions in themselves are no guarantees whatsoever for a liberal democracy in the Anglo-Saxon sense. The Constitution of the United States has been successfully adopted by many a South and Central American dictatorship (the Republic of Santo Domingo even has a two-party system, but for some time the two of them had only one presidential candidate—Dictator R. L. Trujillo); and the constitution of the U.S.S.R.—theoretically acceptable by any Christian state—is in Russia the instrument of a totalitarian autocracy. Britain has no written constitution; but, paralleling Protestant bibliolatry, there is in some countries a real worship of written constitutions and politico-legal arrangements, just what was ridiculed by Plato (Republic, viii, 557).

4. SELF-GOVERNMENT

Every age is befooled by the notions which are in fashion in it. Our age is befooled by “democracy.”

—W. G. SUMNER, quoted by LLOYD MORRIS,

Postscript to Yesterday

The collectivistic character of a (politically) democratic society receives a certain psychological reinforcement from the essentially collectivistic structure of the political parties in a parliamentary framework. The political struggle may have for a few leaders, governors and rulers the aspects of “I,” “thou” and “he,” but for the masses the dialogue is based on “we,” “you” and “they.” The old egoism which so often characterized personal rule (monarchy, one-man dictatorship, and so on) flies out the window and is supplanted by a seemingly idealistic “nostrism.” This expression, in opposition to a brutal egoism and a Christian altruism, was first used by the Austrian National Socialist Walther Pembaur.³⁹¹ “Nostrism” is also highly characteristic of the European blood brother of democracy—ethnic nationalism. A man, personally to all outward appearances humble, modest and balanced, if infected by nationalism, may break into the wildest, most shameless and most irrational praise of his nation, of course tacitly including himself in the venerated collective. “Nostrism” is thus nothing but camouflaged egotism; yet on account of its collectivistic implications it is infinitely more devastating in its results. As a matter of fact, we have even come to “respect” the nostrist; a man who extols himself is easily a target for ridicule, but a man who sings the praise of his own nation is, after all, a “good patriot” who has our sympathies as long as his nation shows no hostility to ours.³⁹² This disease has almost hopelessly poisoned the political atmosphere of the Old World, and has an iron grip on the social layer considered to be the backbone of every progressive nation—the middle class.

This situation is not exactly the same in the ideal parliamentary democracy as in the endangered one lacking the “common denominator.” An American, for instance, can say with a certain degree of truthfulness: “We elect our President.” This statement is correct if we assume that the defeated minority inwardly abides by the decision of the majority. The regulation determining that the majority should prevail over the minority may be entirely arbitrary and irrational,³⁹³ but since the constitution “universally” accepted in the country makes this stipulation, the rank and file of the minority can be said to have co-elected the President by merely participating in the process. (This notion is, admittedly, in the spirit of Rousseau: cf. Contrat social, IV, ii.)

Of course, the few who for some reason are unable or unwilling to accept the constitution are out of luck. Since they will have to “obey” the victorious candidate of their political adversaries, they are not citizens in the sense in which Spinoza uses this term.³⁹⁴ In “democratic” European countries, where the constitutions are met with contempt since they are only arenas constructed for the occasion—or racetracks whose spectators expect a final winner terminating the race—the elections usually divide the voters into Spinoza’s “citizens” on one side and into “subjects,” if not into “slaves,” on the other. There it can be truly said that not the nation but the majority elects its legislature and sometimes its chief executive.

Yet the voter in the parliamentary democracy, no matter on which side of the Atlantic, is in his political capacity an “individual” and not a “person.”³⁹⁵ In total anonymity and secretiveness he votes as the smallest mathematically indivisible fraction of a nation. (Neither should it be forgotten that this procedure represents the zenith of an invitation to irresponsibility.) Yet the impersonal nature of the voting process forces us to analyze the character of democratic “self-government” more critically. Fisher Ames, a century and a half ago, had no illusions about this claim of democratic apologists.³⁹⁶ Of course, if self-government is viewed from a national or collectivistic point of view—if a multitude is considered to be one organism with something like a responsible “group soul,” and if we simply identify the greater part with the whole—then the talk about “self-government” is justified. Yet such a point of view is only possible on a “nostrist” (and “vostrist”) basis, and political power from such a source comes curiously near to the anathematized statement in the Syllabus: Auctoritas nihil aliud est nisi numeri et materialium summa (“authority is nothing else than numbers and the sum of material things”).

It is obvious that all these vistas are unacceptable to anybody clinging to a non-materialistic philosophy; we have to reject them as figmentary and return consciously to the realities of the human person. It is, after all, man with all his glories and shortcomings, all his desires, longings, and emotions, his reason, his faith and his despair, who faces history and politics—and not some imaginary polycephalic centipede. To the philosopher of the New Mechanism the difference between the effectiveness of one person’s vote among five and among 500,000 will be merely in degree. This statement is mathematically correct. But “existentially” this is by no means the case.

Yet let us go a step further. If, for instance, the voters of France should be graphically represented by a solid column of the height of the Eiffel Tower (over 980 feet), one individual vote would measure not more than one three-thousandth part of an inch. In a modern mammoth state the individual at national elections is nothing more than a microbe; whether he in particular goes to the polls or not makes hardly any difference. His person and personality, as Aristotle stated melancholically, is counted and not weighed, and thus treated κατ’ ριθμòν λλ μ κατ’ ξαν—“by number but not by importance.”³⁹⁷ Thus, “Nobody is indispensable” is a highly democratic slogan. The conservative and personalist would say: “Everybody is unique. Everybody is indispensable. Nobody can be replaced.” Even at the risk of being accused of delighting in exaggerations and hyperbolic statements, we insist that the aforementioned democratic slogan leads straight to the cremation-stoves of Tręblinka and Oświęcim. Obviously, the noses counted in an election or the numbers figuring in the lists of selective service boards are interchangeable. So are the victims of a plebiscitarian tyranny.

To these reflections it must be added that the intensity of a vote cannot be calculated either; if 51 per cent of a nation vaguely approves of a party or of a particular measure the fanatical, fervent and desperate opposition of 49 per cent is of no avail.

There is no doubt that “self-government” is an enticing ideal and a fine dream. It may be part and parcel of our human nostalgia of the “paradise lost,” and related to the soothing vision of the anarchists. Actually it does not and cannot exist in its popular connotation. Human beings are algebraic entities who at the polls do not really “add up.” At the polls a plus b plus c is neither d nor 3; it is just what it says: a+b+c. The very choice of the candidates or the parties is limited and “prefabricated,” and thus the voter can often indulge merely in negations (“voting against” someone or something) and not in affirmations—unless he embraces a current political faith and closes his eyes to the personality of the candidate. An Austrian Socialist, for instance, who had voted in 1920 for his Marxist party, found himself ruled by a clerical party under the leadership of a Monsignor, and thus exercised no “self-government.”

And although the citizen in a parliamentary democracy based on Laski’s “two pillars” is psychologically in a better situation—much depends on his sportsmanship³⁹⁸ in the acceptance of the candidate of his luckier rivals—there are other aspects which make “self-government” largely illusory. Man, the tragic animal, is here again faced with defeat. Government is almost always unsatisfactory and disappointing. True self-government can only be the mastery man exercises over himself; most human beings need for this purpose a personal sphere, “elbow room,” privacy which cannot be invaded by either state or society. Families, for instance, are minor kingdoms—ideal spheres for the development of personality; and free societies always have strongly developed hierarchically built family cells. The franchise, as F. Lieber pointed out over two generations ago,³⁹⁹ is no synonym for liberty; it can therefore not guarantee this Lebensraum, this “personal sphere,” which is a postulate of liberalism and not of democracy. A Tyrolean peasant under Maria Theresa had, no doubt, a bigger and better-guaranteed private sphere than, let us say, the average dweller in a New York Lower East Side tenement—not to speak of Berliners and Muscovites under their respective totalitarian régimes.

The concept of “government by consent of the governed” is practically identical with that of “self-government”; personally and “existentially” it is an accidental concomitant of any form of government including tyranny. To Comrade Ivanov, who is a convinced Communist, the régime of the U.S.S.R. is a “government by consent of the governed” as far as he is concerned; to Citizen Petrov, relegated to the “Minus Six,” it is a tyranny. Moreover, the very reason for the difference in the two attitudes may be traced back to the psychological aspects of the government’s propaganda effort. Comrade Ivanov is of the Communist “persuasion”; Citizen Petrov is still unconvinced.

The ethical value of these political “opinions” and “persuasions” is another matter. To what extent do they genuinely form parts of the personalities of voters? It is certain that democracy rests squarely on the vacillations and shifting loyalties of a certain sector of the electorate, since well-grounded and unchanging political convictions would result in a “freezing process” which is the very end of democracy.

Luckily there is in most democratic movements a more or less avowed tendency to disestablish (destroy, expropriate) some existing élite or aristocracy, and thus to effect a change; envy is usually the driving motor in these efforts. At the same time a new clique tries to get into power behind this “smoke screen.”⁴⁰⁰

This brings us to the thesis that parliamentary democratic government is always strictly oligarchical in character. This thesis was advanced over a century ago by Fisher Ames⁴⁰¹ and then by Proudhon.⁴⁰² In our days it was reaffirmed by H. G. Wells⁴⁰³ and received a more thorough treatment by Pareto, Mosca and Robert Michels. The last-mentioned expounded this thesis for the first time in his treatise on the sociology of political parties,⁴⁰⁴ and returned to it in a smaller work entirely dedicated to this issue.⁴⁰⁵ James Burnham in his The Machiavellians wrote a commentary on the oligarchic theory of democracy. Sir Henry Maine, however, doubted the creation of oligarchies or élites on a democratic basis; all he expected from the democratic process was a new despotism.⁴⁰⁶ In any case, if democracy is actually in practice nothing but a conspiracy of small, entrenched groups cleverly “manipulating votes,” the harsh judgment of René Schwob on democracy⁴⁰⁷ is indeed not far off the mark. Thus the final moral aspects of democracy in action—with their final psychological implications, so constantly overlooked by the apologists of the democratic dogma—gain new and more depressing perspectives.

To all this must be added a biological tendency towards oligarchy from intermarriage, family alliances and the heredity of natural gifts, which probably even democracy cannot counteract successfully. Especially if we believe in the analysis of Professor A. H. Lloyd, we are bound to see the spectre of an enslavement to oligarchy menacing “free democracies” even from these quarters.⁴⁰⁸

5. ETHICS AND REPRESENTATION

Flatter les vices du peuple est encore plus lâche et plus sale que de flatter les vices des grands.

—CHARLES PÉGUY, “Mémoires et dossiers”

Ex senatus-consultis et plebiscitis scelera exercentur.

—SENECA

When we survey the democratic scene one characteristic almost immediately captures our attention: lack of responsibility. It is interesting to note that irresponsibility was the standard charge against the monarchs, who were considered to be responsible to “God only.”⁴⁰⁹ Yet the advent of democracy has hardly increased the sense of responsibility,⁴¹⁰ since democratic composite government has resulted in a division of responsibility which makes it ubiquitous and at the same time—through a process of “atomization”—illusory. The electors who have dropped their ballots in unmarked envelopes can deny their misdeeds with a straight face, and the deputies who after an initial failure were not re-elected can claim that the time of their tenure was too short to permit the completion of their plans. There is also a widespread tendency to restrict the tenure of chief executives (“Power corrupts!”). As a result the amateur incumbents of this high office not only are prevented from utilizing their meagre experience acquired at great cost, but the bar against their re-election or reappointment often puts them into a mood of frivolous indifference. And since the judges and censors of the politician’s actions are (seemingly) not God but the lay electorate, whose opinion has great “practical” but little ethical, historical or factual value, the sense of true responsibility will be blunted. Maintaining one’s popularity with King Demos has nothing whatsoever to do with a sense of true responsibility which, in its finality, is always directed towards God.

As, moreover, political power in a democracy is not inheritable except in a very oblique way, the judgment of history has hardly to be feared, as in the case of a dynasty. The follies of a Woodrow Wilson, a Clémenceau, a Lloyd George, or a Sonnino had no direct ill effects on immediate members of their families. Most politicians are dead or in retirement when the results of their policies become manifest. But a Louis XVI, a Charles I of Austria, a Nicholas II had to pay for the errors or neglects of their ancestors. Still, the ethical problem of a “democracy in action” is greatest in the moral position of the politician.⁴¹¹

What is the duty of the successful political candidate? To speak and vote according to his own lights, or to become the mouthpiece of his constituency, thus merely voicing public opinion? Republicanism will favour the former theory, democracy the latter. The republican aspect of popular representation is one of a transfer of popular sovereignty to electees, while the democratic deputy is the representative of the “voice of the people.”⁴¹²

The problem of the borderlines between these two norms is one of the first magnitude—especially in the United States.* It is evident that the dishonest republican electee might sidetrack his own opinion to gain popularity, while a democrat might be unable to resist the voice of his conscience. Yet, viewing this overlapping of theory and practice, the person adhering to Christian ethics can only approve of the republican, not of the democratic, thesis. To him human action is permissible only in conformity with one’s conscience (see Note 688). The true Christian as a candidate in a thoroughly democratic state is almost unthinkable; only in rare cases will he succeed in maintaining his position. Without a truly magic personality he can hardly expect success.

Of course, there is the possibility of a deformed conscience prompting the deputy to act according to popular opinion and not according to his own conviction—thus making a sacrificium intellectus. The “election year scare” and the “Write to your senator!” proposition are largely democratic phenomena—unless the latter is done in a spirit of enlightenment, and not of pressure menacing the deputy with the sanctions of the ballot-box.⁴¹³ Several constitutions insist on the independence of the deputy from popular demands,⁴¹⁴ but we cannot help doubting whether in spite of these written injunctions the Damocles’ sword of pending elections remains ineffective. It must be admitted, though, that in countries with election-lists on a nationwide party basis (Listenwahlrecht) the danger in this de-personalized system comes rather from the pressure of party discipline than from the retaliations of an irate electorate.

In order to illustrate our ethical dilemma, let us imagine three candidates—a good Christian, a good pagan, and a bad pagan—running for office and holding an election meeting. They are heckled by the audience, and reply according to their lights. In order to illustrate our thesis we shall be rather typical and exaggerate their respective positions.

1. Question: “We all want the Caloosahatchie Canal. Are you going to vote for it?”

The Good Christian: | The Good Pagan: | The Bad Pagan:
I am sorry but I am going to vote against the project. I know that you would benefit from it locally but your local benefit is out of all proportion to the expenses which would have to be borne by the taxpayers of the whole nation. | Though the prospects are not very bright I will do my best. As a representative of this area I will put its interests always first. | The Canal has always been on the top of my agenda. Sure, I’ll vote for it. This state is going to have the finest, broadest, bluestand smoothest canal in the world!

2. Question: “What are you going to do about our relations with Mexico? We don’t trust her.”

The Good Christian: | The Good Pagan: | The Bad Pagan:
I have studied the problem of our relations with Mexico for many years. To give you an exhaustive and honest answer I would need at least three hours and I am not sure that you would even then understand what I mean. | It all depends on what the present Mexican Government is going to do about our investments. It is probably premature to make plans at the present moment. The interests of our nation are, naturally, paramount to me. | Nobody in his senses ever trusts Mexico. We won’t play sucker to her again and the big stick remains the best policy. We’re going to break off diplomatic relations with her—that’s what I am going to vote for!

3. Question: “We want better roads. We’re against railroad subsidies. How are you going to vote in these matters?”

The Good Christian: | The Good Pagan: | The Bad Pagan:
I have no idea. As a matter of fact I have never studied this problem and I know nothing about it. I will, though, investigate the matter, which might take me a couple of months. I’ve been told that it is a complicated question. | Of course, better roads are necessary and I will vote for them. Like you, I view the railroad subsidies with mistrust. Yet I doubt that these matters will come up in the next session. Still, you can count on me. | That highway-versus-railroad problem is very simple. Only a stuffed shirt or longhaired professor would make it appear complicated. I’ll give you the lowdown in a nutshell. It boils down to the following simple facts. . . . (Follows a three-minute outline.)

This sketch could be continued ad nauseam. The Christian candidate would be sincere, frank, serious. He would confess ignorance where need be, he would oppose his constituents when his conscience advocated disagreement, he would refuse to distort facts by popularizing them or by “boiling them down” to a deceptive simplicity,⁴¹⁵ thus flattering the intellectual vanity of the credulous masses.⁴¹⁶ The bad pagan simply lies to his voters; as Pascal put it: “One must have a mental reservation, and judge everything by that, while nevertheless speaking like the people.”⁴¹⁷ He pretends to understand problems he is not acquainted with, and simulates knowledge; he is determined not to stick to his promises or even to act against his conscience.

The good pagan is in the worst situation of all: he lies, quite subconsciously, to himself. He believes, perhaps in all sincerity, that one can square the circle—that one’s own conscience, absolute truth, the feasible and permissible, the ethical and practical, public opinion and the useful, can all be brought under the same denominator. The tragedy of Christian existence is not for him; he would flee what Jean Wahl calls décisions kierkegaardiennes.⁴¹⁸ The calamities brought upon mankind by the Fall have for him no reality.

And in the overall scene—in the struggle between the three above-mentioned types—a fatal Gresham’s Law is operating: the inferior human currency drives the better one out of circulation. As Burckhardt said, “Itself a product of envy and mediocre men, it [democracy] can use only mediocre men for its tools.”⁴¹⁹ The good Christian’s position is an almost hopeless one, since he is not willing to sacrifice ethical values to the Moloch of popularity.⁴²⁰

From the foregoing the inner weakness of the republican form of government is quite evident. St. Thomas rightly considers democracy to be the perversion of “polity” (republic), and it is obvious that the difference between these two is conceptual rather than constitutional.⁴²¹ (The same is true of the relationship between monarchy and tyranny, aristocracy and oligarchy.) Although the three bad forms of government can be established as such, the perversion of the good forms of government lies, not in a visible change of their structure, but in a per-version, a “turning awry” of their aim and purpose. Constitutionally very little can be done to prevent the degeneration of a republic into a democracy, because the ulterior motives and aims of a person can rarely be judged by the outsider—just as, conversely, the monarch can appear to be (or actually change into) a tyrant, or the aristocrat into an oligarch. The decision of a ruler can seem to be purely in his own interest, whereas it will actually work for the common good; and the reverse is also true. Sometimes not even history can tell us the truth.

One factor—and a very important one—in the preservation of a republic lies in the moral standards upon which a society is insisting. Another one is the limited material and honorific rewards a political career should offer, thus providing the “democrat” with no economic (or other) advantages in, and incentives for, re-election. To the professional politician popularity, as a means to re-election, is the immediate goal. The republican, on the other hand, should view popularity with indifference, and failure in the elections with equanimity; this again is more likely if he has private interests, wealth and, perhaps, a career outside the political sphere. (Hence the old republican—but highly undemocratic—property qualifications.) And herein lies the very tragedy of republican government, which has to steer constantly between the Scylla of a camouflaged aristocratic rule and the Charybdis of a democracy—the extremes of the Venetian Christianissima Respublica and Hitler’s republikanischer Führerstaat with a deutsche Demokratie.

6. KNOWLEDGE

La “Colère des Imbeciles” ravage aujourd’hui la terre.

—GEORGES BERNANOS, La France contre les robots

Having dealt with the ethical problem of the elector and elected, we have to investigate the intellectual aspects of democracy. Thus we come, first of all, to the problem of knowledge.

Knowledge, in a narrower sense, is cognition of the true. An objective judgment can be made only if we know the nature of the object in question. Without a real knowledge of the object we cannot let reason make a judgment. On the other hand, a few external aspects, if perceived, are sufficient to let our emotions react.

But while knowledge can discriminate between true and untrue, good and bad, the emotions can only express subjective feelings, “likes” and “dislikes.” In this case there is no comprehension but merely the recognition that something appears likeable or unlikeable to an observer. Without a grasp of the real nature of a thing only appearances can be dealt with. The picture of the object in the mind of the “judging” person becomes all-important—the picture and not the reality. “Thus I like you, thus I dislike you,” says the person. It is obvious that real knowledge will, finally, correct that picture and basically alter the affective attitude of the observer. And under “knowledge” we might also distinguish between Vernunft and Verstand—reason and understanding. It ought to be conceded that there is a deeper understanding, and even knowledge, possible through affection and love. Yet love might not only open eyes but also make blind! The tenet “I believe that I may understand” (and “I love that I may understand”) may entail rich rewards, but also terrible losses. Here lies the risk of a pure Augustinianism, as well as of a naked existentialism.

There still remains the question whether we can remain absolutely neutral towards a phenomenon. Knowledge, intuition and emotion in relation to an object under scrutiny can be contemporaneous; but can we, especially towards objects which have a direct bearing on us, remain indifferent? In the absence of knowledge are we necessarily emotional? We are inclined to believe that this is the case. Hence Jacob Burckhardt’s criticism of the anti-rational character of democracy: “We do not have democracy in order to heed reason; if we had wanted that we could have kept limited franchise and respect for persons worthy of respect.”⁴²²

If we compare now, for instance, one of the Swiss cantonal diets in the Middle Ages, or a New England town hall meeting,⁴²³ with the elective processes in a modern mammoth democracy, we will quickly discover that there is in the two first-mentioned cases the possibility of an equitable relationship between political decision and personal knowledge.⁴²⁴ Even today the problems which crop up in the Diet of Glarus can be grasped by the voting citizenry. Yet in a large nation, what is the actual relationship between the world problems of today and the popular representatives—not to mention the vast voting masses? The grave problems moving the world demand at least a superficial comprehension of history, geography, economics, physics, international and constitutional law, foreign languages, military and naval science, agriculture, biology, racial psychology, diplomatic usage, and many more subjects besides.

This need is somewhat subconsciously felt by the advocates of democracy, who therefore indulge in grandiose schemes of mass education—which still fall completely short of the necessary but unattainable goal. President Garfield, in reply to Macaulay’s criticism, said: “We confront the dangers of suffrage by the blessings of universal education.”⁴²⁵ Yet we see how the knowledge of the voters as well as of their representatives remains insufficient to be used in an evaluation of the momentous problems of the world. Even John Stuart Mill had his doubts about the egalitarian character of democratic suffrage;⁴²⁶ as a result of all this, emotions increasingly dominate the political scene; and the shrinkage of “one world,” on the other hand, rapidly multiplies the number of questions having a bearing on individual nations. Owing to the perversity of this situation we have a never-ending series of failures, the reaction to which is often a cry for an unlimited rule of experts. These are asked to rule with an iron fist, and to enforce a pagan utilitarianism of the worst Benthamite stamp. Ethics and human freedom would then be dispensed with as needless impediments.

To these considerations the supporters of the democratic dogma will reply that the whole problem is not one of knowledge and efficiency; that the issue is purely moral, and concerned with such aims as “self-government,” freedom, and volition. They will quote “freedom of choice in cases of doubt”—and the disciples of the “liberal heresy” will point out that “we have a right to be wrong!” It is, admittedly, sometimes prudent not to enforce truth; but a right to be wrong does not exist.

In this connection we have to remember that government is not a final end. It is probably only a means to an intermediary end. And if good government is an art in the service of the common good, it is natural that those who have a higher skill in this art⁴²⁷ should, within proper limits, have a greater chance to serve the common good.⁴²⁸ It is perfectly true that a layman might make a better diagnosis of an illness than a doctor, or that a lawyer with artistic inclinations might design a better and more beautiful evening dress than a tailor. But there is also such a thing as prudence based on probabilities. The knowledge, skill and experience of physicians are directed towards diseases, those of tailors towards dressmaking.

We also doubt that every man is a political animal in the narrow sense of the term. It seems obvious that the political power of a person (like any other “accorded” power) should be commensurate with the object—regardless whether the object is a proposition faced by a legislator or the choice between candidates belonging to parties confronted by major decisions. In the latter case the hapless voter is also called upon to exercise his psychological skill in relation to persons he hardly knows. In this quandary it does not matter whether the voter is one out often or one out of a million. It has been well said that “ten million ignorances do not make one piece of knowledge.”⁴²⁹

As to the problem of control by experts, we want to repeat that the most pressing problem of good (and that automatically implies ethical) government lies today in building up defence machineries around spheres in which the person should have power and self-government approximately commensurate with his own capacities. The Middle Ages and their aftermath were characterized by a multitude of such autonomous and semi-autonomous spheres; medieval man frequently belonged to a variety of these. Moral perfection and intellectualization for central governments, coupled with a restriction of their radius of action, should be our programme—the very reverse of the existing trends. The characteristics of modern mass government are: a central organ increasing in totality and ubiquity, driven by emotions but employing bureaucratic staffs of varying qualifications and efficiency, and putting (more or less) knowledge and experience to the service of whims and emotions, thus placing the “heart” above the “brain.” Totalitarian dictatorships, though hampered by irrational doctrines, nevertheless rely more on the help of experts—and they are, in addition, highly conscious of the fact that emotions can be “manufactured.”

The question of expert knowledge versus amateurism is all the more pressing because, if there ever was an equitable relationship between the voting masses and the issues confronting them, it is now rapidly waning. We have already hinted at the multiplication of problems in a shrinking world; this situation is aggravated by our steadily decreasing relative (personal) knowledge. While the actual knowledge of mankind, stored in millions of books, files, and specialized brains, continues to rise at a mad pace, the knowledge necessary for the understanding of world affairs advances in a geometric progression, standard individual knowledge (if at all!) only in an arithmetic one.⁴³⁰ Is it not more than certain that the burning problems of our age and time—atomic fission, European politics, the economic cycles, Far Eastern affairs, to name only a few—are properly understood by only a microscopic minority in every modern nation? By one in a thousand? Or is it one in ten thousand? But man will always judge, object, criticize, praise, condemn, regardless of his qualifications. He has a good right to do that. Still, the question remains whether his emotional reactions should affect the common good.⁴³¹

It is fairly obvious that the enormous disorder and chaos in this world is not the result alone of the flagrant breach of practically every ethical postulate, but is also due to the retreat of knowledge and reason from the domain of politics. Oxenstierna’s injunction was never truer than today. It really seems that statesmanship is incompatible with “politics” in the democratic sense. We have seen great statesmen (of the ethical as well as of the Machiavellian pattern) in monarchies, aristocratic republics and post-revolutionary tyrannies. Yet the complete lack of security of tenure, necessitating a constant preoccupation with mere “politics,” is a fatal handicap in democracies. It is to be doubted that the parliaments of the last fifty years have produced a single outstanding statesman. Products of the old British oligarchy like Disraeli or Gladstone would be unthinkable in the democratized parliamentary scene of today.

The fact remains that in all democratic nations the person of the “politician” is treated with contempt,⁴³² and “politics” are looked upon by a healthy public opinion as a cocktail of deceit, lying, treachery, double-dealing, graft, theft, insincerity, perjury, imposture,⁴³³ dishonourable compromise and other vices. There is, however, a time-lag between the disappearance of the general respect given to the human organs of the constitution and that given to the constitution itself. In countries where the constitution is not a mere “armisticial arrangement” but the survival of a grand, but defunct, republican order, we often find a very considerable difference between the homage paid to the constitutional order and the enthusiasm accorded to the deputies and other elected representatives of the nation. Of this discrepancy the citizens are sometimes not only conscious, but even proud.

To the historian this antithesis is neither new nor particularly encouraging. After two hundred years of cheerful and ironic anti-clericalism the Reformation came after all, and destroyed the fabric of the Church in a number of nations. The scholastic “I distinguish” has little bearing on the masses.

In order to complete our line of argumentation we have to mention the possibility of an “artistic” (aesthetic) way of governing a nation—a pattern not based on pure emotions nor on reason and knowledge.⁴³⁴ The probability and possibility of such an art of government is limited, although not to such an extent as generally surmised.⁴³⁵ In nations with a strong sense for aesthetic values the artistic element in the political leadership is of considerable importance, since it appeals to the dark borderlines of reason, emotion and Pascal’s raisons du cœur que la raison ne connaît pas—“reasons of the heart which reason does not know.”⁴³⁶

The emotional, egoistic and irrational demands and vagaries of the masses, reflected in their representatives, leads finally to considerable tensions between the parliaments and the administrations. This is especially true in the secretive war and foreign offices, which by their very nature can never become fully “democratized.”⁴³⁷ The dilemma between the demand for intellectual qualifications—labelled as “undemocratic”⁴³⁸—and the grave crises due to the usual democratic amateurism⁴³⁹ is insoluble. Neither can countries lacking expanding economies and natural defences afford the costly method of “trial and error.” This was felt by Metternich as early as the second quarter of the last century. He said to Ticknor: “I labour chiefly, almost entirely, to prevent troubles, to prevent evil . . . In a democracy you cannot do this. There you must begin by the evil, and endure it, till it has been felt and acknowledged, and then, perhaps, you can apply the remedy.”⁴⁴⁰

In the meantime we can observe how the tension between parliamentarians and bureaucrats rises in all those nations where the number of political appointees in the administration is limited and the standards of the civil services are high. The total elimination of the parliamentary machinery then becomes the dream of the bureaucrats, and the probability of a dictatorship promising “greater efficiency” increases. In this case the rebellion of the experts against lay control takes a particularly violent form. Entirely insoluble is the problem a democracy faces in a total war—not only during such a war, but even before the first shot is fired; since democracy is “rule by the people” and no entire nation ever wishes a war, a tyrannical government, which can choose the exact moment of attack, has a simply tremendous advantage.⁴⁴¹

7. SHADOWS OF TYRANNY

Compressing the idea into one syllable, Hamilton at a New York dinner replied to some democratic sentiment by striking his hand sharply on the table and saying: “Your people, sir—your people is a great beast.”

—HENRY ADAMS⁴⁴²

The antinomy between the bitter reality of “politics” and the constitutional tradition are not the only factors in creating a certain cynicism and a general poisoning of the atmosphere in a democracy. Even more dangerous is the enforcement of the “common framework of reference”—the bloc d’idées incontestables, the “fund of indisputable ideas” as Leibholz calls it.⁴⁴³ This particular task of a democratic society is not only not without spiritual perils, but it produces also a uniformity which can have adverse effects on the intellectual scene.⁴⁴⁴ The result is a lack of “distance” between the person and society, which in this case is strongly annexationist; a secret police is conspicuously absent, but there are ostracism and boycott, the typical forms of persecution sanctioned by democratic society and directed against the non-conformist. Consider the numerous colloquial (“slang”) expressions denoting a non-conformist prevalent in democratic civilizations: “outsider” is still literary, but we have also such terms as “stuck-up,” “stuffed shirt,” “highbrow,” “crackpot,” “high-hat,” and so on—as opposed to “ordinary, decent chap,” “regular fellow,” “regular guy,” “square shooter,” “fellow-like-you-and-me,” etc. The real ruler becomes “everybody,” “they say so,” “John Q, Public,” “Mr. Average Man.”⁴⁴⁵

There is something essentially inhuman and even un-Christian in the masses and in the “this-worldly” aspects of society, which we do not necessarily find in the individual.⁴⁴⁶ Especially if a society harbours paganizing tendencies and strays collectively from the path of truth and virtue, the vigilance of the person easily becomes paralyzed. Christopher Dawson writes:

It is the very function of the Christian to be moving against the world, and to be protesting against the majority of voices. And though a doctrine such as this may be perverted into a contempt of authority, a neglect of the Church and an arrogant reliance of self, yet there is a sense in which it is true, as every part of Scripture teaches. “Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil,” is its uniform injunction.⁴⁴⁷

Everywhere we can hear the exclamation: “There’s nothing wrong about it; everybody does it!” And since the omnipotent society rules through the public praise of labels and shibboleths, we see as a result all heresies, mischievous actions, immoral propositions making their conquests under an elaborate camouflage, in order not to challenge openly the powerful forces of the social Behemoth which can be far more potent than the state Leviathan. Thus we see communism in the democratic orbit proclaiming itself, not as messianic atheist proletarianism, but as “streamlined democracy” or as “Twentieth-Century Americanism” and Huey Long very penetratingly said that when fascism came to the United States it would call itself democracy.⁴⁴⁸ The lack of frankness and courage, as well as the powerful sway of collective myths, drains the essence from most notions.

In the basically non-democratic world with free societies and democratic constitutions, the situation is quite different. There the principles of indirect democracy (equality, election of representatives and majority rule) appear as a mere constitutional frame: any conceivable picture can be fitted into it. Hence the absolute futility of “enforcing” democracy. The “frame” might be imposed, the “picture” never. Constitutions may be decreed, but societies are entities of natural growth—unless we do some “social engineering.”

Since these societies are divided into deeply antagonistic groups of an ideological pattern, none having so far an absolute majority, no real picture but at best a mosaic can be offered. Yet all parties will strive to reach an absolute majority in order to rule without being hampered and handicapped by partners in a coalition. We have likened the parliaments with their elections to race-courses in which finally, after many indecisive rounds, a real winner will appear. But the achievement of a real majority by one single party usually signals the very end of the constitutional process; in all likelihood a determined effort will be made to “freeze” this happy situation, and to cancel the struggle for supremacy once and for all by constitutional amendments. Thus J. C. Bluntschli was right in pointing out two dangers of democratic republics: (a) demagogy and demagogues, (b) parties who are not curbed by any superior power.⁴⁴⁹ Hence the greater stability of parliamentary instability in monarchies. When the Nazis and their Nationalist tail won 51.4 per cent of all seats in the Reichstag, the “democratic process” of the Weimar State had come to an end,⁴⁵⁰ and the Führer as incarnation of the masses took over the reins of the Republic. (For a more complete analysis of the German constitutional tragedy, see below, pp. 261–263.)

Of course, there are short cuts to modern tyranny by revolutions and pronunciamientos (Russia, Italy). Yet it must be borne in mind that all modern tyrannies were (and are) party dictatorships with a parliamentary “prehistory.” And full party dictatorship is possible only in a republic, or in a monarchy camouflaged as such. A leader (Führer, duce, vozhd’) is not a ruler. He “marches ahead” but is, theoretically at least, an “equal.” As a modernized “tribune of the people” he is not only the product of political but also of “social” democracy. Thus in Italy the rupture between the dictatorship of the Fascist party and the monarchy had to come sooner or later—when Mussolini established his Repúbblica Sociale Italiana and thus reverted to his earlier republican programme. No wonder that it is the republic which has become synonymous with dictatorship, not the monarchy.

Of liberal, democratic republics there are only three surviving: the United States, Switzerland and, perhaps, Finland; to which one might add the Irish experiment. All other republics are either ruled dictatorially or stand on the brink of civil wars. “True democracy” (in the popular sense) is much more at home in the monarchies of north-western Europe and the British Commonwealth. And it is significant that all these nations, whether monarchical or republican, are, with the exception of Belgium, predominantly Protestant or have a superimposed Protestant culture.

Thus the value of the monarchical alloy should not be underestimated. If society has failed to establish a common denominator for all political parties, a mere alloy, as the case of Italy in 1922 has demonstrated, is not sufficient, and a more effective strengthening of the monarchical factor becomes necessary. We have to ask ourselves whether in the most extreme cases, when violent temperament is combined with thorough ideological incompatibility (Spain, Portugal, Greece, South America), government from above on a bureaucratic basis is not the only safeguard against the alternative of anarchy and party dictatorship, which again reminds us of Plato’s warning: “Tyranny, then, arises from no other form of government than democracy.” Among these nations the political ideologies are dynamite, a fatally disruptive force; to introduce such a highly explosive element into the legislative body is sheer folly. It makes sense to let a couple of calm, well bred, gentle Catholic theologians debate the problems of Grace and Free Will. Such an interchange of ideas stands a good chance of being constructive and methodical. Yet a discussion between a member of the Federatión Anarquista Ibérica and a Navarrese Carlist on the curriculum of state secondary schools has no theoretical or practical value whatsoever. The final argument in such a discussion can only be civil war and the dialogue of machine guns.

The attempt to stage discussions between people of widely divergent views is in itself quite harmless. A free society whose task is not to preserve the premises of a sound parliamentary democracy will always tolerate dissent. The suicide and downfall begins if dissent is made the essence of government. Nobody in his senses would elect a king suffering from schizophrenia to rule a country. As a matter of fact, a hereditary king suffering from schizophrenia, unlike a parliament divided against itself, would be automatically replaced by a regency.

In contemplating this whole situation we must never forget that by far the greater part of Western civilization is either Catholic or Greek Orthodox. The Protestants on the European Continent form only 13 per cent, of the population.⁴⁵¹ Thus the relativism of the Protestant-Liberal world⁴⁵² is only a parochial phenomenon. The non-Protestant world would insist that if A is correct and B differs from A, then B must be wrong. Hence also the conspicuous absence of convinced democrats among Continental European thinkers of the first order. It would be very difficult to name more than a dozen of them—and our efforts to find more than two have failed. We are speaking of thinkers, not of literati who not only crave a public as chaplains of King Demos, but are also attracted by the “sentimental” and “artistic” qualities of democracy, which so easily assumes the character of a secularized religion.

Yet this relativism, which the clear thinker and logician rejects, plays an enormous rôle in the political and spiritual realm of democracy. We leave it to the psychologist to determine the feminine implications of such relativism. But relativism and readiness for compromise go hand in hand, and an absolute refusal to compromise on fundamentals (a Catholic rather than a Protestant trait) would soon bring democratic machinery to a standstill. The political coalitions of the temporary democracies in the Catholic orbit have contributed more than anything else to the undermining of the moral prestige of politicians; yet the various coalition governments with their combinazioni are not the only manifestations of compromise—the voter has, first of all, to make a compromise between his own views and those of the party he supports. The electee will have to compromise in a similar way. In the democracy with several parties the parties will have to compromise among themselves. They collectively will have to compromise with “reality,” i.e., the” facts,” and also with the oscillations of public opinion. This frenzy of compromise differs curiously from the noble device: Prius mori quam foedari—“Sooner die than compromise.” And it is the most destructive moral and psychological preparation of the masses for facing oppression and enslavement. It is significant that the most heroic resistance against the Nazi invaders came from “backward” nations which had a minimum of democratic experience. The resistance of the French, Belgians, Dutch and Danes cannot in the least be compared with that of the Poles, Serbs, Greeks or even the Italians. The heroic struggle of Warsaw is without parallel in the history of the twentieth century. And so is its betrayal.

It is not surprising that the “liberal heresy” is a much better foundation or lubricant for the smooth functioning of a democratic republic than a theology or philosophy insisting on absolutes. In the religious field the liberal heresy, in turn, harmonizes best with modern, liberal Protestantism. Once we reject either the existence of absolute truth or its human attainability—and this is the essence, not of liberalism but of the “liberal heresy”—there can be no virtue attached to a stubborn defence of convictions of verities. We have only to remember the tragedy of the liberal heretic in the person of Pilate. In John 18. 37–38 we read how Our Lord insists in his presence that He is indeed a King who came into this world in order to be a witness for truth. Everyone born of truth will listen to His voice. And Pilate asks: ;—“What is truth?” He is convinced that he can get no answer to this question; he leaves the Son of Man, walks out to the howling mob and shifts in his predicament from liberal doubt to democratic procedure. The majority shall decide. . . .

8. ADDITIONAL ASPECTS OF THE PROBLEM

In certain historical periods one has to make the full circle of follies in order to return to reason.

—BENJAMIN CONSTANT

Returning to the basic issue of democracy, we have again to ask ourselves whether indirect democracy is still full democracy.⁴⁵³ Just as no constitutional injunction can prevent a republic from becoming—partly or wholly—a democracy, this process can also happen in reverse. Such a development is, though, less likely, because the wages for the capital sin of disregarding public opinion are removal by the ballot.⁴⁵⁴ But even if we take the sanctions of the masses into consideration, the fact remains that actual power, albeit for a limited time, is invested in a few. Viewed from this angle, a republic or a democracy are oligarchical monarchies with a time-limit.

Under these circumstances the differences between oligarchy and democracy (between aristocracy and republic) are gradual rather than fundamental. Direct democracy, as we have seen, is not feasible on any larger scale.⁴⁵⁵ The practicality of democracy begins only when we inject the “aristocratic” (parliamentary) or “monarchical” (presidential) alloy. Yet the alloy is perfectly workable by itself, as we know by historical experience. The ethical defender of the democratic dogma is thus in the curious position of having to admit either a total independence of reality from philosophy, or to project his calculations and visions into a hypothetical millennium of a super-race.⁴⁵⁶ Thus we seem to be confronted by the question whether government as such is not in its very essence an activity emanating from one or only a few.

Whatever the answer, it remains fairly certain that the number of ultimate governors dwindles with the size of the country and its population. This paradox is no less evident in Russia than in China, the Spanish Empire and the United States (whose monarchical organ, the President, enjoys surprisingly great powers). The classic republics of an oligarchic-aristocratic pattern (Venice, Genoa, the Hanseatic cities) never surpassed medium size. The democracies were even smaller.⁴⁵⁷ The enormous expansion of the Roman republic prior to and under Cæsar and Augustus hastened its transition from democracy to the dictatorship of the Cæsarian principate.⁴⁵⁸ Today the old evolution from tyranny or dictatorship to legitimate monarchy is, for historical reasons, less likely. Polybius’ “turn of the wheel” (νακκλωσις) is in an impasse.

The evolution from democracy to tyranny can hardly be prevented by more and better education, nor can democracy be made workable by the plan of making everybody into a philosopher-king. The advocates of this Utopian dream completely overlook original sin, with its effects on the moral and intellectual qualities of man. As a result we see in all democracies the tendency to increase education quantitatively (primarily by an extension of compulsory education), but, in order to make it “available to all,” the standards are constantly reduced. Of course, once the Ph.D. is made compulsory for all young Americans—there is already talk about an obligatory college education—American intellectual life will be annihilated. “Indoctrination” (in the narrow, exclusive, European sense of the term) on the other hand, trying to establish the common framework of reference directly or indirectly and to guard it jealously, will not only fail to establish a connection between the actual knowledge and that necessary to judge the great political questions—it will also prevent the formation of a necessary sovereignty of mind and the attainment of wider horizons. All it will accomplish is intellectual and spiritual inbreeding, if not total sterility. For these and other reasons a mass democracy is almost inevitable in any larger nation which is pledged to the democratic dogma.

Some democratic Catholics took great comfort from the Christmas message of Pope Pius XII in 1944. Yet the Pope, dealing with the shibboleth “democracy”—which in its popular connotation covers such a wide variety of ideals, institutions and political forms—merely outlined the sane and ethical forms of representative government as one example of many good forms of government. What the Pope had in mind is the parliamentary part of a mixed government; this is obvious from his reference to the possible monarchical alloy. The Pope did not “underwrite” democracy as we understand the term; he even took pains to point out that his condemnation of totalitarianism does not cover an absolute monarchy. (The ethical evaluation of an absolute monarchy depends in each individual case on how accurately it aims at the common good—which includes respect for the freedom and the natural rights of man.)

Still, it is quite amazing to see what has been read into the Pontiff’s text. After making the observation that the irresponsibility of the dictators has evoked a general desire to control governmental action, he immediately launched into a distinction between “the people” and “the masses,” i.e., “shapeless multitudes.” He insisted that a “mass democracy” would be catastrophic—an extremely pessimistic statement, if we take the anti-personal mass character of our megalopolitan civilization into consideration. Then he attacked the concept of a mechanical equality, noting that inequalities ought not to obviate a spirit of union and brotherhood. Finally he laid great stress on the fact that

since the centre of gravity of a democracy normally set up resides in this popular assembly, from which political currents radiate into every field of public life, for good or evil, the question of the high moral standards, practical ability and intellectual capacity of parliamentary deputies is for every people living under a democratic régime a question of life and death, of prosperity and decadence, of soundness or perpetual unrest.⁴⁵⁹

The fulfilment of these precepts seems to us out of the question in our present civilization. Certainly one of the elements which militates against the attainment of this goal is the mechanical egalitarianism so strongly condemned by the Father of Christendom.⁴⁶⁰

Now if we look at the voters in the democratic polity we have again to distinguish between nations with, and nations without, the “common denominator.” In the former case we have in the parties mere “ins” and “outs,” and there is no good reason why individuals should not easily shift their allegiance between the two (or more) groups. The necessary flux of parliamentary government depends on the “disloyalty” of the “shifters,” to whom the choice of parties is a “toss-up.” Under such circumstances we will find citizens who, deeply convinced of the validity of the Acton formula, will vote on principle against any party which has been in power “too long.” This lack of security of tenure, in turn, often fosters graft and corruption, irresponsibility, and a petty bureaucratic mentality. Yet the greatest damage will be done in matters of foreign policy, which will follow a zigzag course depending on the outcome of the elections (cf. pp. 159–160).

This situation assumes a different character in ideologically-divided nations, where we find opposing political philosophies which are fairly often co-extensive with “racial” (ethnic) religious, or social groups. A follower of the “Re-Reformed” Dutch Church will hardly vote for the Catholic State Party, or a Calvinist Magyar intellectual from the Danubian region for the Slovak Catholic People’s Party. In the case of such a shift the accusation of treason would not be unjustified. The final logical deduction from the democratic dogma was made by the great Czechoslovak democracy, which exiled the Sudeten Germans en masse—three and a half million, one quarter of the population—for having voted Nazi in 1938. The Austrian political situation, of which we have spoken above, today seems to be as “frozen” as it was in 1920: all but two of the federated states and the federal government have a Catholic, conservative control with slight royalist and agrarian implications, while Vienna (a state as well as a city) is administered by a party which holds membership in the Second International and traditionally has a strong anti-Christian bias. Whereas the main support of the People’s Party comes from the peasants, the upper middle classes and the clergy, the Social Democrats are primarily represented among the workers and the lower bourgeoisie. Here we cannot expect much flux, and thus the democratic process in Austria lacks not merely the necessary conditions for a “dialogue,” but also the element of change. Only a mass hysteria can change this situation—the number of real converts being too small to affect the ratio of deputies materially.

The dangers besetting democracies and forcing them down the path to tyranny are so numerous that we have to be critical of this form of government, not only on account of its intrinsic weaknesses but also for its evolutionary potentialities. It is also often precisely the claim of the democratic governments that they truly represent the general will which paralyzes the opposition against the ensuing totalitarian development of the state. Monarchs in the past, when tyranically inclined, had to operate under much more difficult circumstances; the constitutional and psychological position of the Christian monarch was always a risky and tenuous one. Democracy, in its mobility and uncertainty, was always an entirely different proposition. Gonzague de Reynold, the brilliant Swiss historian, penned the following severe but unassailable judgment:

The law of democracy is the law of numbers. But every government regulated by the law of numbers becomes a telluric phenomenon subject to its own fatality.

This fatality consists in the fact that a moment will arrive in which it breaks loose from human control, from the lessons of experience, from the influence of reason. . . . This is why democracy, a party individualistic from its beginning, arrived at what one calls today the government of the masses. This is why, after having been the régime of the bourgeoisie, it is becoming the rule of the proletariat. This is why, having been the postulate of liberalism, it becomes that of socialism. . . . This is why, having turned into its own opposite, it preserves of its proper self nothing but the name, nothing but the label.⁴⁶¹

We are fully conscious of the fact that the foregoing chapter so critical of democracy, yet written by a citizen of a European democratic republic, neglects to include a full comparison with other forms of government. The criteria we have examined include such items as reasonableness, morality, ethical pitfalls, human satisfaction, inherent dangers, and evolutionary directions; these should be applied to other simple or composite types of rule. Concerning this fact, we have to say that the present chapter contains only material for such further and necessary analysis.⁴⁶²

In the next chapter we will continue our investigation along these lines, singling out a specific form as a means of comparison. For this purpose we have chosen monarchy, because its historical record is the clearest and longest of all. The fact that no major work has been written about the monarchic idea—either in the U.S.A. or in Europe⁴⁶³—acted on us as an incentive to deal more extensively with this political phenomenon, which has still such a dominating rôle in recorded history—and such a bad name in our myth-ridden age.⁴⁶⁴ And only the future can teach us whether monarchy, to the edification or the detriment of us all, will be able to say to our present-day parliaments and dictators the proud words:

Time is yours, but eternity is mine.⁴⁶⁵

It is obvious that these terms, viz., “republican” and “democratic,” are not related to the respective American parties. Though some Republicans would openly reject the epithet “democratic,” all Democrats are professed republicans. To make the confusion of labels worse the Democrats have in the Northern states a strong egalitarian wing, while their main strength in the South is derived from the former upholders of Slavery.

CHAPTER IV

DEMOCRACY AND MONARCHY

1. THE QUESTION

Mir ist das Volk zur Last:

   Meint es doch diess und das;

Weil es die Fürsten hasst,

   Denkt es, es wäre was.

—GOETHE⁴⁶⁶

The hatred for the monarchical principle has gone so far that people want to have four-part solos.

—S. KIERKEGAARD⁴⁶⁷

IN the last chapter we tried to make a critical approach to democracy. In the course of that analysis we pointed out several shortcomings of this form of government. These alleged defects are to be found either in the non-fulfilment of specific claims made by the supporters of this political doctrine, or in its intrinsic character.

We mentioned, moreover, certain qualities and needs of democratic parliamentary government which severely restrict its application to our civilization; and we have also tried to follow Don Sturzo’s warning not to separate history from philosophy. And, finally, we could not but hint at the various evolutionary processes—some of them due to extraneous forces, others emanating from the very nature of democracy—which tend to transform popular representative governments into the plebiscitarian tyrannies of our days.

Our accusations against democracy can be summarized in the following catalogue:

1.  Democracy—with the exception of direct democracy, practical on a minute scale only—is not “self-government.”

2.  It is emotional, at best irrational, and often anti-rational and anti-intellectual.

3.  It is corrupting in most of its implications and thus morally dangerous.

4.  It is wasteful from the point of view of the “human material.”

5.  It is historically closely bound up with the liberal heresy (“sectarian liberalism”), with the despair of the attainability of objective truth, and with the maladies of militarism, ethnic nationalism and racialism.

6.  It is, because of its egalitarianism, teleologically incompatible with liberty.

7.  It is the last step in the political evolution towards the modern form of tyranny.

8.  It prospers only with the support of strict, semi-totalitarian or totalitarian societies exercising control in the form of “horizontal pressure.”

9.  It is collectivistic and anti-personalistic.

10.  It failed for these and other reasons in Catholic Europe, and flourished in Protestant countries only.

To the full elucidation of the last-mentioned point we are devoting Chapter V of this study.

Still, it is certain that our critical remarks on the failings of democracy, in spite of their severity, have a relative value only. We have already (in the preceding chapter) given our reasons why, deviating from St. Thomas, we consider government to be necessitated by fallen human nature;⁴⁶⁸ it is, therefore, questionable to us whether there can be such a thing as an even theoretically perfect form of government—perfect not in its nature and structure, but in its relation to man. We can imagine a “perfect crutch” which can give the very best service to a man deprived of a lower extremity; but even the “perfect” crutch, being a crutch, will compress the axillary arteries and deprive the hands of their freedom of action. No crutch fully replaces a limb, and even the “perfect crutch” remains, in a sense, a hypothetical notion. (Nevertheless, we do not, for obvious reasons, want to toy with the illogical concept of the “necessary evil.”) Thus the question is whether one crutch can be better than another one—or, continuing our analogies, whether artificial limbs fulfil the purpose better than crutches. We have to ask ourselves whether the shortcomings of democracy are greater or less than those of other forms of government, for example of aristocracy or monarchy.

In the preceding part we have dealt with democracy in its classic sense as well as in its modern, popular formulation, which signifies representative mixed government based on majority rule, legal equality and the liberal tradition (the last an extraneous element). We will omit the comparison with the republic controlled by a hereditary aristocracy or a “closed oligarchy,” although such a form of government is, historically, by no means rare; the British monarchy after 1688, for instance, was in practice nothing but a camouflaged aristocratic republic.

The type of monarchy we want to compare with the democratic state is the hereditary monarchy, operating through an officialdom, but possessing local organs of self-government and opinionating bodies with moral weight. Not the feudal, medieval monarchy, but rather the enlightened absolutism of Maria Theresa should serve us as a means of comparison. We do not consider this to be the best type of monarchy (nor the worst), but rather a “pure” type which, unlike aulic absolutism has as its officially proclaimed aim the weal of the state, the much-discussed “common good.” As Frederick II of Prussia observed, “A prince is the first servant and the first magistrate of the state.”⁴⁶⁹

It is evident that the common good cannot be summed up in a simple formula. It abounds, moreover, with inner conflicts and “choices.” The present, pagan tendency of seeing in the common good the sum total of material advantages for the community, regardless of the sacrifice of immaterial values, has to be thoroughly rejected. Even John Stuart Mill, who had opposed an orthodox utilitarianism, had warning words on this subject.⁴⁷⁰

2. THE ESSENCE OF MONARCHY

Monarchy seems to be the most natural sort of government, for whatever nature produces with more than one head is esteemed monstrous.

—From the Athenian Mercury⁴⁷¹

The difficulty we face at this particular time and place with this analysis lies precisely in the organic character and in the uniformity of the political scene in the United States. Whereas an average Frenchman might easily imagine his country being transformed into an absolutistic monarchy—a plebiscitarian monarchy—a military dictatorship—an anarchic-syndicalistic federation or a communist tyranny, an American (fortunately, we must say) has not the same doubtful advantage. In comparison with revolutionary and deeply divided Europe, plastered with an endless amount of thin historical layers, the American monolith tends towards conservatism. If, by some magic, the present constitution and governmental institutions were removed, the 153,000,000 Americans would be faced by an absolute political void.⁴⁷² Hence, although a constitutional monarchy is only an overnight train trip from New York City, an alien form of government like monarchy, though perhaps intellectually understandable in its functional mechanism, remains in its very nature, essence and character unintelligible to the educated person no less than to the man in the street in the United States.

The unhistorical notion that republics are more “progressive” than the “backward” monarchies already creates an initial prejudice.⁴⁷³ It is conveniently forgotten that Europe returned to republicanism (and to democracy) when her culture and civilization were obviously in decline. The imitation of political forms from the city-states of the pre-Christian era is characteristic of the present dotage of both the Old World and the “New.” American culture and civilization are, needless to say, as old as their European equivalent. A Californian and a Scottish writer are in time equidistant from Shakespeare. The reality of the Roman-Greek background or the Judæo-Christian inheritance is not stronger in Denmark than in Wisconsin. The very absence of “young” historical monuments in the United States—medieval monasteries, Renaissance palaces, Baroque cathedrals—emphasizes the senility on the western side of the ocean, while Europe still enjoys the remnants of these youthful forms. Thus American democracy and republicanism are part and parcel of the dotage of our “White,” one-time Christian civilization.

Democratic forms of government in early tribal stages are very frequent,⁴⁷⁴ and therefore the accusation levelled by R. de Scoraille, S.J., against St. Robert Bellarmine’s thesis of the transference of ruling authority through the people is, historically at least, not justified. Yet whatever the reasons, the fact remains that in the United States any attempted explanation of the monarchical order encounters enormous psychological difficulties;⁴⁷⁵ and Ernst Bruncken was far from wrong when he wrote:

Every teacher of comparative political science will discover what enormous effort it requires to impart a clear notion of European monarchical institutions to even quite mature students. A Napoleonic tyranny, a dictatorship—this is easily within the realm of their comprehension. But a legitimate monarchy seems to the American a simple absurdity, and he cannot understand how otherwise quite intelligent people can have faith in such a thing.⁴⁷⁶

This is perhaps surprising when we remember (as Lieber points out⁴⁷⁷) that the Declaration of Independence in no way attacks the institution of monarchy, but merely disqualifies George III for his high office. But to the teacher of history this attitude is a serious handicap, because the whole growth of our Christian civilization is politically interwoven with the institution of monarchy. We have thus immediately to ask ourselves whether this symbiosis—not always a peaceful and harmonious one, but a symbiosis nevertheless—was purely accidental or had some deeper, inner reason. It is obvious that there is theologically no coactive connection between Christianity (or Catholicism) and any particular form of government. Neither does the popular antithesis of “government by persons” and “government by law” enter our argument. It must not be forgotten that the Christian European monarchy was through most of its history of a constitutional pattern, which circumscribed and limited the ruler’s sphere of action by the law of God and the law of the land.⁴⁷⁸

Some of the strength of the monarchical idea in Europe was derived from the circumstance that it stood for an institution which was at the same time social and political, and that it lent itself to an organic perpetuation. Francis Joseph, once asked in a moment of candour by Theodore Roosevelt what he considered to be the rôle of a monarch in the present day and age, replied: “To protect my nations from their governments!” Yet even greater importance has to be attributed to the fact that it fitted harmoniously into the general cultural picture.

To the cultural anthropologist monarchy is a patriarchal institution.⁴⁷⁹ Its underlying ideology is thus “familistic.”⁴⁸⁰ The ideal monarch is a father⁴⁸¹—a concept expressed in the symbolic pictorial representation of kings and emperors. The king of the playing-cards, or of the illustrations in children’s stories, is usually a bearded, middle-aged or old man with eyes expressing a mixture of benevolence, jollity and occasional severity. He appears to be neither too young nor too smart—and he is decidedly not a superman.⁴⁸² He exudes authority, but he nevertheless gives the impression that shrewder subjects could get the better of him.

Now, a father in the narrower sense is a creator, a procreator with a subsequent evanescent authority; a father in a wider sense is a man with full responsibility over minors, and a position of respect, seniority and leadership in relation to mature persons. This relation is intimate, emotional and affectionate. There is a mutual interest which is partly personal and partly “generational,” i.e., directed towards the ruler’s family, and thus transferable to the heir. Baruch Spinoza thought that monarchy is a form of government in which subjects are treated like children, whereas tyrants treat them like slaves. Yet in a traditional monarchy the relationship between king and subject is that of a middle-aged father and his mature son, not that of a young father and an infant. In a similar way Dante saw (De monarchia, iii, 16) in the Holy Roman Emperor a “first-born son of the Pope,” who owes him reverence, but not secular obedience.⁴⁸³

The Catholic world, essentially patriarchal in nature, had a variety of fathers: not only physical fathers and kings, but also patres (confessors, Beichtväter, spiritual fathers),⁴⁸⁴ and—in Rome—a Holy Father. Above them was the Father in Heaven, Creator as well as Regent.⁴⁸⁵ The view has been expressed that the psychological influence of monotheistic Christianity—in its Catholic form—greatly contributed to the strengthening of the monarchical idea in Japan, and helped it to secure its final victory in the nineteenth century over the oligarchic Shōgunate.⁴⁸⁶ Abel Bonnard in Les modérés wrote quite rightly about the kings: “The king was the father of his people, only because every father was king in his family.”⁴⁸⁷ Vladimir Solovyov, the great prophet and philosopher, rightly saw in the principle of fatherhood the basis of a Catholic order, though in his concept of the paternité permanente he fully subordinated the monarch to the Pope, thus pointing to a “generational hierarchy.”⁴⁸⁸ To St. Robert Bellarmine also the inner relationship between fatherhood and the patriarchal principle was clear;⁴⁸⁹ whence his preference for a pure monarchy over a pure democracy,⁴⁹⁰ though his real enthusiasm was for a composite type of government.

Now we have to look at political institutions from the point of view of cultural harmony. Since the patriarchal relationship dominates in the theological, ecclesiastic and biological sphere, it is psychologically not easy to organize political life along egalitarian and “numeralistic” lines. We are familiar with the traditional division between private, political and ecclesiastical society; but the fact remains that man has a certain unity without which a well-rounded, balanced personality cannot be imagined. Thus the breaking up of the pattern of existence in our atomistic age has certainly not fostered the development of true personality.⁴⁹¹

Yet although the patriarchal idea in recent times has been greatly weakened, the father-son relationship is and remains an ineradicable element in the psychological structure of societies. Freud has tried to explain all relationships within the family by sexual motives, but his pansexualism suffers from basic rational defects repeatedly confusing causes and effects, means and ends; these various shortcomings have been criticized particularly by such psychologists as C. G. Jung, R. Allers, R. Wahle, and S. Behn.⁴⁹² All this does not obviate the fact that there is in our psyche the active and passive desire for “fatherhood.” After all, the biological sphere of our existence presents us with an example which has its deeper analogies in theology, society and politics. It is natural to have reverence and affection for one’s father. It is natural to have a desire for being or becoming a father. It is also natural to have a fatherly and benevolent interest in those who are, for some reason or other, our charges. And although we all, more or less, crave recognition, like to be esteemed or listened to, we also have a tendency to follow others whose superior qualities we readily recognize or whom we consider to have been placed by a generally accepted custom in a position of command and leadership. Our soul is not a windowless monad, but it rejoices in loving command and proud service. (It is only the inferior man who indulges in arrogant supremacy and servile inferiority—the stigma of false hierarchies.)

Neither does man according to his nature hanker after a sterile scepticism; he has a desire for belief. Man wants to believe not only in truths and deities,⁴⁹³ but also—with reason, measure and clarity—in persons. The family is, in a sense, a “fideistic” institution; its members have to believe in each other. Mater semper certa est—“one can always speak with legal certainty of the mother” was a principle of Roman law; but the father-son relationship in the biological order rests on faith in a woman’s word. And a tempered, non-hysterical belief is also necessary in state and society. A sneering, contemptuous attitude, pregnant with suspicion and animosities, is neither natural nor constructive. It is, moreover, evident that sound hierarchies (without which Church, state and society are unimaginable) can only be based on affection and reason. Joseph de Maistre was correct when he said that “no sovereign power is strong enough to govern several millions of men unless it is aided by religion or slavery, or both.”⁴⁹⁴ We doubt that reason alone would be a sufficient ligament for a hierarchical or any other order; human nature demands the inclusion of emotional elements, and there is no doubt that among these love is the noblest and most constructive one. There is also an inner (Augustinian) harmony between love and reason. Love, as we have already observed (see above, p. 116), can make blind, but it can also open eyes.

As soon as we leave the safer ground of personal relationships built on reason and affection, and enter the realm of collective emotions (of a “fraternal” rather than a patriarchal order) we are already on dangerous ground. Animalism, anti-rationalism and egoism—properly camouflaged as “nostrism” (the ego is always included in the nos)⁴⁹⁵—often reign here supreme. It is true that the general or personal enthusiasm for the monarch can, in its extreme, assume idolatrous forms; collective self-worship, on the other hand—which is the psychological basis of democracy, the real source of nationalism, class pride and racialism—is already dangerous in its initial stages.⁴⁹⁶

The whole history of the rise of European civilization and culture is written in terms of the familistic affection for rulers, an attachment which has lasted in some countries right into the twentieth century. The Hungarian noblemen who shouted, after Maria Theresa’s passionate plea for help, Moriamur pro rege nostro, Maria Theresia!—“Let us die for our king, Maria Theresa”—(and meant it) have their successors in the citizens of Brussels who wept openly in the streets in September 1935 at the news that their Queen had died in an accident.*

But the good monarchs, it must be admitted, never “die”; Charlemagne, according to legend, still resides in the Untersberg; Frederick Barbarossa lives on in the Kyffhäuser and Arthur in Avalon, and Emperor Joseph II still keeps on supporting the poor. The most miraculous of all is undoubtedly Sebastião of Portugal, the rei encuberto, who fell in the battle of Alcazarquivir in 1579, but was expected by his people to return on Good Friday in 1808.⁴⁹⁷ These great loyalties, affections and affinities may seem to be naïve; but the emotional aura surrounding the dynasty in a monarchical nation is still potentially saturated with Christian values—certainly more so than the hustle and bustle of a presidential election campaign, or the mass hysteria enveloping a totalitarian “nostrist” Leader.

The monarchs, it must also be kept in mind, were, just like the dynasties, part of their countries—not of their nations. In old plays the king of France is simply “France” and the monarch of Spain is “Spain.” But an Empereur des Français is merely a crowned plebiscitarian dictator. His star, like that of a president, lasts only as long as his luck. The real monarch, on the other hand, belongs to the “scenery,” just like the mountains, rivers or cathedrals. He cannot logically be a nationalist or a racialist,⁴⁹⁸ since his ancestors are mainly aliens; his wife, his mother, his in-laws, his grandchildren and grandparents are mostly foreigners.⁴⁹⁹ He is a ruler and not a leader; a person thoroughly different from the nation, and thus not its “embodiment” or personification. Opposed to the monolithic principle of totalitarianism, monarchy stands for differentiation, not “identity.”

Republicanism and democracy owe their rise in Europe to the fausse idée claire of “self-rule,” but it is, nevertheless, highly significant that all modern republics—unlike their forerunners in antiquity—have the pseudo-monarchic institution of the presidency,⁵⁰⁰ even though the” president “of the Swiss Confederacy is only a chairman. Thus the modern republic is unable to deny its historical monarchic background.

Still, the fact remains that it took a long time until the familistic principle found expression in the political sphere. Monarchy was to Disraeli an institution of the highest evolutionary development. He said in his Coningsby (Book V, Chapter viii): “The tendency of an advanced civilization is in truth monarchy. Monarchy is indeed a government which requires a high degree of civilization. . . . An educated nation recoils from the imperfect vicariate of what is called a representative government.”

Donoso Cortés had very similar notions,⁵⁰¹ and even Thomas Jefferson must have leaned to the conviction that there is something essentially immature about democracy.⁵⁰² And the very strength of the monarchical creed among intellectuals is documented by the fact that twenty-seven out of forty “immortals” of the Académie française belonged as late as 1900 to various royalist groups.⁵⁰³ Although royalism—losing in active historical memory ever since—has also yielded ground among our thinkers, this decline has not favoured the democratic dogma.

3. THE CARICATURE OF MONARCHY

Je suis né le vingt-sept septembre mil neuf cent trois, Sans Dieu sans maître sans roi ET SANS DROITS.

—E. L. T. MESENS, Troisième front (London, 1944)

If we incline to too much democracy, we shall soon shoot into monarchy.

—ALEXANDER HAMILTON⁵⁰⁴

The transition of democratic republics and parliamentary monarchies into full-fledged tyrannies and dictatorships has a variety of aspects. Some of them are of a moral nature, especially if we take the negative moral qualities of the masses, as such, into consideration;⁵⁰⁵ others are of a technical or constitutional character, and these we have discussed in Chapter III of our study (see above, pp. 122–127). De Tocqueville, Plato, D. Cortés, Constant, Burckhardt, De Reynold, Dawson, Röpke, Spengler and others have well described this process, which is a concomitant of ageing democracy and perhaps its “natural” form of death. To C. L. von Haller the final “choice” of a democracy was merely between an “inner” and a foreign military conqueror.⁵⁰⁶ Not only have we, in recent decades, seen democracies saved from total annihilation merely by a favourable geographic location (Britain, the United States), but it has also been demonstrated to us that the slowness of democratic constitutional machinery results in grave diplomatic and political defeats. (Contrast Hitler’s week-end invasions and crises.) With the disappearance of distances the fatal weaknesses of “democratic procedure” will become fully manifest.

But modern dictatorships, while democratic in the most classic sense of the term, are also monarchic from a structural as well as from a psychological point of view. Yet while they are the fulfilment of classic democracy, they are the caricature of traditional monarchy which, in Europe, was always Christian (it is difficult to say whether a pagan monarchy or a pagan democracy would be more oppressive; A. de Gasparin⁵⁰⁷ was more afraid of the latter), supra-national, non-racial and familistic. The suspicion that “monarchy” would return in one way or another—openly, in disguise or in distortion, as Cæsarism, royalist restoration or straight tyranny—occupied not only historians but also psychologists.

Very revealing in this connection is the lecture delivered in 1919 by the Viennese Freudian psychoanalyst Dr. Paul Federn, in which he dealt intelligently with the reasons for the undeveloped “father complex” in the United States. His paper contains a survey of the relationship between the concept of fatherhood and the various political, sociological and religious concepts of Western society. The author admitted that the grave setback suffered by the patriarchal principle on account of the political revolutions in 1917 and 1918 was only incompletely repeated in the other spheres of human relations. He closed his lecture with the following remarks:

The growth of a new political order [i.e., the democratic republic] is indeed struggling with the greatest psychological handicaps. The patriarchal tendency is inherited and, as I have explained before, intimately connected with all personal ties, such as our relationships to the mother, the wife, the relatives, the paternal friends, occupation, property and labour, religion and ideology. . . .

. . . finally, even among those who have now emancipated themselves from the social father-son relationship, the basic attraction to it nevertheless remains so strong that they merely wait for the appearance of a new, similar person who corresponds to their father-ideal, and with whom they can enter into a new father-son relationship. This is also the reason why after the fall of monarchies republics have yielded with great regularity to the rule of a popular leader. . . .

. . . the father-son motif has suffered a very grave defeat. Yet on account of family education, and as an inherited sentiment, it is deeply anchored in the hearts of mankind, and will probably this time too prevent the establishment of a completely “fatherless” society.⁵⁰⁸

And indeed, the post-monarchial nations, with the paternal and patriarchal principle still continuing strong in the biological, religious and social sphere, were weak through their lack of homogeneity and the absence of an all-pervading principle, which alone gives nation-wide cohesion and historic consciousness. The personal dictatorship of party leaders was a substitute for the royal institution. To Guglielmo Ferrero, Mussolini was merely a successor of Giolitti, Depretis and Crispi—a mere party man and not a Cæsar.⁵⁰⁹ There is in Europe also the institution of the political “grand old man” or “elder statesman” which plays a much greater role on the Continent (and in Asia) than in the English-speaking world. One has only to remember men like the brothers Brătianu, Professor Iorga, Nikola Pašic, Vladimir Maček, Father Hlinka, Eleutheros Venizelos, Georges Clemenceau, Józef Pilsudski, Stambulov, Count Albert Apponyi, Paul von Hindenburg, Aristide Briand, etc. The “grand old men” are, naturally, rarely dismissed but die in harness. Fatherhood is a fact; it cannot be abolished. Such deeply monarchical and patriarchal states as Portugal, Spain, Germany, Austria, Russia, France and Hungary have seen the return of one-man rule, though often in a democratized (i.e., plebiscitarian and totalitarian) version.⁵¹⁰ The dictators are, by and large, monarchs minus their essential attributes—interrelationship, lack of marital ties within the nation, inheritance of office, absence of vested interests in specific classes, training for the profession.

If the dictatorship is not of a definitely military pattern, as in the Iberian peninsula⁵¹¹ and in France of yesterday (and tomorrow?), the dictator is necessarily of “lowly origin”—an ex-seminarian and son of a cobbler, a post-card painter, a bricklayer, a mechanic.⁵¹² And he not only embodies the masses, but he also appeals to the father-son motif. The victorious party, whose leader he is, endeavours to bring the whole nation under the same ideological denominator; while an additional uniformity of class, race or ethnic nationality, enforced by terror, assassination or deportation, tries desperately to establish a general feeling of fraternity based on identity. The “nation of (identical) brothers” is then provided with the father-leader, who promises to be more democratic, and a better—because more efficient—provider than the father-ruler of old. We have seen the papa-leader in a grey military overcoat in the Red Square smiling under his cosy walrus moustache, we have seen him in an equally grey (feldgrau) uniform patting the cheeks of little, blonde girls with pigtails; we have seen him harvesting with a broad grin among fascist youngsters, or exposing a hairy chest in the wintry sun of Sestrières. The greyness, as the colour of self-effacement and modesty, is of deeper, symbolic value. It says: “I am only your leader. I am not better than you and you could, quite easily, be in my place.” (The Marshals, like Goring and Tito, dressed in fancy uniforms and plastered with decorations, do not fit into this pattern.⁵¹³) Unmarried or keeping their humdrum wives carefully in the background,⁵¹⁴ these “papa-leaders” have given the impression of being in love solely with their nation or their motherland (rodina).⁵¹⁵

Of Solovyov’s “permanent paternity” the dictators are mere caricatures, though they make full use of the ineradicable human desire for its realization. The limitations of the Christian law are absent. And behind the true-hearted, ingenuous eyes of the Führer, the warm twinkle of the vozhd’, and the ironically benevolent gaze of the duce, lurk the horrors of the concentration camps, the guillotines, the “Chinese death” and the mass graves of nameless victims. Yet it seems that the nations in spite of all want to pay the price for the privilege of having a synthetic father. Naturam expellas furca tamen usque recurret. After a democratic interlude the “monarchy” returns with a vengeance, returns by the back door, camouflaged, masked and diabolically perverted—a blood-curdling metamorphosis we know only from nightmares or surrealist films. The reassertion of the natural father-urge does not result in the restitution of the paternal kingdom but in the rise of the Terrifying Father, a Krónos devouring his own children, who are paralyzed by his magnetic glare like rabbits facing a boa constrictor. Indeed, in the words of E. Jünger, “decayed altars are inhabited by demons.” Still, we have to remember that the rise of the pitiless mob-masters would have been impossible without the moral decay of a slavish citizenry.⁵¹⁶

According to Plato, the transition from democracy to tyranny is a natural and almost unavoidable process. Polybius had identical, and Aristotle similar concepts. Yet the consummation of this development would be the slow transformation of personal tyranny into monarchy. If the regime of the tyrant becomes consolidated, restrictive measures can be relaxed in proportion as his rule gains security and even a semblance of “legitimacy” (a purely psychological legitimacy, of course—compare, for example, the constitutional reform enacted by Napoleon III in 1869). Finally, a general, inner acceptance beckons; plebiscitarian Cæsarism develops into monarchy.⁵¹⁷ What we then witness, over a longer period of time, is primarily an exchange of élites (or dynasties).⁵¹⁸

But, fortunately or unfortunately, this evolution, so frequent in the remote past, seems today out of the question. Without a completely clear slate it could hardly be imagined, though a greater optimism was manifested by C. B. Anderley (Lord Norton), who hoped for an easy shortcut through a temporary “Cromwellian” dictatorship.⁵¹⁹ The Bonapartes, who started out as plebiscitarian dictators, achieved—to use G. Ferrero’s terminology—nothing but quasi-legitimacy. Their experiment failed. Achmed Zogu’s attempt, which had better chances, was interrupted by a foreign invasion.

The causes of this modern inability to make a peaceful transformation (Prévost-Paradol even foresaw a period of anarchy before the final establishment of tyranny⁵²⁰) are manifold, and we have to seek them in the popularity of democratic and pseudo-democratic trappings, so significant for the totalitarian dictatorships; we have to seek them in the general weakening of the familistic principle and, last but not least, in the continued existence of legitimate royal and imperial families in exile, which acts as a powerful psychological obstacle. A coronation of either Hitler or Mussolini would have covered these dictators with ridicule, and their popularity would have been obliterated immediately.

In the U.S.S.R., where the last vestiges of a public opinion have been eliminated, the situation is, theoretically at least, different. Yet the perpetuation of personal tyranny in the democratic guise involves sanguinary struggles among eligible successors—purges, assassinations, conspiracies, trials. The “royalization” of the Leaders certainly lacks today its psychological props.

The father-son motif in European politics is still little understood in the U.S. Not so long ago a Catholic weekly published⁵²¹ a letter from a reader in Texas who openly declared his preference for dictatorial leaders (like Hitler and Stalin) over monarchs—an attitude which, from a demo-republican point of view, is entirely logical. The notions of monarchy in the United States are still largely coloured by Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court and Soglow’s “Little King,” plus the menacing moustache of the Kaiser—the legend of whose war guilt has, by the way, been thoroughly exploded.⁵²²

This does not mean that America is insensitive to the symbol of paternity. The picture of Uncle Sam, a thin, early-nineteenth-century New Englander, is possibly motivated by the father-image; paternal in nature also are the other two guiding groups, the Pilgrim Fathers and the Founding Fathers. Yet in addition to these we find the feminine symbol of Liberty with the raised torch, and the dazzling Madame Columbia. Looking to other democracies, Marianne is, needless to say, a more effective symbol than Britannia (John Bull is her real equivalent), and not only the French but also the Swiss republican symbol—Helvetia—is feminine. Of course, it can be argued that republics claiming rule by law instead of rule by men have to derive their inner strength from abstractions expressed in symbols. But these are always of a feminine nature. The fraternal and matriarchal elements, so strong in all democratic civilizations, far outweigh the patriarchal factor. In masses there is, moreover, a strongly feminine essence, manifesting itself in irrationality and the supremacy of emotions over reason.⁵²³ Although psychologists have shown great interest in the curious behaviour and mentality of crowds, which so frequently seem bereft of the finest human qualities,⁵²⁴ philosophers have displayed considerable reluctance to face this important issue of our collectivistic age.

Though we have seen self-styled “personalists” acclaiming democracy enthusiastically, we doubt whether democracy with its horizontalism (and anti-verticalism), its necessary social controls and pressures, its operation with crowds, masses and parties, can lead us to a rebirth of personal values. Is a vertical pressure worse than a horizontal one—a governmental persecution, other things being equal, a lesser evil than social wrath? The simplest answer to this problem would be an empirical one. We have only to ask a prospective inmate of a jail whether he would prefer a prison with hostile warders to one with hostile fellow prisoners. We think that he would.

All these problems are, at the present moment, of greater importance for the Continent than for America. It seems that kings, queens (as depositaries of male lines), dictators and “strong men” are going to rule the Continental scene forever. Britain also must understand this hard fact, and not shirk this issue in spite of its psychological remoteness and strangeness. The question which truly liberal nations have to ask themselves is simply this: “In any given country, what form of government offers the relatively best guarantee for the preservation of a reasonable maximum of individual freedom?” Noel Busch wrote quite aptly, in an article about Queen Wilhelmina published by Life, about “that reverence which Europeans, when deprived of royalties, are likely to direct toward dictators or mere politicians.” The attitude of the grocer in Little Lord Fauntleroy towards royalty is therefore not necessarily conducive to liberty in the Old World.

4. MONARCHY COMPARED WITH DEMOCRACY

The absolute ruler may be a Nero, but he is sometimes Titus or Marcus Aurelius; the people is often Nero, and never Marcus Aurelius.

—RlVAROL

We have to preface this section with the observation that the individual (as individual, not as person) is, in the historicopolitical perspective, practically powerless. We have said before that the democratic principle of “one man, one vote,” viewed against a background of voting masses numbering several millions, only serves to demonstrate the pitiful helplessness of the inarticulate individual, who functions at the polls as the smallest indivisible arithmetical (and not always algebraic) unit. He acts in total anonymity, secrecy and legal irresponsibility.

The articulate (and “original”) person, on the other hand, has as great or small a chance to exercise his political influence under either form of government. The effective influence of such men as Leibniz and Voltaire, Hobbes, Stahl or Wagner on monarchs was at least as great as the persuasive influence of other thinkers or writers on the political masses. Yet since the educational standards of monarchic rulers are usually above average, the persuasive efforts of intellectuals, for better or worse, have greater chances in a royal framework. One would therefore expect in a democratic society to see the thinker depreciated on account of his ineffectuality. Who can doubt that the Swiss nation is far less affected by the writings of Burckhardt, De Reynold, Amiel or Vinet than was French eighteenth-century aristocracy by the philosophes?⁵²⁵

And now to the points of comparison.

1. Monarchy is by its nature dissociated from party rule. Only in the “constitutional” (i.e., parliamentary) monarchy are royalist parties imaginable; yet in a sound, organic monarchy all parties accept the common monarchic denominator, and the opposition is thus “His Majesty’s Most Loyal Opposition.”

Democracy is by nature party rule. The President (or Prime Minister) is a “party man.” He lacks originally—and often permanently—general backing.

2. The monarch is the political and social head of the nation. The President of the United States, on the other hand, is decidedly not a “social” leader, even though his wife figures—unofficially—as the “first lady.” The monarch can, unlike a republican leader, rule not only through the mechanism of the laws but also though his prestige—an “endogene” force.

3. Even a monarch of mediocre talents and natural gifts has the advantage of having received an education for his profession.⁵²⁶ A democratic leader can only have the hasty technical training of those with a “late vocation,” and in most cases he is nothing but a dilettante (see below, point 25),⁵²⁷ Yet this harmonizes well with the general tenor of democracy, whose raison d’etre is not truth,⁵²⁸ efficacy, reason, study, and reflection, but volition pure and simple. Some apologists of democracy, in order to arrive at an intellectual justification of their theory, propose an enormous increase in general education which will enable all citizens to judge the important issues of the day. Yet the goals they set can only be reached by small fractions of highly gifted individuals. Caught between the Charybdis of intellectual qualifications for the franchise (which are plainly incompatible with very elementary democratic principles) and the Scylla of an orgy of emotional irrationalism, they steer their course towards the noble goal of education and “brains” for all. What they do not take into consideration is the hard fact of human imperfection, of original sin.⁵²⁹

4. The education which the ideal monarch can enjoy is not only intellectual, but also moral and spiritual. The democratic leader coming into power is always “unprepared.” It is the sudden or quick rise (especially if it is from obscurity) to fame and authority which turns the mind and upsets the balance of the careerist in a democracy. This corruption through power, naturally, is worse in a plebiscitarian dictatorship, where popularity combined with autocracy and lack of religious humility show the most devastating results. Grimmelshausen wrote:

Es ist kein Schwerdt, das schärffer schiert,
Als wann ein Baur zum Herren wird,

—“There is no sword which cuts sharper than when a peasant becomes a master.”⁵³⁰ On the other hand, the continuous preparation for the exercise of power which, with a king, begins practically at the cradle, usually prevents this loss of all sense of proportion. This is why we have to accept the famous usually prevents this loss (“Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely”) with many reservations. His theory smacks of environmental determinism, and would make the papacy permanently the most corrupt power in the world. If we interpret Acton’s thesis as relating to the Vatican’s secular power it is equally erroneous; during the height of the papacy’s political prestige, corruption there had not been prevalent or conspicuous.

5. Kingship was not only an office with religious implications (the coronation of a Catholic ruler is a sacramental),⁵³¹ but the whole traditional Christian monarchy was deeply imbued with a religious spirit. Kierkegaard, who disliked Protestantism and hated democracy, insisted that true royalists lean toward Catholicism.⁵³² The respect for the human person and the rights of the subjects were strongly emphasized in the education of a ruler; this has been stressed by every author writing tracts for the education of princes—Bossuet, Fénelon, Bolingbroke, etc.⁵³³ The foot-washing ceremony to which Catholic rulers were obliged on Maundy Thursday could not fail to leave a deep impression in the minds of princes and rulers alike. After the Reformation the King of England could, naturally, not be subjected to such a degrading ceremony, and distributed silver pennies instead.⁵³⁴

6. The ruling families—all intermarried and forming a single breed—had biologically a better qualification for their profession than the average man. It seems to be a proven fact that there is a noticeable difference in the I.Q.’s of different social classes, and heredity rather than environment here plays the determining rôle.⁵³⁵ There can be no doubt that the intermarriage of those endowed with a superior talent for specific tasks results in a breed with an aptitude above normal; the biological theory that acquired characteristics cannot be inherited is today strongly under fire.⁵³⁶ This implies no intrinsic racial superiority, but merely a hereditary tendency strengthened through centuries of breeding and inbreeding. (It should be noted that inbreeding is not in itself evil; it merely accentuates the qualities inherent in common ancestors.) Monarchs and royal princes of extraordinary intelligence or genius abound in history. Considering only those who lived since 1840 we could mention Archduke John of Austria, Archduke Francis Ferdinand, Alexander II of Russia, King Edward VII, King Ferdinand of Bulgaria, Queen Maria Christina of Spain, King Leopold I (and II) of the Belgians, Prince Consort Albert, and Dom Pedro II of Brazil. Another list might be made of men and women who were no more—but no less—than hard-working, first-rate civil servants like Queen Victoria, Francis Joseph, Carol I, Queen Wilhelmina, King Gustav V, King Albert of the Belgians and so on.

7. Monarchy in the Christian world is an international institution.⁵³⁷ As long as it was a living force the wars between political units were of a relative and restricted nature—Kabinettskriege, as the Germans say. Between 1100 and 1866 A.D. no Christian kingdom was eliminated permanently from the map. (Naturally we exclude from consideration the Napoleonic period, and the casualties among the Italian republics, and the Rzeczpospolita Polska, the “Polish Commonwealth “under an elected King who was—to the greatest misfortune of the country—“nobody’s” relative.) No monarch was thoroughly dispossessed, and the price to be paid for military defeat was merely a city, a county, a province. After the battle of Solferino the Emperor Francis Joseph said simply: “I have lost a battle and I pay with a province.” He was not progressive enough to believe in “unconditional surrender” and in the guerre aux allures déchaînées—nor did Napoleon III.⁵³⁸ Conscription was an invention of the French Revolution, and so were wars on a nation-wide basis with great collective passions.⁵³⁹

The true nature of these “cabinet wars”—which, to a limited extent, still coloured the Napoleonic Wars—can clearly be seen in the description of Wintzingerode’s capture, a scene brilliantly depicted by Caulaincourt in his memoirs.⁵⁴⁰ Hardly credible also, from our modern point of view, is the scene of the departure of Count Hübner, who as Austrian ambassador was forced to leave Paris at the outbreak of the hostilities in 1859. Hübner himself tells us how the Marquis de Pimodan, a former colonel in the Austrian army, came to the station to say good-bye to the members of the departing embassy. “He wore the white Austrian uniform,” writes Hübner, “and nobody objected.”⁵⁴¹ A French citizen in a German uniform at the Gare de l’Est in Paris in the early days of August, 1914, would certainly have been mobbed. The spirit of non-progressive, unenlightened but forgiving reaction was even stronger at the beginning of the last century, when Frederick William III, King of Prussia, returning from the Napoleonic Wars, was accorded a much too triumphal reception, and immediately told the Lord Mayor of Berlin:

“The reception festivities are exquisitely arranged, and I honour them as expressions of our loyalty; but they are much too pompous. I am displeased by the accumulation of trophies, cannons and banners in front of the armoury and directly opposite my lodgings.

One does not have to and, indeed, one must never jeer at the vanquished enemy. This is despicable boasting, and don’t let us continue, in our good luck, the old arrogance which brought us nothing but misery. It is opposed to good manners to hurt the feelings of peoples with whom one has just concluded peace by frivolously exhibiting cannons and banners. . . . The magnificent victory columns, the showy trophies in the windows of the arsenal must be removed. Tomorrow’s celebrations should be a feast of pious gratitude and humility before God. It is He who has done great things for Prussia; to Him alone all honour is due.”⁵⁴²

This attitude compares very favourably with the mentality of the various war- and peace-criminals of all camps in the last forty years. This nefarious and arrogant mob was, from the point of view of a long-suffering humanity, on an even lower level than Napoleon, who himself once distinctly let the cat out of the bag when he said: “I am a child of the Revolution, an offspring of the people. I shall not tolerate being insulted like a king!”⁵⁴³

8. Monarchs, unlike democratic leaders, are ethnically “mixed.” They are usually of foreign origin. Their relatives are foreigners. Narrow limits are set to their (ethnic) nationalism—if they ever develop it. (See Notes 498 and 499.) Democracy and nationalism, on the other hand, are closely related and interdependent.⁵⁴⁴

9. Monarchy is also interracial. Racialism is possible only with the emphasis on the “people” (race, Volk, narod). Twentieth-century racialism desires “nobility for the majority.” Not only have the European monarchs common ancestors like Charlemagne and St. Elizabeth—who belong to the Christian European orbit—but also Semites like Mohammed⁵⁴⁵ or the Jew Pierleone, brother of the Counter-Pope Anaclet II. The “mother-line” of Maria Theresa goes back to Polovtsian (i.e., Tartar) chieftains, and William II counted Genghiz Khan among his ancestors. Frederick II (the “Great”) was overwhelmingly of French “blood.”⁵⁴⁶

10. The monarchic principle is thus, as St. Thomas characterized it in his De regimine principum, a uniting, not a dividing principle.—Every election, on the other hand, is a solemn manifestation of division.

11. Neither is a sound monarchy oligarchical, as democracy is by necessity, and aristocracy by nature.⁵⁴⁷

12. Due to its inherent patriarchalism, monarchy fits organically into the ecclesiastic and familistic pattern of a Christian society. (Compare the teaching of Pope Leo XIII: “Likewise the powers of fathers of families preserves expressly a certain image and form of the authority which is in God, from which ‘all paternity in heaven and earth receives its name’—Eph. 3. 15.”)⁵⁴⁸ The relationship between the king as “the father of the fatherland”⁵⁴⁹ and the people is one of mutual love.—Yet the bourgeois, as Werner Sombart points out, is not “erotic.”⁵⁵⁰ Vigilance and suspicion towards the magistrate are thus the true “republican virtues.”

13. Monarchy more than any other form of government qualifies as “organic government,” i.e., a government which is “legitimate,” in the sense in which G. Ferrero uses this term, and “ideational” according to P. Sorokin’s terminology (see Note 442). The “organic” character was well described by the lines of Kipling:

“Ancient rights unnoticed
  As the breath we draw.”

Just because monarchy stresses the element of continuity, affection and religion, it will more easily assume an “organic” status than any other governmental variety.

14. The position of monarchs has, for several reasons, not been unfavourable to their moral and spiritual development. The responsible monarch (like the responsible Christian statesman) has far more often to face decisions encompassing the most cruel alternatives than the man in the street. The choice is only too frequently between Machiavellian diabolism or utter renunciation. At the same time the very issues in their complexity are seductively ambiguous, and demand constant examination of conscience. The bourgeois avoidance of good and evil is nevertheless almost impossible.⁵⁵¹ The calendar of saints shows that royalty has contributed more than any other lay estate to the ranks of those who have been accorded the honour of the altars—though it must be admitted that many of them were canonized before this procedure was made so rigorously severe. Nevertheless, the number of monarchs who have taken the advice of St. Robert Bellarmine (De officio principis, cap. xxii) to carry their sceptre like a cross is not small. Among the rulers in the last hundred and fifty years who have, earlier or later in life, and in the hour of death, given an impressive example of manliness and religious devotion, one should mention Frederick William III, Charles I of Austria, Alexander I⁵⁵² and Nicholas II of Russia, King Albert of the Belgians, King Christian X of Denmark, Louis XVI⁵⁵³ and King George I of Greece. Among their female counterparts one should mention Queen Louise of Prussia,Queen Astrid of the Belgians, and Queen Maria Christina of Spain.

15. Since monarchy is “rule from above” and thus does not have to exercise a horizontal pressure, it is by its nature more liberal than democracy.⁵⁵⁴ Just because monarchs cannot constantly refer to mandates received from the people, their radius of action is psychologically more limited than that of democratic leaders. Even a Louis XIV would probably have been slain twenty-four hours after proclaiming prohibition, and George III might have been quartered by the staunchest Tories had he dared to impose laws which are promulgated as a matter of routine by modern parliaments.⁵⁵⁵

16. Since, in a monarchy, the societal enforcement of the “common framework of reference” in the ideological sphere is not necessary, the controlling forces of society can be relaxed. Freedom of opinion and self-expression thus becomes more likely⁵⁵⁶ and, if granted, it will not be as destructive as in a purely parliamentary state (see above, pp. 123–125). There is, for instance, little doubt that the professors (and the students) of the University of Vienna enjoyed greater liberties under Francis Joseph than, let us say, their colleagues do at present in the average American university or college.

17. The security and perpetuity of tenure enjoyed by monarchs makes them less exposed to “graft,” bribery or theft.⁵⁵⁷ It can be argued that the monarchs who squandered money most lavishly still spent it almost exclusively among their own subjects, and became largely responsible for the amassing of great art treasures and architectural monuments which were either made accessible to the public or were shared with the citizenry. The corruption of democratic republics, however, left few lasting values; the financial scandals of the French Third Republic bequeathed no Versailles and no Louvre to the nation; whereas the picture galleries left by the imperial dynasty of Russia were greatly valued by the Soviets, and when the Germans destroyed Peterhof and Oranienbaum there was, curiously enough, a violent outcry in the Soviet press. Proudhon said rightly: “Democracy is more expensive than monarchy; it is incompatible with liberty.”⁵⁵⁸

18. A monarchy, under ordinary circumstances, is not plutocratic. Bismarck’s persecution of the Socialists was the main point of disagreement between himself and William II.⁵⁵⁹ The rule of money has always been more pronounced in democratic or oligarchic republics. Hence Proudhon’s remark: “Money, always money, that is the nerve of democracy.”⁵⁶⁰ The transition from the truly royal Stuart monarchy in England to the camouflaged republic, with a plutocratic and oligarchic character, under the Hanoverians, is the very keynote of Hilaire Belloc’s interpretation of modern English history.

19. Neither is there any need for flattering large parts of the population. Flattering the majority is the basic technique and art of governing political parties, as well as plebiscitarian tyrannies.

20. The monarch, on the other hand, is potentially the protector of minorities—especially the small, powerless and uninfluential minorities—just because he is “everybody’s monarch.” The very concept of a “minority” is non-monarchial and democratic. The constant counting and comparing of numbers characterizes all egalitarian-parliamentary régimes. The protective rôle of kingship is clearly seen in the oath of the Holy Roman Emperor.⁵⁶¹ In democratic republics, on the other hand, we have always seen tiny, unpopular minorities being sacrificed to the whim of the majorities, who in times of stress blissfully disregard constitutional injunctions. (Take, for example, the case of the Nisei in the United States during World War II.) A monarch can, at least, be reminded of his coronation oath, but the citizenry stands under no special obligation or pressure—save from their weak and vacillating consciences.

21. The monarch is a responsible person. The fact that a monarch is responsible “to God alone,” rather than to an assembly or a popular majority, is rather shocking to an agnostic mind; but while God cannot be fooled, the masses can. While it is perhaps true that “one cannot fool all the people all the time,” it seems that one can fool millions for centuries. History abounds in such examples, especially the history of religions.⁵⁶² In spite of the republican-democratic emphasis on “responsible government,” subject to the sanction of not getting re-elected (and of being impeached in only the grossest cases of corruption), the demo-republican government nevertheless derives its authority from anonymous, secretly voting masses on a purely numerical basis. It is even impossible to trace the empowering individual; and thus we get what French authors call the “cult of irresponsibility.” The electees, rejecting all responsibility, can easily blame the electors for their “mandates.” Thus we get today the immoral idea of making whole nations responsible for the deeds and misdeeds of their rulers, regardless of whether these had majority support or not. This collective judgment of moral acts is one of the great maladies of the democratic age.

22. The monarch is not only a public property which, in a sense, can be claimed by every subject,⁵⁶³ but he is also classless. On the Continent rigid marriage laws prevent any intermarriage between royalty and all classes, including, naturally, the aristocracy. The children of Archduke Francis Ferdinand of Austria, heir to Francis Joseph, were deprived of their right of succession to the crown—their mother would never have been accorded the title of an empress. The wife of the Archduke (a Countess Chotek) belonged to the aristocracy of Bohemia, but the alliance of the dynasty with (1) a specific class from (2) a specific region was considered to be incompatible with the principle of monarchic impartiality and “neutrality.” Royalty is thus practically forced to marry outside of the country—the alternative being wedlock with a distant relative of the same family. The Swedish dynastic law permits marriage with non-royalty—provided the partner is a foreigner. Thus at least a relationship between the ruling dynasty and any existing class within the country is being avoided.

23. The monarch will be restrained in his actions by the thought of the integrity of his patrimony, which he intends to leave unimpaired to his son or any other heir. Rarely were the “great gamblers” legitimate monarchs. Democratic leadership knows of no such selfish scruples. Nevertheless, we have to take the subtly monarchical undercurrents in a republic into consideration. Again and again we see politicians who aspire toward a repetition of their careers by a son or a near relative; the latent patriarchalism of the masses supports this tendency, by voting members of the same family into power. In the United States we have seen two Adamses, two Harrisons and two Roosevelts as Presidents—and a third Roosevelt now beginning a political career; and Senator Taft probably owes at least some of his political influence to his Presidential father.

24. A monarch and, even more so, a dynasty can plan policies on a grand scale—for the remote as well as for the immediate future.⁵⁶⁴ There can be relatively more mutual confidence in a monarchical world, because the changes in political directions are fewer. On the other hand, the frequent cabinet changes in Britain during the eighteenth century, each coupled with a subsequent change in policy, resulted in a general resentment against “perfidious Albion.” Today all of Europe nervously watches every American national election. Burckhardt wrote: “Since politics has been based on people’s inner fermentations, all certainty is at an end.”⁵⁶⁵

25. Monarchy coupled with a “bureaucracy” is intrinsically better adapted to the complex modern age, demanding special skills and knowledges, than a shifting democratic officialdom.⁵⁶⁶ St. Thomas had no doubts about the rôle of knowledge and wisdom in the human order (see Summa, I, q. 92, a. 2, ad 2). The rank amateur, elected by emotional masses, is less and less capable of facing the monumental issues of our day. The relationship between actual knowledge and the facts which ought to be known—including the skills which ought to be possessed—becomes more and more disproportionate. The hostility of democracy for the former, and the increase of the latter, conditioned by “progress,” have aggravated a situation which places purely parliamentary régimes in a dangerous situation, especially if they are confronted by quickly moving totalitarian dictatorships aided by a Machiavellian adroitness. We are here faced by the “illogical” phenomenon of a constantly rising democratic voluntarism and amateurism in an increasingly complicated world. Historical evolution, we must bear in mind, is not “sensible.”

26. The advantages of “voting out” or “voting in” heads of government are of a highly problematic nature. The judgment of nations is not the judgment of history. Even Freud had no trust in the masses, and insisted that “an enjoyment- and excitement-seeking mob must be kept down by the power of a prudent upper class.”⁵⁶⁷ The phrase so often repeated in democratic nations insisting that “bad presidents” would incur the wrath of the voters, whereas bad monarchs hold their office for life, stands no critical investigation. In most cases we can judge the value of a regime in historical perspective only—yet we must not forget that the judgment of history and the judgment of historians is not the same thing either. Nor can it be argued that nations really know their political appointees. As to the element of chance, it is at least equal in the case of a monarchy and that of a democratic republic; the dice are, probably, even more heavily loaded against an elected than against an inherited government. The “turnover” is greater in a democracy, that much is true; but rapid change has, so far, not been generally a favourable factor in government.

27. The rise of great statesmen has been fostered more by monarchic than by democratic government. The historical record on this matter is not open to doubt. Even parliamentary monarchy showed a “diminished return” of political geniuses. It can be stated without danger of refutation that the parliaments of the Western world have not yielded since 1890 a single truly outstanding, constructive statesman—not even a genuinely successful Machiavellian.⁵⁶⁸ Only chaos and revolution have given the same chance to outstanding men as monarchy; but the moral level of these products of civil strife cannot measure up to the better proteges of the monarchic system. A Richelieu or a Mazarin was superior to a Marat or a Robespierre—a Bismarck to a Hitler—a Cavour to a Mussolini—a Pobyedonostsev to a Stalin—a Pašic to a Tito. Thus great statesmanship is either vested in monarchs, their appointees, members of aristocratic oligarchies or in the products of revolutions—but almost never in purely parliamentary figures. The outstanding thinkers (we mean thinkers, not literati) of this world have only in the most exceptional cases favoured the democratic system.

28. Even the seemingly irrational aspects of monarchy—as, for instance, the inheritance laws—have upon closer analysis a rational core.⁵⁶⁹ Pascal knew that very well.⁵⁷⁰ The greater susceptibility of democracies to corruption is an equally well-known fact.⁵⁷¹ Hungary, Germany, Bohemia-Moravia, Austria, were all far more corrupt after 1919 than under imperial aegis. Italy, Yugoslavia and Bulgaria, after 1945, have suffered further declines in financial ethics.

29. Monarchy is a safeguard against foreign intervention in the internal affairs of the country. Through the agency of the internationally organized ideological parties, or through parliamentary groups representing ethnic minorities whose bulk lives in adjoining countries, a unique opportunity is offered to foreign states to intervene efficiently in the inner affairs of a democratic nation. Catherine II of Russia was furious when the Poles changed over to the hereditary monarchy in 1792.⁵⁷²

30. Last, but not least, the inner antithesis between a plebiscitarian party-dictatorship and a monarchy must be mentioned. Only in the Italian monarchy have we seen the rise of a dictatorship on a party basis—a phenomenon due entirely to the weakness of the “quasi-legitimate” (in Ferrero’s terminology) status of the Italian kingship. Still, through all the period from 1922 until 1943, the Crown and the Party continued in a very uneasy partnership—the Crown actually remaining in a position of inferiority. Only the enormous weakening of the Party in the “Fascist War” gave the Crown the belated courage and opportunity to strike against its hostile bedfellow.⁵⁷³ Mussolini then established the “Italian Social Republic,” thus returning to the original republican programme of the Fascist party.⁵⁷⁴ Yet the discredited monarchy was defeated at the polls by a combination of Fascist, Socialist and Communist votes, thus confirming Mussolini’s step and creating a situation which will make the rise of another dictator much easier than in 1922. All other totalitarian states were, and probably always will be, republican in character.

The average American’s difficulty to take monarchy seriously stems mostly from historic and geographic factors. His country is a Grossinsel, a Big Island protected by two Oceans, one Sea and the Arctic—not counting Canada or Mexico. But any Roman standing on the Palatine Hill and overlooking the Eternal City would see that this city has once been part of a monarchy, then of an aristocratic republic, then of a democratic and finally of a plutocratic republic followed by a military dictatorship, a Caesarian monarchy, a barbarian kingdom, a hierocracy, a kingdom, a republic, a kingdom and again of a republic. To him, or to an Athenian, forms of government such as monarchy or republic would neither imply “backwardness,” nor “modernity.” Where there is a king today in Athens there has been a democratic republic 2,300 years ago . . . a democratic republic which murdered Socrates and forced Aristotle into exile.

These facts are not quite obvious to Americans and they have difficulties in visualizing anything but an American Republic for the next 10,000 (or 20,000?) years. Yet if we had asked a Roman in the year 70 B.C. whether his country would soon be a monarchy he would have sounded a most hilarious protest. Wasn’t it the glory of Rome to have dispensed with such an Asiatic form of government? Ten years later Caesar loomed large on the Roman scene. And had we had the chance to repeat this conversation with a descendant of the same Roman in the year 280 A.D. he would have been unable to see the irony in our account. “Well, aren’t we still a republic,” he might have retorted. “We have a Senate. Of course we have also an Imperator, but that means ‘general’ and a general is not a monarch. We also call him princeps, but that means ‘first man’ and nothing else. Pronouncing Imperator like Emperor and Princeps in the way of Prince—well, these are just linguistics. The idea that we ever could become a monarchy is today as preposterous as 350 years ago.” Yet in 284 Diocletian became Roman Emperor. He was not another Vespasian who insisted on having it written on Capitol Hill that he had received his power from the people. The comedy had come to an end. Diocletian abolished the Senate, demanded Proskýnesis (prostration) and had himself adorned with a golden crown. Only now it was evident to all and sundry that the Republic had gone the way of all flesh.

To these considerations the historical observation must be added that the rise of our Christian civilization took place under the aegis of monarchy which, quite rightly, has been characterized as embodying “le moindre mal, la possibilité du bien—the least evil [and] the possibility of good.” The anti-monarchic currents in the last hundred and sixty years had a more or less anti-Catholic if not, as in many cases, an anti-Christian, character.⁵⁷⁵ Under the emphatically parliamentary monarchies and the democratic republics, Christianity declined or suffered minor persecutions. “The Catholic Church, in particular,” says Monsignor Ronald Knox, “has had much to suffer from the democracies.”⁵⁷⁶ In the totalitarian, illiberal, plebiscitarian republics, these systematic molestations changed into sanguinary persecutions and efforts for a final extermination.

We are convinced that there is a psychological bridge between these facts. They cannot be merely accidental. Neither is it sheer coincidence that in the latest war the Church has received abuse from all sides, and has suffered most grievously and unjustly in a struggle which was, in a sense, the fratricidal strife between the three heirs of the French Revolution: democratic nationalism, national socialism and socialist internationalism—all of them claiming to be the sole and only embodiment of true democracy.⁵⁷⁷

SUPPLEMENTARY NOTE

NEO-THOMISM AND THE PROBLEM OF AUTHORITY

I

We remember here the reaction of a German professor toward the magnificent structure of Thomism: ‘Ja, das ist sehr schön, aber das Leben ist nicht so!’

—HUNTER GUTHRIE, S.J.⁵⁷⁸

As we have already remarked, it is obvious that a writer trying to analyze a political or social phenomenon critically and methodically will be motivated by a more or less coherent philosophy. Since the point of view of the author deviates from the Neo-Thomist one, and this approach so strongly dominates the present-day philosophical scene of Catholic Britain and the United States, it is only fair to relieve the reader from the onerous task of guessing at or reconstructing the content of his philosophy.

We believe that the true significance of the work of St. Thomas is to be found in his effort to provide Catholic theology with a wonderful, logically consistent and, to a certain degree, even encyclopedic skeleton. The Summa, in particular, was written as a textbook—the most impressive and exhaustive textbook, perhaps, of all time. This fact has been overlooked by some of our Neo-Thomists, who are deeply in love with this skeleton and view all efforts to put living, warm flesh on it with suspicion and dismay. It has therefore been argued—and, we think, rightly so—that St. Thomas was not a Thomist.

The great Aquinate has striven primarily to elucidate objective reality, which must remain at all times the starting point and the dorsal spine of every true philosophy. The alternative, in its finality, is a rootless psychology, a vague sentimentalism, or absolute nihilism. Even those who treat the work of St. Thomas as an enormous cupboard with thousands of little drawers filled with replies—an inflexible theological and philosophical “Information, Please”—can rarely go entirely astray. (The simian ability to pull out the right little drawer within a fraction of a second has, by the way, often been considered to be the most important criterion of an accomplished scholastic philosopher.) The osteophilia of many of our Neo-Thomists, it is true, might prevent them from reaching the summits from which the final glories of knowledge and wisdom can be seen; but they will never lose themselves completely, either. But those toying with phenomenological approaches or with existential philosophy, especially if they dispense with the “skeleton,” face considerable risks.

Nevertheless we often wonder, in all humility, whether St. Thomas himself was able to answer fully the question: “What is man?” It also often seems to us that the great doctor, in spite of his prodigious capacity for work, could only give many hints, but not an exhaustive reply, as to the subsidiary question: “How is man?”⁵⁷⁹ We will readily confess that the philosophical and theological achievement of the Church, resting on the two powerful pillars of reason and revelation, far outshines the more meagre results of psychological investigation. If we think the situation over, there is nothing surprising in it, and a reversal of the relationship is the very stigma of neopaganism. We prefer an ingenuous philosophy or theology to the diabolic monstrosity of an “expert” psychology without immutable values.

“Pure” Thomism fitted so well into the Middle Ages because a skeleton was most appropriate to a historical epoch which was over-rich in meat—the “meat” of Catholic spiritual and cultural values. The significance of Thomism today is not less, but it is a different one; it has become a weapon of attack and defence in a time of confusion and chaos. Yet it must be borne in mind that Cardinal Mercier, who has contributed so much to the revival of Thomism, exhorted philosophers to use the writings of the Angelic Doctor as a starting point, not as a destination. There is today, furthermore, a crying need for the analysis and illumination of supra-rational values. Thus we have seen this “New Mechanism” neglecting the cultivation of the intuitive, artistic and “sentientive” qualities of man.⁵⁸⁰ Of course, the dangers are even greater in Unamuno’s ideal picture (in his Del sentimiento trágico de la vida, p. 31) of the philosophic man: “Not only with reason but with the will, with the sentiments, with the flesh and the senses, with the whole soul and the whole body, is man a philosopher.”

We believe that a “naked” Thomism lends itself too easily to intellectual constructions which not only do not stand the practical test and are intrinsically “unconvincing,”⁵⁸¹ but also bear little relation to fundamental qualities of human nature, and operate with concepts conforming neither to psychological nor to philosophical reality. (Here it may be sufficient to refer to the volitional concept of “the people,” “community,” or “multitude,” which is entirely figmentary.) If we deal with man we have to start with the (God-created) person and end with the (God-created) person, taking into account man’s subjective existence in the light of objective reality. The full nature of the moon has to be understood not only in astronomical terms, but also as human experience—as faint light over a path, as a melancholy disc over a romantic lake, and so on. The “multiple function” is often purely material, often material and spiritual. An enormous solar system appearing as a star in the sky might possibly harbour intelligent beings, and is thus really a “world”—but it is also possible that it is only a tiny embellishment of a summer night, to attract the attention of a casual wanderer and to gladden his heart. In a terrestrial sense man is the measure. The author of this book has to confess to being influenced to a certain degree by Christian existentialism; he is, moreover, convinced that a fruitful discussion of political forms is possible only if we accept the “human reality” and avoid the New Mechanism which turns us so swiftly into bombinantes in vacuo. We hold that a constructive approach to problems in the sphere of political theory is feasible only when at last the strong skeleton of Thomism is clad with the soft, warm flesh, not of a wild subjectivism, but of a personal world-picture of man created by and reverting to God. This implies taking into account not only all the glories of man, but also all his shortcomings and imperfections. Others have endeavoured—mainly in the Old World—to work on that synthesis, lest the bones become brittle and the flesh deformed. We have merely followed them along the trail they have blazed.

II

“As a matter of fact,” Shatov declared, “if there is a revolution in Russia, it will have to start with the propagation of atheism.” An old, tough captain with grey hair sat and sat in silence, and did not breathe a word. All of a sudden he rose in the very middle of the room and, you know, said aloud just as if speaking to himself: “If there is no God, how can I then be a captain?” He took his cap, threw up his hands and left.

—DOSTOYEVSKI, The Possessed⁵⁸²

The moral problem of political authority is the most important and basic in the whole discussion of political theory. In modern American legal thinking the chaos in this matter is ever widening, especially so in circles denying the natural law.⁵⁸³ Though not affecting the question of the various forms of government directly, it has, nevertheless, to all those sympathetic towards an existentialist approach, a psychological importance.⁵⁸⁴ This might conceivably puzzle the pure Thomist, who is perfectly willing to discuss the problem of authority and the problem of political forms in separate compartments. Suarez and St. Robert Bellarmine have given us their points of view on authority in almost complete detachment from the question of the validity and inner quality of the various forms of government; but we are not certain whether they did not themselves see the deeper, inner connections between these two investigations.

Father Servière, S. J., as well as Father James Brodrick, S.J.,⁵⁸⁵ does not doubt that St. Robert Bellarmine was fundamentally a monarchist, who preferred a more or less mixed form of government for reasons of political expediency,⁵⁸⁶ but could not refrain from insisting that monarchy is superior to democracy if we have to choose between these two types in their pure form.⁵⁸⁷ Yet it must be conceded to a certain American school of political thought that the basic philosophical vistas of Suarez and Bellarmine point in a far more democratic direction. The early Jesuit theory of political authority emanating from God and passing through the people to their appointed rulers and magistrates—a theory by no means without medieval backing—has an intrinsically demo-republican character, not, perhaps, in coactive logicality, but certainly as a psychological “invitation.” We must therefore be indulgent towards F. J. Stahl, who mistook the views of these seventeenth-century theologians for early Rousseauism.⁵⁸⁸ The Bellarmine-Jefferson legend,⁵⁸⁹ though factually untenable, has its philosophic charms; but if we want at all costs a Catholic pedigree for American political and constitutional philosophy, it is probably safer still to appeal to the Locke-Hooker-St. Thomas connection.⁵⁹⁰

Focusing our attention on the problem of authority proper, we ought to consult Scripture first. The text Rom. 13.1–7 is well known and has received, especially from the hands of the Reformers, rough treatment.⁵⁹¹ The confusion between power and authority is, among these authors, the rule rather than the exception, and Luther’s view that the state as such is an added punishment for the Fall served as a foundation for the leidender Gehorsam, the “suffering obedience” to the caprices of the rulers. Calvin’s teachings in these matters—contrary to general opinion—were not very different;⁵⁹² though it could be asserted that he was by temperament rather an aristocratic oligarch,⁵⁹³ while Luther tended (implicitly at least) towards monarchism.⁵⁹⁴

Whatever the distortions, misinterpretations and exaggerations of the Reformers and their theological epigones, it certainly would be rash to reject entirely the external evidence of the crude fact of an existing power. Such an attitude would be un-Scriptural. Neither would it be a sound procedure for a Catholic thinker to take, on principle, a point of view as remote as possible from a Protestant or any other non-Catholic position. Opposition for opposition’s sake would lead to curious results in matters theological; it is an attitude which would rather agree with a sect on the lunatic fringe than with members of the Church of Christ.

Since we believe that there are other will-powers in this universe besides that of God, we have a good right to view all actions and activities critically—to reflect, to speculate, to conform or oppose or resist. Thus it is evident that all power being exercised is subject to critical analysis by investigation of its purpose, its effects, the intentions of its exercisers. An exousia—regardless of whether we translate this Scriptural term as “authority” or “power”—has to have a positive relationship towards its purpose, the common good. To be theoú diákonos, “a servant of God,” it is necessary that a power be “reasonable,” i.e., ordained towards its natural end. A ruler in the possession of power, but misusing it by woefully harming the common good, is not a “helpmate of God” (leitourgós theoú) and thus has no claim to authority and to obedience. It can even be argued that power, well established and entrenched, claiming authority but methodically destroying the values of the common good, is diabolic in character. The satanic aspects of such government combining power (a divine attribute) with wickedness and irrationality are usually underscored by a quality of confusion; it rarely opposes the common good on all scores and in every respect, though its positive actions are often means to nefarious ends: for example, even maternity wards, recreational institutions and places of learning established by the state can be designed to build up armies intended for aggressive warfare.

There should be no difficulty in accepting the scholastic tradition of the right of resistance against the tyrant, although these notions frightened not only pious seventeenth-century Protestants, but even Hegel.⁵⁹⁵ A ruler has the same obligation to the right use of power as the owner of property. Both—power and property—have to be used to foster the common good. Their misuse or abuse should result in confiscation or deposition. But it is also evident that legality (even legality according to international law) is part and parcel of the common good; and therefore legitimacy, in the political sense, cannot be sneered at. Thus, rebellion against a “legal” government (i.e., a government legal in the juridical but not in the moral sense) can be excused only if its continued trespasses against other more important aspects of the common good justify steps which according to the secular (constitutional) law are illegal, but become, under these circumstances, legal according to the natural law.

Since rebellion is likely to evoke bloodshed, it is obvious that it is in the nature of a “last resort”; it becomes justified only if all peaceful societal and constitutional efforts have failed to provide a remedy for the situation. Still, we have to be careful not to fall into an arid legalism, nor to adopt a concept of the common good which is too wide or too narrow. Under ordinary circumstances it would be difficult to demonstrate a specific right (i.e., a possessive right) of the monarch to crown and kingship—which can hardly be treated as property. The case becomes less clear when the merits of a dynasty are related not only to services rendered, but also to the very creation of a nation. There would be an England even without the Hanovers and the Coburgs; but there would not be an Austria without the Habsburgs.

We have hinted that power acting according to reason, that is, intelligently and virtuously, ordaining its efforts towards the common good and not offending against it through its mere existence (as, for example, an unwarranted military occupation by a foreign power), has authority as a genuine leitourgós theoú, a helpmate of God. It certainly is not diabolic. And this situation is, we think, independent of majority consent.⁵⁹⁶ If a vast majority of the citizenry is opposed to good or just government, we do not see why this should obviate authority in the least.⁵⁹⁷

It is only too well known that the mobs of the medieval cities were often bitterly anti-Jewish, and that the desire for the massacre, exile or suppression of the Jews came from the lower classes, including the lower clergy. Royalty, the majority of bishops and, above all, the papacy protected the people of Our Lord. In this case reason and virtue were on the side of these high-placed minorities.⁵⁹⁸

It seems to us then, in conformity with Royer-Collard,⁵⁹⁹ that reason is the indicator which points to authority in general,⁶⁰⁰ and political authority in particular. Without the elements of reason, knowledge and wisdom, no correlation between those in power and the common good is possible. There are, of course, also powerful psychological factors involved in the concept of the common good; and these, in turn, are related to the highest as well as to the lowest intellectual virtues—love and prudence, which enter the concept of “legality.”⁶⁰¹

Such an “occasionalist” view is frankly undemocratic as well as antidemocratic; but we still think that it is neither Cartesian nor contrary to sound Catholic doctrine. The theory that authority, whose fountainhead is God, is vested “secondarily” in the people (multitudo), who transfer it to their magistrate, has roots which admittedly go further back than Suarez and Bellarmine. Yet the first difficulty which we experience in accepting this view lies in the problem of transference. It is not sheer coincidence that the earlier Middle Ages insisted in most of their elections on the use of the principle of unanimity—a principle of great destructive effect in practice.⁶⁰² Yet the philosophical reasons for this demand are quite evident (would elections without original sin show unanimous results? Would plebiscites?) and we should not be surprised to see the principle of unanimity in full action until 1790—at least in one country and in connection with one function: the royal election by the Polish nobility. The nie pozwalam or liberum veto ruined Poland, but the alternative—majoritism—has, in our opinion, no philosophical quality at all. At best it can be an arbitrary convention (as, for instance, the two-thirds majority at a papal conclave); it could not in the least serve for the purpose of a genuine transference of authority.

Neither has majority rule any theological value. The concept of a “larger and sounder part” of a nation (wielding authority over a “smaller and less sound part”?) makes little sense if we give to the expression “sounder” any wider or deeper meaning than the simple word “sane.” There is, we will admit, a certain Catholic political tradition which, banking on the phrase securus iudicat orbis terrarum—“the whole world is a safe judge”—has shown something we might call a “statistical optimism,” but we are unable to agree with it.

In the preceding paragraphs we have insisted that reason can only be applied to matters whose nature is understood. Yet the so-called “larger and sounder part” is usually delinquent in training its reason, while political knowledge is only in the rarest of all cases “adequate”—among the multitudes as well as among the magistrates. Actually, as we have pointed out, the gulf between the things known and the things which ought to be known is constantly widening, thus necessitating judgment in the absence of knowledge—an action which necessarily results in emotionalism; and, if multitudes are called to judgment and action, an irrational mass emotionalism which is plainly of an animal nature is bound to follow. When the present author and his wife first arrived in the United States in 1937 the New Deal was still the question of the day. After collecting data on the question and working feverishly for a couple of weeks on the available material, we gave up, realizing that a study enabling us to arrive at any rational judgment would take several months. We estimated then that only a few thousand Americans could possibly be in a position to make a sound judgment on this economic policy; yet at least seventy million Americans (voters and non-voters alike) had the strongest possible convictions on it. These vast masses also lacked any deeper insight into the minds, intellects and mentalities of their representatives who had to deal with this subject in legislation—men whom to all practical purposes they did not know at all, often not even their names, faces or professed views!

The majority principle has been evoked by some Catholics by referring to papal elections. Yet in this case we certainly find no transference of authority at all, but a designatory act pure and simple. The modalities of the conclave are mere laws of the Church; theoretically, a papal dynasty would be possible, though probably not desirable. And just as papal authority is in no way transferred from God via the College of Cardinals, we do not have much reason to believe that the procedure in civil society should be a different one.

It is, moreover, obvious that a repeated act of designation takes place only in specific forms of government, not in all. (The intervals between these acts of designation or election are entirely arbitrary. “More democracy” would mean smaller and smaller intervals.) In a hereditary monarchy without plebiscites or elections, even the passive support of the population remains an unexpressed secret and a mystery.

The practical difficulties of the Catholic supporters of the thesis of popular sovereignty (entirely based on the concept of God as the original source of authority) are so many that the principle of a possible designation seems to us more logical. The latter actually has a stronger case, because it enjoys the support of papal authority—not of a dogma pronounced solemnly ex cathedra, but still of an encyclical and a papal letter. These documents merit, to say the least, a Catholic’s filial respect, attention and consideration. We refer to Leo XIII’s encyclical Diuturnum illud and to Pope Pius X’s letter condemning the Sillon movement. The encyclical says:

Indeed very many in recent days, following in the footsteps of those in the preceding century who called themselves “philosophers,” say that all power comes from the people; wherefore they say that those who exercise it in the state do not exercise it as their own, but as given to them by the people, and on this condition, that the people, by which it is given, may recall it at their pleasure. With these, however, Catholics disagree, for they derive the power to rule from God, as from a natural and necessary principle. . . .

. . . Here it is worth while to note that those who are to govern a republic may, in some matters, be chosen by the will and judgment of the masses, if no Catholic doctrine oppose. Clearly, by this selection the magistrate is chosen, but the rights of his magistracy are not conferred; nor is the authority conferred, but it is decided by whom it shall be exercised.⁶⁰³

Pius X is equally clear and explicit, leaving in our mind no doubt as to the meaning of the encyclical of his predecessor, to which he expressly alludes:

No doubt the “Sillon” movement makes this authority, which it places first in the people, descend from God—but in such a way that “it ascends from below in order to reach a higher level, while in the organisation of the Church the power descends from above in order to reach a lower level.” But, aside from its being abnormal for delegation to ascend, since it is of its nature to descend, Leo XIII has refuted in advance this attempt to reconcile Catholic doctrine with the error of the philosophes.⁶⁰⁴

We think that this is unequivocal, and we cannot be swayed by the explanations of Cardinal Billot,⁶⁰⁵ who sought to prove that the encyclical Diuturnum illud does not involve a refutation of the populistic theories of Suarez and Bellarmine.⁶⁰⁶

It is certainly not necessary to point out that the act of designation rests on no quantitative principle. Designation can be made by a small group of electors (as, for instance, in the election of the Holy Roman Emperors) or by an entire population—including infants. (All age limits are entirely arbitrary and conventional.)⁶⁰⁷ After all, the relation between a government and the population changes rapidly after every election, because voters die and minors come of age. At any given moment the “verdict” of the last election may have been cancelled, and the former majority, through the normal biological process, be in a minority.

There is, of course, no connection between popularity and authority. Adolf Hitler (who so frequently claimed to be an Erzdemokrat—an “archdemocrat”) said, “Popularity always is the basis of authority.”⁶⁰⁸ But in our opinion authority rests merely on the “external” evidence of power, and the necessary “internal” evidence of ordination towards the common good.

To the citizen (or subjectl), the problem of authority—and obedience also—has, in the practical field, strongly personal aspects of a somewhat existentialist nature. The “internal evidence,” in spite of its rational character, is not always immediately recognizable. The magistrate’s intentions preceding every “plan” are of a hidden nature. The difficulties in appraising the “internal evidence” are often considerable, and we must admit that flagrant and persistent violation of the common good is manifest only in the more extreme cases. Owing to man’s imperfection the total of “internal evidence” will always be an approximation, and never achieve objective perfection. Every analyst must most carefully take into consideration two imperfections—his own and that of the matter under review.

Nor must it be forgotten that almost all of us are born into a political community, and that custom and habit often impair our objectivity. Many of us are lacking “distance.”⁶⁰⁹ Under the type of rule we have called “organic government,” the multitudo will give to it their implicit assent by not questioning its intrinsic truth and value. Yet if we scrutinize the Catholic world we find that today Luxemburg alone can, with a stretch of the imagination, be said to have “organic government.” Most of the present-day governments in Catholic countries are “quasi-legitimate” (“governments in flux”), and a great many are thoroughly “illegitimate” (“governments by force”). The lack of an organic character goes hand in hand with a virtual monopoly of republicanism among Catholic nations—the notable exception again being Luxemburg. The loss of religious fervour among the masses was synchronized with the rise of republicanism and with cultural decay. (On the paradox of Protestantism becoming the religion of modern monarchies, see below, Chapter V, pp. 205–06.)

But it must not be forgotten that these aforementioned categories are of a purely psychological nature; there are situations when “governments by force” can claim true authority while harshly enforcing the common good among a decadent population, and even the most “organic” government can trespass violently against the common good, thus gravely impairing its claim to factual authority. We believe, for instance, that governments repressing some of their citizens on racial grounds—regardless of whether they comprise 0.9 per cent or 55 per cent of the population⁶¹⁰—are so fundamentally opposed to important, non-material matter of the common good (justice, equity, freedom, charity, reason), that their claim to authority is invalid—and this in spite of a thoroughly unquestioned sway. They cannot claim to be leitourgoi theoú. Under these circumstances the question of resistance and rebellion arises—a question, unfortunately, of great actuality.

It may, perhaps, not be unwise to illustrate our thesis. At first, let us describe a simple case. A steamer is about to sink, and the passengers fight madly for the lifeboats. The officers of the ship have lost their heads. Yet one of the passengers draws a revolver, and with the help of this weapon and a stentorian voice is able to establish order and give directions. The passengers, thwarted in their immediate desires, resent him; but, fearful of his weapon, obey him. Has he authority? Certainly. He has power. He uses it for the common good. He enjoys no popularity. There is no contract between him and the other passengers. And still, he should be obeyed. Nor is it a refutation to say that this is an emergency. Life is emergency.

The situation would be more complicated in the case of a Bourbon legitimist under the rule of Napoleon III. The Emperor had power;⁶¹¹ there is no good reason to believe that he did not strive for the common good. It can also be supposed that he had popular backing during most of the time of his regime. Had our legitimist the right to foment a rebellion?

The only argument our revolutionary-minded Royalist could have put forward is a firm belief that the Bonapartist régime, by its very existence, was opposed to very important immaterial values—continuity, tradition, loyalty, legality. In other words—he had to be convinced that Bonapartism would make France lose her “soul,” and that all the horrors of a revolution would be a small price to be paid for a restoration (or “liberation”). Actually, we think, such a calculation would have been materially and historically wrong; but this does not obviate the possibility that a person earnestly consulting his conscience would come to a different conclusion. The final decisions always rest with the individual.

It is admittedly easy to theorize about rebellion; but we face here more than in other matters the complexities of individual conscience. To the opponent of the theory of popular sovereignty (either in its Roussellian or in its Bellarminian form) there is no philosophical connection between rebellion and public opinion. Ninety-nine per cent of a population might be blissfully happy under a tyranny based on the torture and exploitation of one per cent. Their sadistic instincts could be fully satisfied by the sufferings of a few fellow citizens.

Nevertheless, the problem whether a rebellion supported by only one per cent of the population can succeed—at first glance a purely practical question—cannot be brushed aside. After all, even a just war can only be started if there is a chance of winning it.⁶¹² All intellectual virtues, as we have hinted before, have to be mobilized by the “lonely individual” in order to come to a personal decision.⁶¹³ (Revolutions, anyhow, usually lack the conscriptional character of modern wars.)

It also ought to be clear to all participants in a rebellion that the elimination of traditional political institutions, especially if they enjoy “organic” status, are dangerous operations on the “body” of political psychology. After 1789—or rather, 1792—France never found her political equilibrium again; and her psychological recovery is today more remote than ever. Traditions which have slowly grown and finally achieved organic status—institutions which are generally considered to be integral parts of a cultural pattern—should not be lightly sacrificed if they undergo a crisis, or even though they may be useless or oppressive for the moment. The violent destruction of institutions in an impasse has brought untold harm to the world. The purely historical argument against revolutions is fairly strong; the balance-sheets of all revolutions and civil wars prove this conclusively. Whatever minor positive results the French Revolution may have had, the gifts of neo-nationalism, totalitarianism and conscription alone far outweigh these gains . . . not to mention the direct sufferings and the far-reaching political, spiritual and intellectual consequences.

All these decisions lie with the individual, whom theology cannot provide in all situations with an elaborate and infallible casuistry. And here we face, finally, a mere fragment of that terrible responsibility which all of us have, not only towards ourselves and our kin, but also towards that seemingly never ending process affecting mankind with all its pitiless forces—that great drama of which God is the everlasting spectator—history.

The present anti-Leopoldism in Belgium—a sentiment of a predominantly non-republican character—has its deeper roots in the King’s remarriage. The rebellion is directed against a “stepmother” who, to make matters worse, is a “sister”—a commoner—and not a “mother” in any way. She could never replace notre bonne reine Astrid. Actually during the campaign for the plebiscite in 1950 the Socialists let the cat out of the bag by printing a poster with the picture of Queen Astrid in a black frame. Nous VOTERONS “NON”, said the text simply. A monarchy involves all the troubles, problems and joys of family life, on a large and public scale.

CHAPTER V

THE POLITICAL TEMPER OF CATHOLIC NATIONS

It is surprising to observe how constantly we find theology at the bottom of our political questions.

—P. J. PROUDHON, Les confessions d’un révolutionnaire

(Paris, 1849, p. 61)

1. THE SOCIAL IMPLICATIONS OF CATHOLICISM

OF all the “external” elements shaping the character of individuals as well as of groups religion is, perhaps, the strongest. This should not surprise us, because every higher religion offers us an almost complete picture of a meaningful universe; it points out a destination and a way. It is, therefore, self-evident that different religions involve different ways of life:⁶¹⁴ they will influence our temperaments.⁶¹⁵ We should never underrate the effect of such other factors as geography, meteorology, biology, nourishment, history, sociology; yet the great changes resulting from the conversion of large groups cannot leave us unimpressed. Even after a short time, entirely new behaviour patterns emerge. One has only to compare the inhabitants of Catholic and of Protestant islands in the Hebrides⁶¹⁶ in order to appreciate the importance of the religious factor; or to compare villages belonging to these two different religious communities in central Germany, in Hungary, in the Netherlands, Latvia or Switzerland. An invisible line divides the cultural patterns of these communities, even though they speak the same language and obey the same laws. England before and after the Reformation; Scotland before and after the Reformation;⁶¹⁷ Norway before and after the Reformation, were different nations. The influence of the religious factor also extends to economics: the disproportionate wealth of French Protestants shows it sufficiently.⁶¹⁸ Max Weber, Troeltsch, Tawney, Fanfani and Krauss have written profusely on this subject.

In this chapter the searchlight of our investigation will be focused on the political behaviour pattern, rather than on the ideologies, of Catholic nations. Forced, under these circumstances, to generalize on this matter, but at the same time endeavouring to avoid the grossest over-simplifications, we will try to compare the attitude of Catholic (and Greek Orthodox) nations and ethnic groups with those of their Protestant equivalents. Comparison, and not the setting of absolute standards, is our aim.

The reader is, first of all, reminded that the Reformation set out as a “rigoristic” reaction against late medieval laxity and liberalism, as well as against the Renaissance and Humanism. St. Clement Maria Hofbauer declared about the Reformation: “The revolt from the Church began because the German people could not and cannot but be devout.”⁶¹⁹ To this Catholic saint the deeply religious, non-libertarian character of the Reformation was obvious.⁶²⁰

But because of its inherent dialectics, Protestantism came in subsequent centuries to occupy a stand diametrically opposed to its original position.⁶²¹ Hence almost all Protestant criticisms levelled against Catholicism are today just the reverse of those directed against the Church four hundred years ago. No modern, liberal Protestant would accuse the Catholics of placing the accent on man rather than on God, of being swayed by the fads of their age, of being too broad-minded, easy-going and carnal.⁶²² Such strictures might be passed upon them by fundamentalists or backwoods preachers, but not by the “enlightened” man in the street, who is impressed by the existence of a Legion of Decency, the efforts by Catholics to enact anti-birth-control legislation, and their rejection of divorce and euthanasia.⁶²³ Catholic dogma, except for an “increase in volume,” has remained unchanged, and commentary on it has varied only within certain limits. Protestantism, on the other hand, is in a constant process of evolution. Whereas the faith of Catholics can be exposed to the process of diminuation de la foi (“diminution of the faith”), that of the Protestant is also subject to the rétrécissement de la foi (“narrowing of the faith”),⁶²⁴ the gradual abolishment of the very articles of faith.

Still, the fact remains that Protestantism is essentially medieval, or, if we prefer, post-medieval. This is documented by the fact that Protestantism clung to the Gothic style long after it had become obsolete in the Catholic world. Even today the Gothic style is prevalent among American churches and colleges with the Catholic minority “joining in.” Of course, it cannot be denied that Protestant “Medievalism” has been emptied of its soul through a relativizing and liberalizing process. Anybody visiting that Gothic sky-scraper, the “Cathedral of Learning” of Pittsburgh University, will be struck by the sight of professors in medieval gowns and mortar boards teaching pragmatist and instrumentalist philosophy. Yet the façade remains and also many thought patterns. Thus the real year of the Reformation is not 1517, but 1511, when Martin Luther, the Augustinian friar on his mission in Rome, for the first time in his life was face to face with the Renaissance. Here was a man from the backwoods of Christendom aghast at the grandiose effort toward a synthesis between Christendom and the immortal and lasting values of antiquity. The annexationist character of Catholicism had been hidden to him and the fact that the synthesis became only perfect in the Baroque he could not guess. Yet what he disapproved of was the cultural aspect of the Renaissance which said “God and Man.” From a “circle” Catholic culture had turned to an elliptic form with two foci. After all, man was created in the image of God and his destiny was to become more god-like after death. There is a real process of theosis envisaged—as we find it, in a different form, also in Eastern theology. Hence the veneration of saints. But the Reformers replied to these efforts “Soli Deo Gloria!” and tried desperately to go back, back to the Middle Ages, back to some sort of imaginary catacomb Church, back to the Old Testament. Unless we are able to picture Luther wandering around in Rome as a hill-billy preacher from the Alleghanies on Broadway in New York, we do not understand the initial spark which started the 16th-century wave of Reformers.

Thus, with the exception of Melanchthon and Zwingli, there are only very minor figures among the Reformers who tried to ride the crest of the wave of Humanism. The most outstanding Humanists everywhere rallied sooner or later to the cause of the Church Universal. So did St. Thomas More, so did Erasmus, so did Reuchlin, the great anti-clerical who had fought monkish narrowness all through his life. And while Catholic culture centred around the dual focus of the Glory of God and the Glory of Man, while Catholic painters directed their interest towards the objects of this world, towards man and woman in the nude (“as God made them”), Protestantism was engaged in a new rigorism. It is a grave mistake to see in Luther a confirmed libertine, who “overvalued sex and marriage.” His concept of marriage is one of “carnality to end all carnality.” Protestantism is very profoundly anti-erotic.* Thus the key to the real understanding of the Catholic cultures of the European Continent and of South and Central America is, for the Protestant as well as for the Catholic of the British Isles and North America, an understanding and appreciation of the cultural, artistic and intellectual values of Humanism, the Renaissance and the Baroque. (The fact that Irish Catholicism has only very peripherically been through this evolution is of paramount importance.) Especially the inner understanding of the Baroque is by no means easy to those belonging to the English-speaking nations and E. I. Watkin is one of the few who came to see the true greatness of the “Jesuit style.” Yet it took him years to disentangle himself from the notions imparted to him by Ruskin.

In order to come to symbolic comprehension of the Catholic-Protestant antithesis one must compare two paintings: the Birth of Venus by Botticelli and American Gothic by Grant Wood. The Birth of Venus follows a pagan pattern, but every sensitive person will perceive that this is a Christian Venus, surrounded by a hardly perceptible glow of sensuality, yet expressing a real synthesis of Eros and Agape, earthly and divine love. She is a “baptized” Venus. The painting of Grant Wood shows us a very Protestant American farmer and his wife with a white, Gothic wooden church in the background. The man holds in his hand a pitchfork with painfully pointed prongs. His balding pate, his thin lips, his clean spectacles no less than his prim and severe wife at his side frightened no less a man than Albert Jay Nock. The outcry of bigots which could be heard at the end of the 19th century that the Democratic Party in New York stood for “Rum, Romanism and Rebellion” was somehow not without substance when we translate this accusation with “Joie de vivre, Catholicism and Individualism.” To our ears, at least, the reverse—“Prohibition, Protestantism and Prostration”—hardly sounds more attractive.

This is by no means an “original theory,” but a thesis alluded to by D. H. Lawrence and Everett Dean Martin, who emphasized the fact that Americans have tried to flee the Middle Ages, but never “thought themselves out of them.”

Thus it has escaped the attention of many neutral observers not conversant with the respective theologies that Catholicism, though blessed with a rigid and authoritarian ecclesiastical organization, has a liberal and “personalistic” theology; while the teachings of Luther and Calvin are characterized by a metaphysical severity which had (and sometimes still has) its concrete political and cultural manifestations. This was most evident in the political sphere: Calvin established in Geneva the first truly totalitarian police-state in Europe,⁶²⁵ and Luther conferred excessive authority on the magistrate. Calvin’s dogma of predestination had in itself no liberal implications, and Luther’s belief in the utter wretchedness of human nature after the Fall sanctioned brutal suppression by the state authorities.

Still, G. P. Gooch is right when he calls Calvin the father of modern democracy in spite of himself.⁶²⁶ Neither should it be doubted that Luther, through his concept of “private interpretation,” his subjectivism, and his notions on church organization, planted seeds which centuries later produced an astounding harvest. In spite of Ins fideism, which relegated all deceased non-Christians to the everlasting horrors of hell fire, and his emphasis on the divine prerogatives of the magistrate, he is through a long dialectic process a forefather of modern democracy.⁶²⁷

The Catholic theological paternity of democracy is of a much more direct character. St. Thomas, though insisting in De regimine principum on the superiority of an (elective) monarchy (the supporters of an elective monarchy, by the way, are always royalists suspicious of the principle of heredity), expresses in the Summa (I–II, q. 105, a. 1) a preference for a mixed government. The idea of popular sovereignty, and other democratic leanings, can also be found among the late Jesuit Scholastics.⁶²⁸ Yet by no means all theological opinions, and not even all dogmas, find a strong psychological echo among the masses. Although Catholicism, prior to the American and French Revolutions, emphasized democratic values more strongly than Protestantism on either side of the Atlantic, the affinity between the Church and democracy was for all practical purposes never a very strong one. To proceed from theological and philosophical concepts to delicate and highly intellectualized formulations in political matters is one thing; but to make them widely accepted is quite another. The Catholic Weltbild or “view of the world” lacked in its fundamental aspects most of the qualities that would have been needed to absorb a politically democratic order which bore no relationship to the social, religious or intellectual forces and tendencies of Catholic societies.

Traditional Catholic culture was always of a basically patriarchal pattern,⁶²⁹ characterized by a ubiquity of fatherhood which automatically fostered royal over republican institutions.⁶³⁰ The concept of society, in accordance with the whole Weltbild, was hierarchic: the main pressures and the very “grain” of existence were vertical rather than horizontal.

This secular order by no means contradicted the other, metaphysical hierarchy of souls. Even the medieval serf knew that simple fishermen were among the saints, and he could see in numerous churches murals representing Hell peopled by tortured popes, kings and bishops. This, however, was by no means egalitarianism. Egalitarianism in the modern sense existed nowhere: what appears to be egalitarianism is merely the strong consciousness of the mystery of the human soul which, though equal with all others at its inception, has to face struggles and temptations, experiences, defeats and victories which rapidly destroy the initial pattern of spiritual equality. “Human equality” in the Catholic orbit is thus nothing but the acute feeling of man’s inability to scrutinize and evaluate the status of souls.

Besides this notion of what we may call—quite arbitrarily—the hidden soul, there is the knowledge that the rôles played by persons here on earth may be thoroughly reversed on the other side of the grave, where all cards will be reshuffled for a new deal.⁶³¹ “He has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich empty away.” It would be wrong to consider these vistas to be without strong “this-worldly” implications, but the very symbol of what is usually taken for “Catholic democracy” (in the social sense)⁶³² is the skull and crossbones—whose omnipresence is nowhere more impressive than in the vaults of the Capuchins in Vienna, where the Habsburgs, the quondam masters of Christendom, are buried. When the Pope enters St. Peter’s for the coronation ceremony, he is greeted by a monk who blows out a candle—admonishing him not to forget that he is mortal like the rest of humanity.⁶³³ This thanatocentrism of Catholic nations is also, partially, the key to their latent revolutionism as well as to their peculiar craving for freedom. It is significant that sanguinary revolutions did not take place in Protestant countries after the evanescence of the earlier rigorism, i.e., after 1700. Civil wars in Protestant countries were henceforward inter-territorial wars, as in the United States (1776, 1861) and in Switzerland (1847). The connection between death and freedom is, of course, an obvious one.⁶³⁴

The Calvinistic and Old Testament notion of taking earthly success as a sign of divine favour and next-worldly promise is absent in Catholic nations, where the beggar is a “useful” member of society and commercialism is not highly appreciated. Professor Allison Peers was once accosted in Madrid by a beggar who uttered the following request: Una limosna, señor, por el amor de Diós, que en la plenitud de mi juventud me ha quitado la gana de trabajar (“An alms for the love of God, Who in the fullness of my youth has taken from me the appetite for work”).⁶³⁵ In Portugal we have the poor farmer, the cabaneiro, who supplements his meagre income by professional begging, especially in the Traz-os-Montes region.⁶³⁶ As for commercialism, it was never forgotten by Catholic nations that the merchants and money changers in the Temple were the only people physically chastised by Our Lord. St. Thomas Aquinas considered trading a licit activity only under extraordinary circumstances (Summa, II–II, q. 77, a. 4) and objected to a large commercial class in an ideal city (De regimine principum, ii. 3). It is hardly necessary to refer to the works dealing with the relationship between capitalism and Protestantism. Under these circumstances, it is not surprising that Catholicism has a greater affinity with agrarian than with urban society.⁶³⁷ The urban share of Protestants in organically grown societies will always be larger than that of Catholics though immigration created a different picture in the United States. The separation of State and Church, which forces the Church to “raise money” for the subsistence of the clergy, etc., thus constitutes a psychological problem in Catholic societies, where the businessman has little social status—and bishops are rarely chosen for their commercial qualifications.

Patriarchalism, with a relative (functional) hierarchy, harmonizes best with the traditional mentality of Catholic nations, which are demophile but not democratic.⁶³⁸ The Catholic “programme” is probably best expressed by a Spanish saying:

Tener un hijo
Plantar un arbol
Escribir un libro

(“To have a son, to plant a tree, to write a book”). Here we find the synthesis of patriarchalism, agriculture and artistry—a perfectly “reactionary” pattern. (Compare with Mussolini’s Un libro e un moschetto—fascista perfetto—“a book and a musket make a perfect Fascist”: intellect and the old Petrine curse—brute force.)

It is obvious that external as well as internal influences can adversely affect, or even destroy, large segments of this pattern without necessarily eliminating basic (i.e., theological) notions. This has happened again and again in the last 160 years. Such changes are, since they involve a series of intellectual and psychological conflicts, of a revolutionary rather than an evolutionary nature. The resulting “uneasy” compromises between the religious genius of Catholic nations, their shaken societies, and their often totally uncongenial forms of government, create grave tensions and perpetuate the revolutionary fervour. Hence Hegel despaired of the possibility of seeing a sensible constitution (vernünftige Verfassung) realized within the framework of the Catholic religion.⁶³⁹ This is the reason why the Catholic world in both hemispheres has never recovered its health, sanity and cultural fertility since the hormones of the French Revolution were injected into its system. (French Canada, which has been spared Rousseau and Robespierre, is the rather significant exception.)

It is also obvious that the ideological substance of the French Revolution is almost in its entirety the product of Protestant dialectics. Although there are some minor Cartesian and Jansenistic elements in the political philosophy of ’89 and ’92, the main impulses came from America, Britain, Holland and Switzerland.

It is thus very doubtful whether any stability in the Catholic world could be regained short of either the total destruction of the Catholic religion or the restitution of a Catholic way of life in conformity with a homogeneous Catholic view of the world. Neither event seems probable in the near future. In the meantime we have seen repeated perversions of traditional Catholic socio-political trends. To illustrate this we have shown in the preceding chapter how the drives fostering personal dictatorship of the mass-party pattern (the plebiscitarian tyranny) came from residues of patriarchalism—notwithstanding the fact that this perversion of patriarchal sentiments was deeply egalitarian and democratic, illiberal and “populistic.”

2. THE CATHOLIC CHARACTER

It is not surprising, therefore, that practically all efforts to establish a lasting organic connection between Catholicism and the “new régime” were bound to fail.⁶⁴⁰ The rigidity and relative immutability of Catholic teaching, Catholic dogma and the whole Catholic mentality prevented all permanent co-operation. While modern, liberal Protestantism is easily swayed and influenced by the issues of the day and the opinions of the world, Catholicism is relatively unpliable, and often prefers to suffer rather than to conform. In matters of dogma the rigidity is, naturally, complete. Though an impediment so far as momentary advantage is concerned, this dislike for compromise in essentials is no less helpful to the Church than her exclusiveness.⁶⁴¹ This attitude has influenced the character of Catholic nations, which often have been decried as “unreasonable” and “unco-operative.” Thus when Harry Hopkins, President Roosevelt’s emissary to Stalin, was blamed for having agreed to the fifth partition of Poland, he answered quite characteristically: “After all, what does it matter? The Poles are like the Irish. They are never satisfied with anything, anyhow.”⁶⁴²

Among the Protestant faiths it is subjectivism—embodied in the principle of private interpretation—and the lack of a central, infallible teaching authority which render them so frequently “up to date”; deprived of a captain and torn from its moorings, the ship of Protestantism drifts along the currents, while Greek Orthodoxy stays in a drydock of immobility.⁶⁴³ Catholicism now has to sail against the wind and against the currents. This is the reason why it so frequently seems out of tune with the spirit of the times—frequently but, perhaps, not always and not forever; because we are again beginning to live in an age of dogmatic affirmations. Even Protestant neo-orthodoxy is partly a reaction against liberal conformism, in an age when the failure of a Roussellian humanitarianism and of shadowy ethical notions without a religious foundation are so evident.

While Luther rejected rationality in the strongest terms,⁶⁴⁴ and thus fostered the rise of fideism and subjectivism, Catholic theology emphasized reason and logic very firmly.⁶⁴⁵ Yet it must also be added that the Church has always been apprehensive about the misuse of reason; this stand has not been affected by the strongly rationalistic and realistic character of Catholic theology since the days of St. Thomas.⁶⁴⁶ In contradiction to St. Thomas (and to Luther, after all) the Church often seemed to take the position that man is rather stupid than wicked. Protestantism, though rather pessimistic about the spiritual qualities of the “sin-cripple,” nevertheless gave him the Bible without explanatory footnotes, trusting in his intelligence (or “inspiration”). Catholicism, on the other hand, frequently tended to adopt the view that a superficial half-education was much worse than no education at all,⁶⁴⁷ and thus in Catholic countries we saw (and sometimes still see) a large number of illiterates side by side with an intellectual élite of high standards. The Protestant goal of education is usually one of good averages—the optimum for a democracy. In democracies there will always be resentment and contempt for the “highbrow” and the illiterate, the intellectual and the “peasant.” A comparison of the French Canadians with their English-speaking co-nationals, or of Americans with Argentines, will confirm this. The strong intellectualization of the professional classes in French Canada contributes to the incompatibility between the two “races.” In Quebec City, for instance, the poems of Claudel are sold at Woolworth’s and Kresge’s.

Still, the emphasis on reason in Catholic theology, which works for an intellectual discipline, produces also an exclusiveness characteristic of all systems adhering to logic. The typical Catholic thinker would always insist that only one or none of two contradictory statements can be right—but not both. The modern “liberal” attitude that both can be right “in their own ways” springs from the supposition that either objective truth does not exist or is humanly unattainable. Such a position automatically engenders a latitudinarianism which, among Protestants for instance, encourages interfaith movements; and, in the political scene, greatly reduces the antagonisms between political parties. If the latter have a broad common denominator, the indulgent voter will see in them mere “ins” and “outs.” The notion that an adversary may be right without impinging on one’s own “subjective-objective” correctness of view is, indeed, an indispensable quality for every nation governed by parliamentary institutions. At the same time it is obvious that there are (often fairly narrowly-set) limits to the “agreed dissent”; prompted by a subconscious fear of total atomization, Protestant societies will frequently watch the “common denominator” with jealous zeal. And thus a social totalitarianism soon ensues. Everett Dean Martin, a Congregationalist minister, went even further and insisted that “private interpretation” led directly to intolerance and, among the multitudes, “fortified ignorance with the delusion of infallibility, circumscribed the outlook of many men with an unimaginative liberalism and rationalized the crowd’s will to power.” (Liberty, p. 124.)

Catholic nations, that is, nations with a Catholic culture and Catholic religious convictions of varying intensity, have an entirely different turn of mind. If they are liberal, their liberalism springs from generosity,⁶⁴⁸ and not from any notion that contradictory opinions are mutually inclusive. Very significant is the popular modern expression “persuasion” for religion. One might die a martyr’s death for a conviction, a faith . . . but for a persuasion? To the convinced Catholic his religion is true and rational. We have heard it said that James Joyce, once erroneously reported as having embraced Protestantism, was congratulated on his conversion by an enthusiastic lady. “Madam,” the former Catholic and agnostic neophyte replied, “you are mistaken. I have lost my faith; I have not lost my reason.”⁶⁴⁹

Convictions, whether religious or political, in the Catholic world assume an absolute character, and sometimes even involve supreme sacrifices. Mere laws and regulations, constitutional charters, the results of elections and even brutal coercion frequently cannot cope with the forces of dissent, which will retaliate by revolutions, rebellions and assassinations.⁶⁵⁰ It is significant that the vast majority of political murders in the last hundred years was carried out predominantly by people with a Catholic, Greek Orthodox or Jewish background.⁶⁵¹ Yet political criminals were treated in most Catholic countries with a mildness which would shock Protestant nations. Friedrich Adler, the assassin of Count Stürgkh, Austrian Prime Minister in 1916 was condemned to death, but released from jail after two years. Gavrilo Prinćip, the assassin of the Archduke Francis Ferdinand, received a prison sentence only. In Russia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries only assassins or would-be assassins of members of the imperial family were executed. (There was no death penalty for any other crime, including murder. The “communist martyrs” are thus practically all victims of mob violence or of the Civil War period.) It must also be noted that most Western countries had special “gentlemanly” jails for political offenders: “fortress” in Germany, “state prison” in Austria and Hungary, etc. But Protestant countries, significantly, went to either of two extremes in their penal procedure: abolishment of death penalty (Scandinavia, Holland) or indiscriminate death penalty for all major crimes (Britain).⁶⁵² The former attitude has its roots in humanitarianism, the latter in agnosticism. The Catholic would reason that if the sentence is too light, the criminal still will have to pay the balance in the next world.

As a result we find in Catholic countries a tendency towards violence which, coupled with the Catholic thirst for the absolute, sometimes takes the most extreme forms. Of course one must not forget that many Catholic nations are also “racially” more excitable than their northern, Protestant neighbours. Even Bavaria is more “radical” than Prussia (and Austria more “radical” than Bavaria); yet Germany, for a variety of reasons, is not classifiable as a “Protestant country” (see below, Chapter VII, pp. 232, 243). But even a philosopher like Miguel de Unamuno, to cite an example, was strong in his denunciation of peace⁶⁵³ and yearned for a civil war—which finally broke out the year before he died. Yet if we want a vivid description of Catholic revolutionary absolutism we have to turn to a passage of Ramón de Valle-Inclán’s Los cruzados de la causa, a novel dealing with the First Carlist War. There he features a discussion between a nun and her bellicose old uncle, the Marqués de Bradomín. The nun says:

“Don Carlos is still not going to rule in Spain.”

“He will in Navarre, and in Álava and in Biscaya.”

The nun joined her hands with a gesture which was at the same time graceful and determined.

“But, uncle, in order to make justice triumph in this way, half of Spain will have to be depopulated.”

The voice of the guardian sounded with a muffled echo in the vastness of the hall:

“God depopulated the world by the Flood.”⁶⁵⁴

In this splendid piece of Spanish extremism⁶⁵⁵ we see an illustration of that Catholic tendency, so aptly described by Léon Bloy, to be or to become pélerins de l’absolu—“pilgrims of the absolute.”⁶⁵⁶ And it is precisely the contempt Catholic cultures have for the concept of compromise, the “fifty-fifty” so indispensable for parliaments with a pluriparty system, which degrades the figure of democratic politicians in the public eye more than in Protestant countries. When people see in politicians mere street-walkers ready for every “trade” or “deal,” respect for political institutions will also suffer in due time. We cannot entirely agree with Huizinga’s dictum (The Waning of the Middle Ages, p. 48) that “to the Catholic soul the unworthiness of the persons never compromises the sacred character of the institution.” Intellectually the Catholic will reject all such empiricism; yet the psychological effects are quite another matter. Modern Protestantism, on the other hand, has developed a real enthusiasm for the concept of compromise, which is so necessary for the ideals of “neighbourliness,” “co-operation” and “solidarity.”⁶⁵⁷ The opposite attitude would be incompatible with the pattern of the friendly “regular guy” (“ordinary, decent chap,” rechter Kerl), the male ideal of the democracies and plebiscitarian dictatorships. A famous saying of Göring’s was: “What we want is regular fellows!”⁶⁵⁸

The Catholic is not in such need of this lubricant of human intercourse because he is not communitarian, but personalistic or individualistic.⁶⁵⁹ But if we ask the average person with an average education whether Protestantism stands for individualism, diversity and freedom, and Catholicism for collectivism, uniformity and authority, we will probably get an answer in the affirmative.⁶⁶⁰ Yet as soon as we deal with the matter critically and compare specific national characters our informant will, perhaps, not only become hesitant but even apologetic about his first, rash answer.

And who is, actually, more anarchic and opposed to rules and regulations—the Austrian or the Prussian? The Lithuanian or the Latvian? The Irishman or the Englishman? The Spaniard or the Scandinavian? And if we speak about authoritarianism, the implication is only too often that all pressure comes from “above.” But we know that “authority” is not necessarily vertical; it can also be horizontal (i.e., societal instead of political), and the subsequent results from the point of view of individual freedom can thus be at least as disastrous as in a case of a tyranny from “above.” “The neighbours” and the community (the two terms are untranslatable, in their sociological meaning, into most Continental languages) can exercise an authority and control with a cold ferocity which can only be matched by the ubiquitous police network of a totalitarian state.⁶⁶¹ This is why Count Keyserling calls America socialistic in a deeper sense and arrives at the conclusion that “most Americans want to obey as no soldiers have ever done.”⁶⁶² D. H. Lawrence’s vistas on the non-liberal essence of America are of a similar character.⁶⁶³ James Tufts doubts that one can choose “individualism as an adequate term to characterize American life and institutions.”⁶⁶⁴ D. W. Brogan supports him in this view,⁶⁶⁵ and these criticisms of American “horizontal pressure” are nothing new. Félix de Beaujour sensed a lack of freedom in America,⁶⁶⁶ and even Jefferson felt compelled to write: “The country which has given to the world the example of physical liberty, owes to it that of moral emancipation also, for as yet it is but nominal with us. The inquisition of public opinion overwhelms, in practice, the freedom asserted by the law in theory.”⁶⁶⁷

Nonconformity is thus more difficult in a Protestant than in a Catholic society. One has only to ask the American tourist where he felt traditionally freer: in Paris, Munich, Vienna, Rome, Prague, Budapest, Cologne, Madrid, Venice and Innsbruck—or in Amsterdam, Geneva, Berlin, Oslo, Debrecen, Aberdeen and Salt Lake City. To be sure the Catholic religion is far more uniform, exacting and rigid than modern Protestantism; but the fact remains that Catholic nations are by “nature” lawless,⁶⁶⁸ individualistic,⁶⁶⁹ unco-operative (except when moved by personal affections), aloof⁶⁷⁰ and independent.⁶⁷¹

These are also the reasons why the Catholics of Catholic countries are, regardless of the intensity of their religious feelings, so frequently indifferent towards the commandments of their Church. Only in dispersion, or on the fringes of the area inhabited by Catholics, do they show a truly Protestant discipline. Count Sforza said: “A profound liberty in regard to dogma and discipline, and at the same time an instinctive avoidance of all formal heresy: these are the two most characteristic and constant traits of the religious conscience in Italy.”⁶⁷² In France the classic type of the fervent but non-practising Catholic was probably best represented by Charles Péguy.⁶⁷³

Slavery, therefore, had, in Catholic countries (the Iberian peninsula, South and Central America) a character entirely at variance with this institution in Anglo-Saxonry.⁶⁷⁴ Army life in Catholic countries is similarly of a much more personal and liberal nature; since Catholics are hostile to the disciplinarian monotony and rigour of the machine age, the relationship between superiors and subordinates in these armies assumes an informal, patriarchal pattern.⁶⁷⁵ There can be no doubt that the present Spanish army has a far less rigorous discipline than the Army of the United States, even though one is the instrument of “fascism” and the other of “democracy.”⁶⁷⁶ If, for one reason or another, informalism and patriarchalism is impossible—as, for instance, in the French and Spanish Foreign Legions—the remaining alternative is one between brutality and anarchy.⁶⁷⁷

In the case of war, the soldiers of Catholic nations must be thoroughly convinced of the sensibleness of the cause. If these convictions are lacking among Catholic soldiers—who often do not feel bound by the Protestant concept of “duty” (Pflicht), mutinies or mass desertions may easily result. Hence the greater reliability of Protestant groups and organizations bound by oaths, promises, etc. These will act efficiently and according to plan even if their belief and conviction in the cause has vanished a long time ago. “Mechanical action” is fairly alien to the Catholic, who is primarily motivated by his (frequently very subjective) conscience. It seems that only a filial affection can supplant conscience and conviction—a mere appeal to “duty” (or “law”) will not do the trick. All of which reminds us of Paul Valéry’s outcry about the Germans: “Savoir et devoir, vous êtes suspects.”⁶⁷⁸ On the other hand, the Portuguese in the Spanish Foreign Legion (the Tercio) were among the best soldiers; during the recent civil war they had accepted the explanation that this struggle was a crusade. But in 1918 they simply had run away before the Germans, since they had not the slightest desire to make Sleswig-Holstein or the Carpatho-Ukraine safe for democracy. The Italian soldier has almost the selfsame reactions. It was said that South Italian soldiers during World War I often applauded with shouts of Bravo, capitano! their officers who, trying to lead them into action, went “over the top.” These sons of workers and peasants had not the slightest interest in dying for the cause of a North Italian irredenta, a cause dear to the hearts of their officers with a very different political outlook. Yet to generalize about Italian “cowardice” is nonsense and merely betrays a lack of imagination. The Spanish pride, on the other hand, produces quite different effects. Compare the Spanish proverb: “To the king must be sacrificed one’s estate and one’s life, but honour is the patrimony of the soul—and the soul belongs to God only.”⁶⁷⁹

At first the violent craving for independence, so prevalent in the Catholic orbit, may seem highly paradoxical. Catholicism, moreover, is authoritarian in its organization, but liberal and “personalistic” in its theology. Liberal Protestant critics, though well acquainted with the authoritarian and monarchic⁶⁸⁰ structure of the Catholic Church and confused by the claim of Rome to absolute truth have only too frequently ignored the other, more important aspects of Catholicism, which is characterized by a complexio oppositorum. Not only do we find in Catholicism an affirmation of free will (libertas arbitrii, to be more correct), but also a rejection of the idea that the non-Christian cannot be saved. Luther, on the other hand, decidedly rejected free will (see Notes 768-69), and rudely rebuked Zwingli, who had expressed a hope to meet with Plato and Socrates in Heaven.⁶⁸¹ The problem of free will is dealt with so delicately in the Thirty-nine Articles that it is not easy to decide whether Anglicanism is as predestinarian as pure Calvinism, but free will was, beyond doubt, a cherished medieval concept (see, for instance, Dante’s Paradiso, Canto V, 19-25, and his De monarchia, i. 12). It is evident that the strong fideism of orthodox Protestantism has to result in an exclusiveness in matters of salvation which could never be shared by Rome. The Jansenist tenet, that supra-natural grace is not imparted outside the Visible Church, was expressly condemned by Pope Clement XI in 1713.

The idea that the true religion can be enforced, or that those who reject truth with full intellectual knowledge must be in bad faith, nevertheless haunted the Church for many centuries.⁶⁸² These two erroneous notions are not based so much on bad theology as on bad psychology and a misunderstanding of the real nature of man. Again we will quote Pascal’s “The heart has its reasons which reason does not know.” The repressive tendency within the Church is today definitely on its way out, although some rearguard actions are still being fought.⁶⁸³ The Canon Law says clearly (§1351) that “no one may be forced to embrace the Catholic faith against his will.” No theologian of renown would today question the possibility of the salvation of the non-Catholic as well as the non-Christian.⁶⁸⁴ The possible salvation of a heretic, a Jew or a pagan is not only a theological “view,” but definitely Catholic doctrine. This was well illustrated by the recent suspension of Father Feeney and of the three professors at Boston College.

Although the Church as the Mystical Body of Christ, and the Pope as the Vicar of Christ on earth, can make infallible pronouncements and can in certain matters “demand” absolute obedience, the highest forum for the Catholic still remains his own conscience. Catholic clericalism should not be exaggerated. On the one hand we see St. Thomas calling all Christians “kings and priests” (De reg. princ., 14); on the other we have the “democracy” of the beyond with its “new deal” placing popes, bishops and kings in Hell, as in Dante’s Divine Comedy.⁶⁸⁵

The formula “binding in conscience” can thus be very misleading. Théodore de Bèze’s “Freedom of conscience is a diabolic doctrine” can well be compared with Luther’s defiant attitude at the Diet of Worms (“Here I stand and cannot do otherwise”). Yet Luther, significantly, was then still in the cowl of a Catholic friar. The Catholic has the duty of forming, educating and training his conscience so that it conforms as closely as possible to the precepts of God and His Church. Yet the Catholic who has the misfortune of losing his faith and who honestly accepts the teachings of another religious body commits a mortal sin if he does not (publicly) embrace whatever religion he believes in. Father O. Karrer very wisely points out that G. B. Shaw was very much mistaken when he claimed Saint Joan of Arc for Protestantism. It was precisely her defiance of ecclesiastical authority and her strict adherence to her conscience which made her canonization possible.⁶⁸⁶ (It was the Devil’s Advocate who, during the process, had brought up the matter of a temporary yielding to episcopal pressure.) The serious character of the supremacy of conscience is described by Father Karrer in the following words:

The Church takes this doctrine about the primacy of conscience so seriously that she proclaims through her teachers: Even in a given exceptional case where an ecclesiastical authority—a priest, a bishop, or even the pope—were to demand something from a Catholic which would be wrong for his conscience, he would not be permitted to obey under any circumstances, and regardless of threats of the heaviest ecclesiastical penalties. When a respected theologian of the Middle Ages, Peter Lombard, proclaimed a contrary doctrine, he was universally opposed; and St. Thomas Aquinas, no less than Bonaventure and, later on, the Canonists themselves, insisted on an unconditional validity of conscience.⁶⁸⁷

According to Catholic theology it is, therefore, quite possible that John Hus’ soul went straight to heaven after his death at the stake, provided he sincerely believed in his own views, however erroneous. The Augustinian dictum (In psalm. cvi. 14): “How many who do not belong to us are really inside, how many of our own people are actually outside [the Church],” has at all times been accepted by the Catholic Church.⁶⁸⁸

3. CATHOLICISM AND POLITICAL BEHAVIOUR

The legal ideal of the Spaniard would lie in the possession of a document on which is written in clear and simple words: “This man is entitled to do whatever may enter his mind.”

—GANIVET, Idearium Español

In Chapter III we have pointed out the premises which Professor Laski considered to be indispensable for a sound parliamentary democracy: (a) a two-party system and (b) a common framework of reference—a common “language” for all (but preferably only two) parties. He quoted Lord Balfour: “Our whole political machinery presupposes a people so fundamentally at one that they can safely afford to bicker; and so sure of their own moderation that they are not dangerously disturbed by the never-ending din of political conflict.”⁶⁸⁹ Although Catholic nations have occasionally produced a two-party system—we have to remember the short-lived experiment of the First Austrian Republic—it has to be borne in mind that these parties often had the character of camouflaged Estates (with philosophical “fixations”), and thus remained “frozen” through decades. Yet it is the second Laskian precept which is so conspicuously absent in Catholic nations—and this includes countries with considerable Catholic minorities like Germany, the Netherlands and Latvia. The Netherlands had, luckily, a monarchical constitution, and thus the evolution towards dictatorship was spared to that nation.

The philosophical abysses between the political parties on the European continent are far less conspicuous in Protestant nations, with their intellectual flexibility—often amounting to rank irrationalism⁶⁹⁰—their relativism, and, last but not least, their totalitarian societies with their conformity and their automatic antagonism towards all radical dissenters. To all this must be added an abundance of myths,⁶⁹¹ which are often very helpful in averting “distractions” and in preserving the status quo. (Though we will never have statistics on that subject, it seems to us that the “conserving” myths far outnumber the “destructive” myths.)

In order to illustrate the first-mentioned characteristics, let us imagine a Norwegian commissioned officer who is: a Freemason, a Social Democratic voter, a member of a Lutheran parish, a monarchist of a sort, and a subscriber to a genuinely liberal paper. Although we do not venture to say that such human synthesis is the rule in Protestant civilizations, they exist nevertheless, and we have known several of them. This naturally does not exclude the phenomenon of an intellectual “schizophrenia,” which we might encounter in any nation, but especially in Russia. The Mexican anti-clerical firebrand who sends his daughters to a convent school is a good example.⁶⁹²

It would be very unjust to charge such persons with in-sincerity or hypocrisy, since the ideologies they adhere to have been so strongly “relativized” in the liberal Protestant climate that they have ceased to be mutually exclusive and antagonistic.⁶⁹³ A Freemasonry which does not insist on its deistic philosophy—a socialism which is ready to skip the notion of the dictatorship of the proletariat—a neo-Lutheranism which doubts the virgin birth and the divinity of Christ—a spiritualism which is scientific and materialistic—a pro-communism based on vague sentimentalities, and a liberalism which rejects free enterprise, can all be blended harmoniously. But the rigidity of the concepts in the Catholic orbit would provoke, for everybody sufficiently courageous and irrational⁶⁹⁴ to try the synthesis, an avalanche of excommunications. The situation in the Greek Orthodox world would not be far different, especially if we consider the persecution of all who deviate from the Communist party line in Russia.

Yet it is precisely this relativism of almost all ideas—excluding the Catholicism of the dispersion⁶⁹⁵—which makes for the easy and swift establishment of a common denominator, which in turn is quite rigorously enforced by all social agencies. All this fosters the growth of a virulent (though frequently not admitted) nationalism, strengthened by an amazing conformity which makes all basic dissent impossible.⁶⁹⁶

The division of the political parties between mere “ins” and “outs” is the logical result of this ideological uniformity. Thus a “working democracy” becomes possible; yet the price which has to be paid for it in terms of social control is one which the Catholic nations (in the long run at least) are not willing to pay. Sir Norman Angell very accurately described human existence in a totalitarian state when he wrote:

From the day that a child is born in Nazi Germany or Russia, and to a lesser degree in Italy, it is brought under the influence of the State’s doctrine; every teacher teaches it through the years of childhood and adolescence. In every conscript, whether military or industrial, the process is continued; every book suggests the prevailing orthodoxy; every paper shouts it; every cinema gives it visual suggestion.⁶⁹⁷

That is, mutatis mutandis, precisely the situation in all countries with a well-established democracy, where social forces jealously guard the “common denominator.” There is no doubt that the great pride of the democracies, compulsory education⁶⁹⁸ (and, to a lesser degree, conscription, is a prime factor in this process of forming the minds of citizens into a uniform pattern. It is obvious that the situation which existed in the Weimar period of the German Republic, when parties were totally unable to establish a real “dialogue,” had to lead to anarchy or to the iron rule of one victorious party; and such a victory could be achieved either in accordance with or in circumvention of the “democratic process.” Before 1933 the supremacy was contested among (a) two Socialist parties which saw in each other abject traitors but, nevertheless, divided humanity into bourgeois and proletarians, (b) ethnicists, who distinguished between Germans and non-Germans, (c) racialists, who talked of Aryans and non-Aryans, (d) “clericals,” who thought in the categories of saints and sinners or believers and non-believers, and (e) democrats deeply in love with the principle of numerical divisions. When the Nazis came to power they immediately proceeded to bring about complete uniformity in all matters. And since the Jews could not conform to the desired racial pattern, a fate was meted out to them which was even worse than that of the American Loyalists—of whom George Washington is supposed to have said that he could see “nothing better . . . than to commit suicide.”⁶⁹⁹ Racialism in Catholic countries is less in evidence than in the Protestant orbit, but the situation as it prevailed in partly Catholic Germany has its significance for every Catholic country.

From these and similar observations it is quite obvious that the political temper of Catholic nations is singularly unfit for parliamentary government, save in the small Catholic Swiss cantons where, due to their size and predominantly agrarian character, the dreaded mass democracy could not develop, and some sort of familial colour in the political system can be preserved. Catholic personalism and individualism found its most concrete expression in the strong federalistic (i.e., anti-centralistic) tradition of the Catholic cantons. The War of Confederacy (Sonderbundskrieg) of 1847 saw the Catholic cantons (save one) lined up in defence of “federalism” against the Protestant cantons eager to enforce centralization. This war, in a sense, paralleled those of 1861–65 (the American War between the States) and 1866 (the so-called Austro-Prussian War).

Federalism in the European anti-centralistic sense has always been part and parcel of Catholic political ideologies. The opposition of American Catholicism to the Child Labour Amendment was due to its proposed character of a federal law. The whole Catholic and conservative movement in Europe was always federalistic in outlook, condemning centralization and separatism alike. Almost all leftist movements were practically or programmatically centralistic; yet Catholic countries also produced a few leftist movements which were federalistic (see Lord Acton’s History of Freedom, p. 98). Pseudo-conservatism in Spain is centralistic, as opposed to the two genuinely Spanish movements—Anarchism and Carlism—which are federalistic and in favour of local autonomy. Neither atomization nor levelling lies within the Catholic religious tradition; what it demands is variety in unity.⁷⁰⁰ Hence also the manifoldness of Catholic religious orders, which show such a wide range in their character and structure.⁷⁰¹

Yet if there must be extremism, then a wild individualism takes precedence over its opposite form. As a result anarchism rather than communism or socialism is the classic form of “radicalism” in the Catholic orbit. Even in the Protestant mind the anarchist will always be an individual from a Catholic or a Greek Orthodox country, and never a member of a Protestant nation. The assassin with a black beard and a smoking bomb is neither an Englishman nor a Swede nor a Prussian, but possibly an Irishman or—even more likely—a Spaniard, an Italian or a Russian. Incidentally, what in European conversations is often glibly called a “bolshevik” is in reality frequently an anarchist. The superior propaganda of the Third International has unfortunately attracted millions in western Europe who are anarchists at heart but, lacking something better, vote the Communist ticket. We are faced here by a tragic misunderstanding, without parallel in Catholic Germany or Austria, because these regions had the privilege of “visual education.” In France and Italy the comedy of errors continue with millions expecting from Communism the end of all controls and total liberty—not total control and a planned economy. In Continental parlance the Catholics are often referred to as “the black ones”; but black is also the colour of the anarchist flag.

It is for the anarchist, then, that even the European Catholic rightist had a weak spot in his heart. Rarely has public opinion in the Old World been more stirred, regardless of party affiliations, than by the Sacco and Vanzetti case. Vanzetti’s earthly remains were interred in an Italian cemetery, where a local cult soon developed with the toleration of the Fascist authorities. A book about the two executed anarchists was published in Naples.⁷⁰² Arnaldo Mussolini, brother of the dictator, wrote a leading article on the two revolutionaries in the Popolo d’Italia, which was incorporated into the aforementioned volume as a preface. Anarchism, of course, was nothing new in the Mussolini family; the father of the duce himself was an anarchist, and gave to his older son the Spanish name of Benito for Benito Juárez (the Italian form would have been Benedetto); while the younger son was named Arnaldo after Arnaldo di Brescia, the great anti-papalist rebel. Yet unlike his older brother, Arnaldo always followed a “papal” orientation.

From all the foregoing it is evident that Catholicism (including Greek Orthodoxy) does not harmonize with the bourgeois spirit and the whole mentality of the middle class.⁷⁰³ This disharmony affects all Continental countries, including Germany,⁷⁰⁴ including France.⁷⁰⁵ Even the more sensitive English Catholics will manifest scepticism towards the bourgeois values. The reasons for this attitude are manifold; they are historical as well as sociological, psychological as well as religious.⁷⁰⁶ Last but not least, they have to be found in the democratic affinities of the urban middle classes,⁷⁰⁷ affinities whose teleology leads clearly to communism,⁷⁰⁸ nazism and other totalitarian heresies.

About the attitude of Catholic cultures towards racialism we have written elsewhere.⁷⁰⁹ Here, as in all other fields of our investigation, not the attitude of individual Catholics (who in the dispersion may easily be affected by the traditions of the majority), but those of the multitudes in Catholic nations have to be analyzed. Moreover, it must never be forgotten that Catholicism, in spite of its historical paternity, is a stranger in the modern world. Non-Catholic cultural patterns affect the most Catholic of civilizations; even the Tyrolean peasant, the Italian Benedictine monk and the Basque Jesuit are influenced to a certain degree by Calvin, Marx, Adam Smith, Bentham, Descartes, Rousseau and Thomas Paine. Still, it can be said that racialism in Catholic countries was always weak, and that anti-judaism in Catholic and Greek Orthodox countries always had a religious, and not a biological, bias.⁷¹⁰ Hitler’s revolution failed, significantly enough, in Black Munich; he succeeded democratically, by elections, in conquering the Reich from the north. The difference between racial concepts in British and French colonies, or between America and Brazil, is obvious. The reasons have to be found in religious commandments and, even more so, in more basic attitudes derived from religious notions.⁷¹¹

Taken all in all, the picture the Catholic nations offer us contains light and dark sides. If we are permitted to generalize, these nations emerge as a rather individualistic⁷¹² and violent crowd; tending towards extremes; partly cynical and partly devout; in the worst case for hire rather than for sale; hardly given to respect or reverence; independent, aloof, unco-operative; undisciplined and sceptical; in one sense splendidly adjusted to this world and, in another one, not at all; strong in their hatreds and affections; proud; and more admirable under stress and duress than in everyday life. Whether one prefers their intensely “human” world to that of enlightened Protestantism is primarily a matter of religion. Lacking belief in a specific creed, this choice would depend on personal tastes and affinities. Still, it must be borne in mind that, whatever our stand may be, religious patterns are of the greatest political importance. The full realization that the Catholic world is faced by the simple alternative of the patriarch or the policeman would have spared millions of lives.

4. CATHOLICISM AND THE FORMS OF GOVERNMENT

This alternative, it must be repeated again, does not exclude the fact that Catholic nations can, in a social sense, be more “democratic,” more demophile than Protestant countries. Just because the Church insists that only God can see into the heart of a person, a seemingly egalitarian position is often taken.⁷¹³ And just because these nations are not genuinely egalitarian, they still can claim to be liberal in the original sense of the term. Dr. Henry Smith Leiper wrote very correctly: “Europe is often said to have rejected democracy. In a sense that remains true. But no intelligent man is entitled to conclude from that fact that Europeans no longer love freedom.”⁷¹⁴ Over a century ago George Ticknor, the open-minded Bostonian traveller, who in Austria went from monastery to monastery, noted in his diary: “In all three monasteries, as well as in the two or three monks I saw at Heiligenkreuz, I have found a more liberal and even republican tone the prevalent one.”⁷¹⁵ The intellectual absolutism of Catholicism has not even impaired the “individualistic” aspects of medieval civilization.⁷¹⁶ If we are looking for free societies we have to search for them among the Catholic and Greek Orthodox nations, yet these have, at best, established only relatively free governments. They have to choose between monarchy and dictatorship. Experience also has taught us that the change from the republican form of government to tyranny is far swifter than from democracy to monarchy; thus the great efforts in the immediate past to enforce democracy in the Old World (and in the New)⁷¹⁷ have ended in the long run with dictatorship and a catastrophic decline of personal liberties. The short demo-liberal interlude is terminated by the advent of tyranny. . . .

Since only 13 per cent, of the population of the European continent are followers of Protestant creeds, and since the efforts to “make the world safe for democracy” were largely directed against the Catholic and the “mixed” zone, the results of all these endeavours have been disastrous. Civil liberties in Russia, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, Spain, Portugal, and Albania are today considerably less than in 1900; the future of constitutional democratic government is promising neither in Germany and Austria nor in France and Italy. The revolutionary ferment has destroyed all Catholic monarchic institutions (save in Belgium), and the outlook in the Greek Orthodox world is not much brighter.

Protestantism, on the other hand, with its flexibility, was able to effect a synthesis between “progress,” democracy, liberalism, tradition and religion. As a result—quite paradoxical at the first glance—monarchy has become the Protestant form of government. Conversely, republicanism in Europe becomes more and more synonymous with tyranny.

There are now only two free Protestant republics, the United States and Finland, with a Switzerland of mixed religion (42 per cent. Catholic) trailing after them. There are only these three well-established liberal-democratic republics in the world. France, perhaps, can be called lucky if she becomes a dictatorship under De Gaulle—as the least of all evils. If we judge this military leader by his famous book, Le fil de l’épee,⁷¹⁸ we must come to the conclusion that he has always been a frank and wholehearted supporter of an authoritarian régime. Italian democracy, on the other hand, may well be a still-born child, strangled at the moment of its birth by the umbilical cord of a not so very democratic peace treaty. The necessary conditions for a sound parliamentary democracy are, naturally, neither on this nor on the other side of the Mont Génis. And we can doubt whether they ever will be. Nor in Spain (this is quite evident when we read the thumbnail sketch of Spanish political history given by General Franco in a speech to the Cortes in May, 1946),⁷¹⁹ nor in Germany, nor in Danubia, nor in the Balkans, nor on the Volga, nor anywhere south of the Rio Grande.

It would, nevertheless, be a great error to think that Continental Europeans do not have a genuine desire for liberty and a healthy framework for the free development of their personalities. The only possible hope they have is a monarchical restoration; but this hope is extremely dim. Curiously enough, the recognition that the “good old times” are those of monarchical “tyranny” prior to 1914 is quite general. The masses, in the quest for bread and security, are no less conscious of this commonplace than the intellectuals eager for liberty. And yet there is at the same time a far-reaching disbelief in the possibility of a return to this one and only form of government that harmonizes with the Catholic temper and promises a minimum of sanity, balance and peace. The U.S.S.R. and the U.S.A. do not favour restoration, and are historically and psychologically bound to oppose it. The United Kingdom is in a very similar situation. In 1945 Austrian monarchist leaders, just released from Nazi concentration camps, were temporarily jailed by the Western Allies.

Under the circumstances, there can be little hope for an integration of social inclinations and political forms in the Old World. Not even a miraculous destruction or quick elimination of Catholicism would help, because the cultural pattern remains for some time even if its theological cause is removed. Joseph de Maistre’s dictum that large nations can only be ruled by religion or slavery—one or the other—is as true today as it was a hundred and twenty years ago. Madariaga’s thesis that Spaniards are moved by two historical forces—dictatorship and separatism, slavery and anarchy—is true for the rest of the Catholic world, though the Spanish case is the most extreme of all.⁷²⁰ The alternative to this choice remains unalterably the familial order of monarchy based on affection. Nothing can replace it. Nor should it be forgotten that the countries of continental Europe all need a mission, a final end, a metaphysical goal—which even elections, increased exports, more calories and better dental care are not going to obviate.⁷²¹

All this is of great importance to America—not because she harbours millions of Catholics; they are culturally assimilated and follow a political tradition which harmonizes very well with a specific Catholic school of political thought.⁷²² The importance lies in the fact that the Catholic world coexists with America on the same planet, in the same hemisphere, on the same continent. Today the Catholic nations, without exception,⁷²³ are going through an enormous crisis; they are not only decimated by the war and under pressure from the colossus in the east, but they are also in an agonía in the Spanish sense of the word, in an internal struggle for life and death. They have not recovered from the blows of the last few centuries, nor found the political institutions congenial to them. They have not been able to adapt their societies to the forms of government fostered and favoured, enforced and impressed by the outside.⁷²⁴ They (and even more so the observers on the sidelines) have understood neither the basic difference between liberalism and democracy nor the teleological antithesis between these two trends. Yet it is virtually certain that the Catholic nations, with their love for personal liberty,⁷²⁵ their earthly pessimism, their pride and scepticism,⁷²⁶ will never in their hearts accept parliamentary democracy.⁷²⁷

This must be borne in mind by all their friends and well-wishers, who should remember Vauvenargue’s saying: “The usual pretext of those who make others miserable is that they want to do them good.” Only if they strive to help the European continent to find its own soul will they act constructively.⁷²⁸ Only thus can the Continent hope to become again what it used to be, a tierra libre y real—a Free and Royal Land.⁷²⁹

The sex act within the marriage bond thus receives sacramental character—hence the insolubility of a genuine matrimonium consummatum. And it would be very naïve to believe that the stand of the Church against artificial contraception is essentially “demographic”; it is defending primarily the very dignity and significance of the sex act.

CHAPTER VI

HUS, LUTHER AND NATIONAL SOCIALISM

The Genesis of a Totalitarian Movement—I

1. INTRODUCTION

THE last two chapters of this book deal with two aspects of the genesis of National Socialism: (1) the problem of the Lutheran fatherhood of National Socialism itself, and (2) the origins of the Nazi party, the N.S.D.A.P. These two chapters are, therefore, only occasionally and incidentally a “prehistory” of Nazi thought. The pedigree we are offering here is by its very nature incomplete; it is merely a contribution to an investigation which necessarily should have a wider scope. The present chapter is primarily a sample of the history of ideas, whereas Chapter VII aspires to be a fragment of straight historical research. Nevertheless, the problems which dominate this book—authority, freedom, equality, orthodoxy and heresy—still figure here on almost every page.

From the point of view of the history of ideas we are convinced that Hus exercised some influence on Luther, on Mussolini, and on the Czech socialist (the Social Democratic) party. (We will refer to the forerunners of Hus only very cursorily, since almost all threads lead through him.) Luther, in turn, together with Calvin, has through a long process of dialectics stimulated the growth of modern democracy. The French Revolution has roots which go back to Calvin and, perhaps, also to Jansenius. Czech socialism fathered Czech National Socialism, which also claims some of the Hussite (Taborite) heritage. Hus also inspired nineteenth-century German nationalism. German nationalism produced Jahn; Jahn influenced Miroslav Tyrš; Tyrš is the most important figure in Czech nationalism. Democracy and ethnic nationalism co-operated in Europe most closely.

Fig. 1.  THE GENEALOGY OF NATIONAL SOCIALISM

Luther is also a forerunner of Hegel; Hegel is the mentor of Marx and Treitschke, hence the trailblazer of socialism, nationalism and statism. Marx gave his doctrine to German, Austrian and Czech socialists alike. Treitschke, on the other hand, influenced Schönerer, and Schönerer influenced Hitler. Marx is also behind French socialism, which produced Sorel, who in turn is admittedly the spiritual father of the young socialist Mussolini, the admirer of Hus. And Mussolini influenced Hitler. (For a schematic representation of some of these currents of influence, see Fig. 1.)

Czech National Socialism (inspired by Hus) provoked in Bohemia and Moravia a National Socialist political organization among the Germans of these two provinces (the so-called Sudeten Germans). Hitler, far from being the founder of nazism, merely entered a small but well established movement.

Almost all of these ideologies—socialism, ethnic nationalism, fascism, National Socialism of the Czech as well as of the German pattern—claimed to be democratic. None of them claimed to be liberal. All were hostile in varying degrees towards Catholicism. All have common ancestors. All ceaselessly influenced each other, and their prehistory is nothing but an endless and ceaseless repetition of “incestual” alliances and inbreeding.

All these philosophies are anti-Catholic, anti-monarchical, anti-traditional; they look solely to the future, want to build a new society, and are “dawnist.” They are opposed to the freedom of the person and are collectivistic; they divide human beings into specific categories, and they all favour the rise of an omnipotent state. They are materialistic, and claim to be “progressive.” All of them have their affinities with the French Revolution. The whole bitter struggle among them is desperate and pitiless on account of its fratricidal nature. They do not see in each other strange opponents, but competing heresies with a common origin.

2. THE PREHISTORY OF LUTHERANISM

If we were tempted to write a complete prehistory of Lutheranism, we would certainly have to include not only the name of Hus, but also those of Wycliffe, Marsiglio, Waldo and perhaps even of the Albigensian heresiarchs,⁷³⁰ of Bogumil and Mani. To be sure, it would not be easy to find a direct influence of Marsiglio on Luther; but very soon after the rise of the Reformer we see a revival of the writings of the Italian statist in the Germanies.⁷³¹ His influence on Wycliffe is undoubted.

The Oxford cleric, in turn, is the first Protestant in our sense. In his De eucharistia he opposed Transubstantiation, and thus completely “annulled” the concept of priesthood, whose status is primarily based on the supranatural power to transform bread and wine into the body and blood of Jesus Christ. Wycliffe’s “poor preacher” was merely a popularizer of the Gospels. In this Reformer’s De officio regis the next logical step was taken, by proclaiming royal power supreme in a secularized state and society.

Luther went through precisely the same motions and came to the same conclusions. But it must be emphasized that it was Wycliffe’s basic theology, rather than his political deductions, which interested the German reformer. He mentioned Wycliffe in his De servo arbitrio, and contemporary critics remarked on his indebtedness to his English forerunner.⁷³²

The influence of Wycliffe on Hus, on the other hand, has never been questioned, and it is no exaggeration to say that Hus was not much more than the Bohemian propagandist for and translator of Wycliffe. When he was burned at the stake Hus died as a witness for Wycliffe’s teachings. Still, we do not have full clarity on the problem of the missing link between Wycliffe and Hus. Not a few authors hint at members of the court of Anne of Bohemia, the queen of King Richard II; others at a certain Faulfisch, a burgher of Prague;⁷³³ others again emphasize the rôle of Peter Payne, vice-principal of St. Edmund’s Hall, who went to live in Bohemia. Payne was domiciled for some time in Saaz (Žatec) with Peter Chelčický; yet there is no indication that he was in Bohemia prior to the death of Hus.⁷³⁴

In spite of the great influence of the works and thoughts of Wycliffe in Bohemia,⁷³⁵ one should not underestimate the influence of the Beghards (Picards).⁷³⁶ The use of the term “Third Empire” for the coming millennium was undoubtedly adopted by the Taborites from their Beghard forerunners.⁷³⁷ It was used by the priest Vaněk, one of the founders of Tábor.⁷³⁸

As to Hus’ influence on Luther, the existing material and literature is fairly rich. Although a few Catholic authors writing in German have noted the connection between Luther and Hus,⁷³⁹ the German Lutherans have rather tended to “play it down.” Czech authors, proud of their compatriot, have put considerable emphasis on Hus’ partial paternity of Luther’s ideas. Among these Jaroslav Goll and F. M. Bartoš deserve special mention.⁷⁴⁰ The latter believes that the influence of the “Brethren” (bratři) on Luther was especially decisive.⁷⁴¹ To the Catholic authorities prosecuting Luther, the connection between him and Hus was obvious from the beginning.⁷⁴²

As in the case of Hitler, we find also contemporary rumours referring to a Bohemian origin of Luther; it was said that he was born in Bohemia⁷⁴³ or that he had a wife and children in Bohemia.⁷⁴⁴ Against these false allegations he protested vigorously.

Whether he had Hussite notions before his disputation with Dr. Eck in Leipzig also remains a matter of conjecture. Hussite ideas had found their way into Germany partly through the Taborite invaders and partly through individual missionaries of the Husso-Wycliffite ideology; Jan Herben mentions the Erfurt theologian Johann Wesel, the “agrarian saint” Böhm, and Johann Drähndorf, who was burned at the stake in Worms in 1425, convicted of Taborite errors. To these he adds the latter’s friend, Peter Turnov (died at the stake at Speyer in 1426); Friedrich Reisert, executed in 1458, and who is said to have been consecrated by Mikuláš Pelhřimovský; Matthias Hagen (burned in 1458), and Nicholas Rutze (died 1508).⁷⁴⁵ Capito von Hagenau insisted that the seed of Hussitism survived not only in Moravia and England (?), but especially in the Germanies “among old people.” “In the years of my childhood,” he continues, “I heard a lot of things which made me wonder, but then I did not understand where it would finally lead.”⁷⁴⁶ Luther himself made a very similar confession when he wrote in 1520:

Thus in many places of Germany there remained from old times a certain amount of incoherent talk about John Hus, and it increased constantly until I too fell upon it. I have found out that he was indeed a dear and very enlightened man, whom even twenty thousand Dr. Ecks collectively could not have defeated.⁷⁴⁷

But it seems that Luther, in spite of this somewhat unclear admission, had felt no personal affinities towards Hussitism prior to his disputation in Leipzig, when Dr. Eck accused him of repeating the errors of the “Bohemians”—a phrase which recurs in the papal bull expressing Luther’s excommunication. Heinrich Boehmer, one of the most outstanding Protestant experts on Luther, admitted that the Reformer, so far fairly ignorant of Hus’ position, had been driven into a corner by his adversary. Only then he proceeded to read some of Hus’ writings, which roused his enthusiasm.⁷⁴⁸ His original “anti-Hussite” stand⁷⁴⁹ was fundamentally altered, but in later years he publicly refused to see in Hus a “saint”⁷⁵⁰—a stand probably due to Luther’s concept of the fundamental rottenness of all human nature.

Boehmer’s views are amply supported by some of Luther’s letters and other passages in his writings. Wenzel von Roždalowsky, a Czech nobleman, sent Luther in July 1519 a libellum of Hus’ “which he wrote about the Church.”⁷⁵¹ We are not in a position to know with certainty just what pamphlet or pamphlets they were that had been sent to the Reformer by his Bohemian correspondent, together with the letters of some Utraquist priests. It could have been Hus’ De ecclesia. In a letter addressed to Staupitz on October 3, 1519, under a Wittenberg dateline, Luther expressed himself in the following way:

I have just received from Prague in Bohemia letters of two priests of the Utraquist faction—men indeed learned in the Sacred Scriptures—together with a pamphlet of John Hus which I have not yet read. They exhort me to constancy and patience, [and say that] that is the pure theology which I teach.⁷⁵²

To these, and probably also to other writings, Luther referred again and again. In mid-February 1520 he wrote to Spalatin in full admiration of Hus, but emphasized again his previous ignorance of the Czech Reformer’s writings:

Hitherto I have unwittingly taught and held all [the opinions] of John Hus. John Staupitz, unaware of their origins, also taught them. In brief, we are all Hussites without knowing it. Not to mention Paul and Augustine who are Hussites to the letter. Just consider the surprising situation into which we have come without the Bohemian leader and doctor.⁷⁵³

Yet it should not be forgotten that Luther had already asked Spalatin, in a letter dated July 20, 1519, whether he had read the books of Hus—that is, at a time when he had not yet received either the letter or the booklets from Roždalowsky.⁷⁵⁴ It is difficult to know whether Luther’s interest in Hus is really so recent as the Leipzig disputation, especially in view of the admission quoted above concerning the talk about Hus in so many German localities. In Luther’s commentary on the twelfth chapter of Daniel we read that “Hus dealt a fatal blow to the papacy” and that “the papacy sank after John Hus into great contempt, [and] the name and teaching of John Hus could not be repressed nor destroyed by any power.” Hus is there expressly called a forerunner of Luther, whose coming he prophesied when he said: “In a hundred years you will have to answer God and me,” and also: “You are going to broil a goose (Hus means goose) but a swan will succeed me and him you will not roast.”⁷⁵⁵ Luther added the comment that Hus expired at the stake in 1416, whereas the scandal about indulgences came to a head in 1517; but Hus’ prophecy is, needless to say, a vaticinium ex post and quite unhistorical.⁷⁵⁶

Luther’s testimony in this matter is full of contradictions; his admissions are counterbalanced by denials like the following:

Finally I protest that if John Hus and Hieronymus of Prague were burned for no other cause (as it seems) than because of these Articles, an injury was done them, and the Pope and his minions were to them most cruel and sacrilegious murderers, enemies of Christ and His Church. Whoever will read these remarks will be my witnesses to his faith and my confession. I indeed did not know at Leipzig the meaning of the Articles, [but] I saw that their words were most Christian. Thus I could not then refute the sense which the admirer of the Pope gave. But now that John Hus’ book is available to me, from what preceded and what followed I see that their sense was most Christian.⁷⁵⁷

Naturally, we have to take into consideration human vanity, which tends to claim originality of thought. Luther’s sudden changes of mind appear also in other aspects of this controversy. Thus at one time he may boast that Wycliffe and Hus were mere critics of papal abuses⁷⁵⁸—which is most certainly an underestimation of their rôles—while at other times he is fully conscious of the importance of Hus, when he writes:

John Hus was the seed or semen which must die and be buried in the earth; but later on it grows up powerfully.⁷⁵⁹

Whereas we cannot see with full clarity the influence of Hus on Luther prior to his disputation with Eck (July 4–5, 1520), it is difficult to doubt that the Reformer was acquainted with his Bohemian forerunner; it is, moreover, certain that the stature of Master John was growing in Luther’s eyes during the following years, and that he read at least some of his works. Luther’s identification of the papacy with Antichrist is most typically Hussite.

When the “Nightingale of Wittenberg” started to sing, the slumbering Taboritism and the still virulent Utraquism of Bohemia and Moravia swung into Luther’s camp. It is not sheer coincidence that the Thirty Years’ War started where the Hussite crusade had left off—in Bohemia. Taking all the evidence together, it is difficult to deny that Hussitism had served as a pattern and had blazed a trail which smoothed the path of the sixteenth-century Reformation. It has thus helped, for better or worse, to lay the foundations of our modern civilization. Even in England there were still considerable remnants of a Wycliffe-inspired Lollardy when Tyndale spread word of Martin Luther. The complaint of Bishop Tunstall to Erasmus in 1523 about the impetus given to the new creed by Lollard undercurrents is well known.759a

3. LUTHERANISM IN THE RISE OF NATIONAL SOCIALISM

In order to come to a fuller understanding of the inner aspects of National Socialism we have made statistical maps (see Figs. 2–4), based on the Kreise division of Germany, showing the interrelationship of political and religious affiliations. We have chosen, as a medium of comparison for the religious distribution, the results of the 1934 census; and, as an index for the Nazi votes, the election of July 31, 1932. (The latter was decided upon only after prolonged deliberation. Two more elections were held, in November, 1932, and in March, 1933. The November election showed a decline of Nazi votes, and was no indication of their full popular potential. The March elections were held under the influence of the Reichstag fire, and we also have proof that in certain areas, especially in southern Bavaria, the results of these elections were falsified.)

The comparison of the religious map with the electoral maps demonstrates at first glance that there is the most obvious connection between the two, and that the Protestant areas, with exceedingly few exceptions, were the main “producers” of the Nazi votes. In those Protestant districts where the Nazis were relatively few, we find a high percentage of Communist votes. This is especially the case in Western Saxony, and in Thuringia, with an extremely big Communist vote. (The inclusion of these areas—both west of the Elbe River—in the Soviet zone of occupation, thus placing the Russian domain within 120 miles of the Dutch border, had clearly not only strategic but also political implications.) Still, one cannot fail but be impressed by the religious aspect of the map showing the National Socialist votes, an aspect detectable only after detailed calculations in relation with the Communist vote. And yet, Communism no less than National Socialism was vigorously opposed by the Catholic Church.

In East Prussia we are faced by the odd situation of the Lutheran Polish Masurians voting overwhelmingly Nazi, while the German Catholic Varmians living in the heart of East Prussia remained in opposition to the Brown Creed. (The map showing the distribution of Nazi votes features this horizontal line of ethnic division.) It is interesting, by the way, that whereas the Lutheran Polish Nazi voters were allowed to remain undisturbed, the German Varmians who voted anti-Nazi were deported in the years 1945–1947.

Yet it is obvious that Catholic and Protestant districts produced no uniform picture by themselves. National Socialism, though fundamentally a lower-middle-class movement, had a large peasant support at the polls—a phenomenon due to the age-old political naïveté of the peasantry. Catholic regions with a tradition of religious and political opposition had, naturally, better averages than the more complacent Catholic Bavarians. Nothing could be more significant for the close interrelationship between intensity of religious feeling and political orientation than the case of the combined Catholic Kreise Aschendorf-Hümmling: here we have not only the lowest percentage of Nazis (three per cent), but also the highest birth rate in all of Germany. Yet these are peasant districts, and juridically they belong to “Prussia.” This may give us an idea how careful one has to be with labels. Only if we accept an identification of Prussia and Protestantism can we operate in a certain sense with the “Prussian-Nazi” thesis (see Note 335). The Upper Franconian area of Bavaria, for instance, was strongly Nazi. It is inhabited by “Bavarians,” yet these are Protestant, and thus traditionally democratic and with little enthusiasm for the Wittelsbach dynasty.⁷⁶⁰

Still, the fact remains that the South and the West were the regions least affected by the Hitler movement. We have the testimony of a journalist of renown who insisted that “Black Bavaria,” including Munich, the “capital of the movement,” was strongly opposed to National Socialism.⁷⁶¹ The remarkable resistance of Catholicism and individual Catholics also impressed other observers who lived during the war years in Germany.⁷⁶² A full story of Catholic resistance against nazism is yet to be given to the English-speaking public.⁷⁶³

On the other side of the ledger, we have heard Herr Streicher insisting during the trial in Nuremberg that were Luther still alive he would have been among the accused for his anti-Jewish views.⁷⁶⁴ And a whole score of theologians, sociologists, political analysts and historians (in their overwhelming majority non-Catholics) have pointed an accusing finger at Luther as the main culprit in the rise of German National Socialism. Among these there are such outstanding Protestant churchmen as Karl Barth, Reinhold Niebuhr and Dean Inge. Among the secular luminaries we find Erich Fromm, Werner Hegemann, W. M. McGovern, Franz Neumann, Karl Otten, P. Wiener and others. Even G. P. Gooch, who likes to weigh his remarks, has harsh words for Luther.⁷⁶⁵

In the Christian Century, a leading liberal American Protestant weekly, an acrimonious debate about Luther’s guilt went on during 1946. And in the past we have seen Lutheran publishers and authors in the United States producing and printing gems like the following, which—in spite of the admiration of certain Catholics for Mussolini—could hardly be matched in the “opposite camp”:

It cannot be said of Hitler that he is a dictator of the German people, but their humble leader and representative. . . . If we consider only the human nature and character of Jesus—His lofty social principles and general attitude towards society—we may say that there are certain resemblances between Jesus the man, and the popular leader of Germany.⁷⁶⁶

So far, so good. Yet the guilt of Luther in the rise of nazism in Germany, if it exists at all, must be specified and proved with more solid arguments. Our investigation has first to deal with the views and the teachings of Luther in order to find whether his ideology (his philosophy and theology) has strong Nazi implications. (It is obvious that a few affinities exist between most ideologists, and that the accusation of an intellectual paternity must be well substantiated. Even Communism is unthinkable without the Christian background.)

And, if we can prove that Luther can justly be called a “Nazi forerunner,” we have still to deal with the question whether the Nazi or Nazoid views of the German Reformer had a real causative effect on the rise of National Socialism in the last few decades. We have also to differentiate between moral and “mechanical” guilt. Especially in the realm of the history of ideas we find not only the element of continuation, but also those of distortion, degeneration, dialectic change⁷⁶⁷ and last, but not least, of antinomian reaction. Neither should the effects of popular historical falsifications in the minds of the masses be underestimated. In this respect the picture of the past, rather than the past itself, is of importance.

The study of Luther’s life work is a Herculean task. The modern, up-to-date, scholarly edition of his works published by the house of Böhlau in Weimar contains so far about seventy volumes, of about 250,000 words each. The series was started in 1883, and not completed in 1939. The Briefwechsel and the Tischreden each belong to a separate series, and are numbered accordingly. This alone should give us an indication of the limitations which a wide popularity of the real Martin Luther would almost automatically encounter. Indeed, there are few Lutheran clergymen who are well versed in Luther’s writings, and many of them would be astonished—if not dismayed—at the quotation of certain passages of the Reformer. And we even find considerable differences between the personal views of Luther and sixteenth-century Lutheranism. The attitude of Luther towards predestination, for instance, as expressed in De servo arbitrio,⁷⁶⁸ and the views of the Evangelical Church, are far from being in absolute harmony.⁷⁶⁹

Another matter is the spirit of the Reformation itself, which was only to a very limited extent in keeping with the spirit of humanism and the Renaissance. On the whole, as we have said before, it was a reaction against the spirit of the times; it was a rigoristic movement, and thus “medieval” in the popular sense. Intelligent Catholics have always understood that the Reformation was a movement towards and for more religion rather than the opposite. At the Diet of Nuremberg (1523) Pope Hadrian VI, through his Legate, made a moving declaration which squarely blamed the Church for the Reformation.⁷⁷⁰ Many Catholics—as, for instance, the late Mgr. Seipel, Chancellor of Austria, and Giovanni Papini—see not in the Middle Ages but in the Renaissance and the Baroque the great Catholic age. D. H. Lawrence was at least symbolically right when he wrote that the Pilgrim Fathers ran away from the new European liberty of the Renaissance.⁷⁷¹ Of all early Reformers probably only Zwingli was a humanist, a humanitarian and a liberal; while Luther, no less than Calvin, preached a holy war against the “paganized” Catholic Church. Nothing could be more erroneous than to follow in the footsteps of nineteenth-century liberal opinion and to see in Luther a herald of the Chromium Age, with “democracy,” civil liberties, bath tubs, refrigerators and the U.N. just around the corner. There was something decidedly Islamic in original Protestantism,⁷⁷² with its idea of an all-controlling hidden God and His infallible Prophet, its secularization of marriage, its puritanism and messianism. Even today some of the survivals of original (i.e., pre-liberal) Protestantism in remote parts of Scandinavia, Holland, Scotland and the United States have, at least culturally, more affinity with the Wahhābīs than with the Catholics from which they stem. It must be borne in mind that not so much the authoritarian organization but the liberal theology of Catholicism was the target of the reformers.⁷⁷³

One of the most fundamental breaks with Catholic tradition was Luther’s rejection of reason, which reminds us so strongly of the acceptance of the “irrational values” by the National Socialists and their programmatic rejection of objective truth,⁷⁷⁴ an attitude they have in common with some of the pseudo-liberal philosophies. Luther was often moved by an irrational inspirationalism, disclaiming the possibility that anybody might correctly judge his doctrine—even the angels. Thus Hitler’s “sleepwalker’s certainty” (traumwandlerische Sicherheit) was anticipated by several centuries. We should therefore not be surprised by the declaration of the Reformer that it is impossible to harmonize faith and reason, that reason is opposed to faith and ought to be killed and interred, that there is nothing as contrary to faith as law and reason, and that those who want to enter Heaven must abandon, conquer, annihilate and destroy all reason.⁷⁷⁵

This characteristic of Luther’s theology has to be kept in mind in order to understand its other aspects. Instead of the strict, all-embracing “logicalism” of the Scholastics, we find a mixture of emotionalism and fideism which fostered a certain mobility and facilitated, at a later period, the rise of anti-nomian reactions. At the same time it can be argued that Lutheranism, through the abandonment of the rational elements in its theology, restricted itself to a relatively small community (i.e., the North Germans and Scandinavians), and never gained the world-wide importance of either Catholicism or Calvinism. Reason and objective truth (as well as the striving for them), know no boundaries and have a universality of their own.

Neither Lutheranism nor Calvinism produced a complete Staatslehre, a complete political philosophy of their own—a fact strongly emphasized by Emil Brunner,⁷⁷⁶ who considers any attempt in that direction as a Catholic tendency.⁷⁷⁷ Still, the statements in the works of Luther delineating the rights and privileges of the government are numerous enough, though there is an avoidance of all speculation on the intrinsic value of the various constitutional forms.

The starting-point of Luther’s view on the prerogatives of the magistrate (die Oberkeit) is the complete wretchedness of man since the Fall—a notion still shared by many modern Lutheran theologians.⁷⁷⁸ There is an abundance of remarks by Luther on the hierarchic superiority of all those in a commanding position (not only the magistrate) over their charges. We cannot doubt that this relationship of command and subjection in the Reformer’s eyes had not only the character of a mechanical result of the extraordinary weakening of human nature through original sin; Luther was also convinced that all earthly bondage constitutes a lasting and self-perpetuating punishment for the Fall. This situation could only be met by a suffering obedience (leidender Gehorsam), not by rebellion or violent resistance; a teaching deplored even by an authoritarian historian like Treitschke.⁷⁷⁹

In his “Evangelium am 23. Sonntag nach Trinitatis” Luther wrote:

Thus one has to suffer the power of a prince. If he misuses his power one should not turn one’s back on him, nor take revenge, nor punish him actively. One has to be obedient to him solely for the sake of God, because he is in God’s place.⁷⁸⁰

A similar idea is expressed in the Reformer’s “Ermahnung zum Frieden auf die 12 Artikel der Bauernschaft in Schwaben”:

Even if the magistrate is wicked and unjust there should be no excuse for rioting or rebellion. For not everybody has the right to punish wickedness; only the secular authorities in the possession of the sword.⁷⁸¹

The same has been said in his “Ob Kriegsleute auch im seligen Stande sein können”:

It is better that the tyrants be a hundred times unjust to the people than that the people inflict one injustice on the tyrants. If there must be injustice it is to be preferred that we suffer from the authorities than that the magistrate suffer from the subjects.⁷⁸²

Or in “Von weltlicher Oberkeit wie weit man ihr Gehorsam schuldig sei”:

One ought not to resist outrage but rather suffer it; yet one should not approve of it.⁷⁸³

Such views are natural if we bear in mind his exclamation:

The princes of the world are gods, the common people are Satan, through whom God sometimes accomplishes what He would otherwise accomplish through Satan, namely rebellions, as punishment for wicked men.⁷⁸⁴

The idea that those enjoying a position of command are “gods” or in God’s place finds frequent representation, as, for instance, in his “Sermons on the Fifth Book of Moses”:

Preachers, parents and tutors are gods in relation to their wards, children, servants and pupils because they act in the place of God. . . . Also David and the other princes were gods.⁷⁸⁵

Indeed, Luther truly revelled in the idea of subordination and subjection, or brutal punishment and terrorization, in all spheres of life. He even laments the impertinence of servants, which he attributes to the laxity of the pope and the machinations of the devil:

These are the reasons for the complaints about the servants in this world. The devil, the pope and the princes are responsible for this lack of authority and for the fact that everybody behaves as it pleases him. In times gone by when we had discipline and coercion nobody dared to remonstrate lest he have the fist on his head; thus it was much better.⁷⁸⁶

The same attitude can be found in matters political:

The donkey wants to be beaten and the mob wants to be ruled by force; God knew this well. This is the reason He gave a sword into the hands of the magistrate, and not a foxtail.⁷⁸⁷

Even stronger, and completely lacking in charity, is the following:

Since God has given us such laws and since He knows that nobody keeps them, He appointed also men who swing the rod, ply the goad and hold the reins—this is how Scripture calls the magistrate in a parable. They have to act like the drivers of donkeys on whose necks one has to lie all the time, and who have to be beaten with switches because they would not move otherwise. Thus the magistrates have to drive on the mob, our Mister Omnes, they have to beat, to choke, to hang, to burn, to behead and to break them on the wheel so that they [the magistrates] will be feared. This is the way to keep within limits. God does not want the law merely to be told to the people; He also wants someone to drive it, hold it tight and force it to work with the fist. . . . Thus it is necessary that the masters of the law lord it over the people, and that they coerce and dominate the rough and unpolished Mister Omnes just as one coerces and dominates swine and wild animals.⁷⁸⁸

Luther’s savagery apparently knew no limits when he dealt with a fellow Reformer like Thomas Münzer, the egalitarian peasant leader and Anabaptist. In a letter Luther complained that the (Catholic) bishop who made Münzer a captive did not use a torture effective enough to break him down:

I will write to the bishop and send you a copy of the letter. They have not given Thomas Münzer the right type of torture; I would have handled him quite differently. . . . Oh, Lord God, since the peasants are possessed by such a mentality, it is high time that they should be strangled like mad dogs.⁷⁸⁹

This attitude of the Reformer is by no means simply the spirit of the times. He constantly harps on the theme that generosity, laxity and kindness are Catholic survivals which he would eliminate in time:

Duke Frederick, the amiable Elector of Saxony, was too timid and stupid to punish the criminals, especially the poor thieves. Yes, he said, it is easy to take a man’s life but one cannot return it to him. And Duke John, Elector of Saxony, always used to say: Well, he still may become a pious person. On account of such weakness and forbearance the country became full of crooks. They [the princes] had been persuaded by monks to be gracious, benevolent and peaceful. But the magistrate, the princes and lords should not be soft.⁷⁹⁰

The complete wickedness of the world demands the existence of brutal princes devoid of piety:

You should know that an intelligent prince has been a rare bird ever since the world has existed; yet a much rarer bird is a pious prince. They are usually the greatest fools or the worst rogues.

The world is too wicked and not worthy of having intelligent and pious princes; frogs must have storks.⁷⁹¹

These rather monstrous princes and magistrates, naturally, need special forgiveness for the sins which they commit constantly in their office;⁷⁹² although they are “in God’s place” they are forced to sin, an activity which to a fideist like Luther is not so repugnant after all. (“Believe strongly and then sin bravely”—a curious transformation of St. Augustine’s “love and then do what you will.”) As a theologian insisting on salvation by faith rather than by good works, Luther remained entirely logical.

It is quite evident that Luther’s political views suffer from the old confusion between power and authority. As a Realpolitiker and a person alien to the concept of legitimacy (a shortcoming he shared with Calvin) he expressed the belief that all those in possession of factual political power have an absolute claim to obedience:

What is this to me, who know that even the Turk is to be borne and honoured because of his power? For I am sure that no power is established without, as Peter says, the will of God.⁷⁹³

Luther’s implicit statement that authority and power are identical is by no means isolated. We get it in his “Heerpredigt”⁷⁹⁴ and in his famous “Appeal to the Christian Nobility.”⁷⁹⁵ In the concrete sense of the term the notion of despotism or usurpation could hardly exist for Luther. Hence the gravity of the accusation of having laid the foundations for the modern German tyranny.⁷⁹⁶

The break with the past is more evident when we read of Luther’s boast of having eliminated the Catholic attitude towards government. The Catholics, he insisted, always considered political power as something dangerous in itself, and implored the princes to be very pious and to go to Mass frequently.⁷⁹⁷ Yet according to Luther the shedding of blood had its spiritual charms:

We are now in such an amazing age that a prince can merit Heaven more easily by shedding blood than others by mere praying.⁷⁹⁸

This agrees with the general tenor of Luther’s outlook on life, which distinguished clearly between the ethos of this world and that of the next:

The proverbs which talk about mercy belong to the kingdom of God and to the Christians, but not to the earthly kingdom. A Christian not only should be merciful, but he should suffer all sorts of things: robbery, fire, murder, devil and hell, though he himself should not slaughter, kill, or wreak vengeance on anybody. Yet the secular kingdom is nothing but the servant of God’s ire toward the wicked, and a foretaste of hell and eternal death. It should not be merciful, but severe, earnest and wrathful in its office and function. Its tool is not a rosary or a little flower of love, but a naked sword.⁷⁹⁹

Thus one should not be surprised to find in Luther a dualism of ethics which is frankly Machiavellian. (The public and the private spheres later suffered a separation in Spinoza’s political thought also.)⁸⁰⁰ The Reformer divided lies into three groups: the official, the jocular, and the pernicious. Only the last-mentioned is forbidden; while the jocular lie is permissible, and the official lie debet fieri—“ought to be told”!⁸⁰¹ Hitler’s Germanische Kriegslist, broken promises and broken assurances are thus entirely within keeping in Lutheran doctrine. In fact, their omission would plainly have been sinful.

This highly pragmatic attitude in ethical matters was also represented in the sphere of private morality. This is evident if we read Luther’s approval of a most amazingly immoral (though probably untrue) anecdote, an approval which shows not only his indifference to logically coherent ethics but also to the very concept of law and legality.⁸⁰² His contemptuous attitude towards the lower classes, especially the peasantry, was most un-Christian.⁸⁰³ Even the Nazi practice of exterminating the insane seems to have had an early advocate in Luther, who was once questioned what one should do with a twelve-year old male cretin leading a purely animal life.

Luther advised that he be choked to death. Someone having asked “for what reason?” he replied, “because I simply think he is a mass of flesh without a soul.”⁸⁰⁴

There is no indication that Luther was a racialist, but there is little doubt that he was an (ethnic) nationalist with a fair dislike for Latins, Slavs, Jews, and Teutons other than Germans. The Wends were for him “a vile nation that God has burdened us with,”⁸⁰⁵ whereas the Dutch and the Flemings were as bad as Italianized Germans, whom he considered to be truly “ incarnate devils.”⁸⁰⁶ His anti-Italianism went hand in hand with his anti-papalism.⁸⁰⁷

Racialism, the “blood” brother of ethnic nationalism, has, with the exception of the Netherlands (but not of Boer South Africa), always been a vice of Protestant civilizations rather than a shortcoming of the Mediterranean “Big Three”—Mohammedanism, Greek Orthodoxy and Catholicism. The veneration of the Bible, with the quantitative superiority of the Old Testament, has transferred a good deal of the old Jewish racialism⁸⁰⁸ to bibliolatric Protestants. Yet it is interesting to note that many Lutheran pastors under Nazi influence were quite willing to part with the Old Testament, and even a scholar like A. von Harnack advocated—before the rise of the Nazis—giving up the pre-Christian elements of the Bible.⁸⁰⁹

Luther’s anti-Judaism is, of course, religious rather than racial. Keenly looking out for allies in his struggle against Rome, he hit on the Jews, who had suffered such great disabilities and had enjoyed proportionately few privileges under Catholic rule.⁸¹⁰ He was convinced that their conversion had been retarded by Romish malpractices, and thus set out to win them over to his new faith.⁸¹¹ In an earlier pamphlet he reminded his readers that Jesus Christ had been according to His human nature a Jew.⁸¹² But when the expected success failed to materialize his initial sympathies turned into a flaming rage, and the disappointed lover started to attack the Jews in a torrent of abuse which found its expression in numerous treatises.⁸¹³ Most of them contain invectives and are written in a style which reminds one painfully of Julius Streicher’s Der Stürmer, whose editor admittedly had read the pamphlet of the Reformer.⁸¹⁴

In his Iom Schem Camphoras und vom Geschlecht Christi Luther implored the authorities to treat the Jews in the following way:

Therefore one should act here in the same way, burn their synagogues, prohibit them from doing anything I have said before, force them to work and treat them with a complete lack of mercy; just as Moses did in the desert, and slew three hundred thousand so that the whole tribe would not perish.⁸¹⁵

The most precise plan for dealing with the Jews is contained in another pamphlet, entitled Von den Juden und ihren Lügen (1534). It provides the persecutor of the Jews with a complete blueprint for action. This programme contains seven points and advises the authorities: (1) “to burn down the synagogues or schools of the Jews and to cover what will not burn up with earth so that nothing at all will remind one of them”;⁸¹⁶ (2) to treat their houses in the same way; (3) to confiscate all their prayer books, Talmuds and other sacred writings; (4) to prevent their rabbis, under pain of capital punishment, from preaching or teaching; (5) to deprive them of the privilege of moving around freely (dass man den Juden das Geleid und Strasze gantz und gar aufhebe); (6) to take away all their money; (7) to provide the young Jews and Jewesses with shovels, axes, rakes and distaffs, so that they will earn their livelihood in the “sweat of their noses.”

After these recommendations the Reformer concluded that they would not do much good after all, and that there is no other efficient remedy but to follow the example of England, France, Spain and Bohemia and to expel the whole lot, after complete expropriation.⁸¹⁷ Thus, short of the gas chambers, we have here the complete programme of the National Socialists. Walter Linden, who was one of them, called this piece of writing “the most complete, the most thorough and the most profound treatise on the Jews of all times.”⁸¹⁸ Another disciple of Hitler, Karl Kindt, stated about the author of this programme:

A man who makes such demands would today certainly back up the measures of which the new Germany approves in her struggle against Jewry. More than that! Since the situation today is much more perilous, he would advise an even more draconic procedure.⁸¹⁹

Luther’s anti-Jewish references are to be found not only in his pamphlets, but also in other texts.⁸²⁰

Going over these quotations there is little doubt that Luther was an authoritarian,⁸²¹ a nationalist and a Jew-baiter. But was he an “early Nazi”? There is little indication that he was a totalitarian, although a minor collectivistic note can here and there be discovered in his writings.⁸²² Luther’s prince is essentially a hierarchic ruler, and not a democratic “leader” who tries to identify himself with the masses, claiming to be their supreme personification. His anti-Judaism is purely religious, and neither ethnic nor racial. (Naturally, the “innate” anti-semitism of the Germans is also a myth.⁸²³) In all these respects Luther is still a genuine son of the Middle Ages. And in spite of a few slender brochures and Streicher’s confession we must doubt that his attacks against the Jews affected even the Nazi leadership, though he enjoyed among them a certain popularity as “a great figure of the German past.” Alfred Rosenberg, who was anything but a Protestant or even a Christian, waxed indignant when Lutherans looked Romeward.⁸²⁴ Yet to the Nazi extremist Luther’s work was only a half-hearted attempt to break with the Mediterranean past.

We must also bear in mind that—contrary to the opinion of some of his Catholic critics—Luther’s irrationalism is rather a naïve reaction against the aridity of late scholasticism than a conscious appeal to the lower instincts. We have already referred to the voluminous size of his lifework. It obviously does not lend itself easily to popularization. Thus, the whole popular picture of Luther in the Germanies is an entirely mythological one. Instead of the irascible, howling, bitterly pamphleteering and thundering Saxon ex-Augustinian, we see a kind and utterly bourgeois “quiet man of God” who replaced Catholic Latinity, immorality, superstition, backwardness, internationalism and materialistic slyness with the idyllic and matrimonial parsonage, with common sense, sobriety and enlightenment, with a new sense of responsibility and rationality. Luther thus appears as the spiritual ancestor of Raabe and Möricke, of the principle that cleanliness is next to godliness, and of charming, virtuous and poetical Germany as depicted by Madame de Staël. There is somewhere the vague notion that the Reformer could also be strong and unyielding if need were, but that is all. The romantic image of the pale young monk aglow with piety and seriousness, as well as of the elusive Junker Georg translating the Bible into the vernacular so that the Book could become the German family’s common literary treasure, dominates the general picture of Luther. Few Germans suspect that this “champion of freedom and tolerance,”⁸²⁵ often mentioned in the same breath with Goethe, had anything to do with anti-Judaism.

Knowing that popular concepts rather than historical truth affect the imagination of the masses, we could brush the whole Luther thesis aside and deny that there is any connection between the German reformer and the National Socialist mass movement. We are, nevertheless, prevented from dropping the case by the irrefutable argument of the election maps. The fact that the Catholics had their big Centre Party (including the Bayrische Volkspartei) while the Protestant political groups never achieved prominence does not invalidate this particular accusation. The distribution of Socialist or Communist votes almost never follows the pattern of the denominational map. We have thus to shift our investigation to the character of Protestantism in general and of German Lutheranism in particular.

The last-mentioned step is all the more necessary because there is the puzzling Scandinavian example of a number of Lutheran countries remaining stalwart defenders of liberalism and (a composite form of) democracy. The survival of these forms in Scandinavia, as well as the relative immunity of these nations from the Nazi virus, has a variety of reasons. We want to enumerate merely the five most important ones:

1. The Reformation in these countries was not a conscious revolution but a most carefully camouflaged and cleverly enacted change from the old to the new creed, with the preservation of many Catholic externals.⁸²⁶ (Only in Iceland was the change sanguinary; in Finland, on the other hand, the holidays of Our Lady are even today strictly official.)

2. The Scandinavian countries did not go through the same politico-military crises and disappointments as Germany.

3. Small lakes have only small ripples.

4. The monarchical institutions of the main Scandinavian countries are above the parties, and play an important psychological rôle.

5. The Scandinavian countries lack the so-called “German” inflexibility and hankering after the Absolute, which in the German world is due to the fact that almost half of the German-speaking community is Catholic. The Germans inside and outside of the “Reich” have a tradition of thinking in absolutes, of gravitating towards extremes, of disdaining compromises, and thus of being basically allergic to the demo-parliamentary system. Their religious composition has prevented the Germans (as a collective unit) from becoming a “Protestant nation” in the sense the English, the Scots or the Americans are today Protestants. Most Evangelical Germans lived in the shadow of Catholicism, in the shadow of medieval cathedrals, on the “far horizon” of the Mediterranean and, until 1806, in the Holy Roman Empire. Catholicism is present in the works of Goethe, Schiller and Wagner. In modern Germany, if the Federal Chancellor was a Catholic (which was frequently the case since 1917), he participated in Berlin’s public Corpus Christi procession. The Lutherans never protested. The corresponding situation could not be expected in the United States.

Although German Protestantism went through evolutions similar to those of the Evangelical creeds abroad, and thus prepared the soil for the realization of parliamentary democracy, this process could be only partially completed, just because Germany is hybrid and not really Protestant. A solidly Protestant or a solidly Catholic Germany would never have produced the Nazi phenomenon as we know it. There could have been aberrations, but these would have remained within limits. It is the combination of the degenerative process of Protestantism with Catholic absolutism and extremism which became such a dangerous explosive mixture. Old heretical strains from Bohemia were necessary to stimulate the refuse of Catholic Germandom—men like Hitler, Himmler and Goebbels—who in turn were acclaimed by the Protestant masses. Without the control and the necessary corrective of monarchy, these forces could develop freely within the loose frame of a parliamentary democracy; and they carried the very heart of the Old World to its doom.

4. THE EVOLUTION OF PROTESTANTISM AND EUROPEAN POLITICS

Having put the evolutionary aspects of Protestantism under the magnifying glass, we have to come to the conclusion that the slow change of the Evangelical creeds from a rigoristic movement to a fertile ground of secularism, sectarian liberalism and “democracy” is a factor of the utmost importance for the understanding of newer European history. Geneva, which had seen the totalitarian tyranny of Maître Jehan Cauvin, produced Rousseau and became the seat of the Red Cross and the League of Nations; Boston, once a Jerusalem of the Puritans, became the centre of New England Unitarianism and transcendentalism. Is this evolution the result of the dialectics of Protestantism? Or is it a logical evolution moving in a straight line from the original premises? Or is it a “reaction” pure and simple?

Probably we find all three elements responsible for the change. Yet whereas the last is a matter of psychological speculation, and the first is of an extremely involved nature outside the grasp of a simple and ready-made explanation, it seems to us that the factor of logical evolution not only explains the transformation with comparative ease, but also figures as the most powerful reason for this phenomenon.

When we concern ourselves primarily with this factor, we will soon make the discovery that we have to deal separately with theological tenets producing intrinsic, and with those producing extrinsic or exogenous effects. When Calvin, for instance, taught that salvation and damnation are preordained by God, the psychological relationship between the believer and his Master was automatically put on a basis different from that in the old Church. But when the Reformers disestablished papal (i.e., central, commanding) authority in dogmatic matters, they hardly foresaw the ultimate consequences in the whole religious, cultural and political spheres of human existence. (The results of the former changes are often wanted or expected; those of the latter are rarely foreseen.)

The literature on the intrinsic effects of Protestantism is very rich (we have to remember the works of Max Weber, Amintore Fanfani, G. P. Gooch, R. H. Tawney, Werner Sombart, Ernst Troeltsch, Christopher Dawson, etc.); but the exogenous forces to which Protestantism, as a religion as well as a cultural whole, is much more exposed than Catholicism have, by and large, been underrated. The Reformers rejected the whole secure “shell” which Catholicism gave to its faithful; many of the major and minor supports and consolations, some of a sacramental, others of an intellectual or psychological nature, were eliminated. Thus whereas the believing Catholic is in frequent human or psychological contact with priests and saints, with popes and angels, the Lutheran (and the Calvinist) face God alone. Soli Deo Gloria! Whereas Catholicism has created an intensive and all-permeating religious culture, extending to wayside shrines, saints’ corners, religious medals, even to “christening” the landscape and the skyline (and has thus sometimes unavoidably included materialistic elements in her catholic and Catholic sphere), Protestantism wanted none of this pan-ecclesiasticism, of this cultural totalitarianism; man was to face the mysterium tremendum as a naked soul, and religion should remain a hidden relationship between him and the deus absconditus.⁸²⁷ As a result we find no religious culture in Protestant countries after the Reformation. The Baroque finds no parallel in the European North. Culture and civilization are and remain secular. “Religion is a private matter” is a socialist slogan, but some Protestants might easily have invented it.

Typical of this situation is the absence of a modern Protestant novel. There is not, even in the United States, a Protestant Periodical Index, as there is a Catholic Periodical Index. Catholicism in the United States has become to a certain extent the religion—and this in spite of its wide unpopularity. The reason is an entirely mechanical one: Protestantism does not lend itself easily to pictorial representation. Especially in a nation of visual publicity, a nun is more expressive of the concept “religious woman” than a praying stenographer or a meditating housewife. The fact, moreover, that the material and external has an important bearing on the spiritual and internal was unluckily ignored by the Reformers. Their psychology was even weaker than their philosophy.

We are faced here with a paradoxical situation; the Reformers, who had such a low opinion of man, crippled so thoroughly by original sin, completely overestimated his strength as to the resistance he might be able to develop against a visually secularized civilization. It simply cannot be doubted that the process of external as well as internal secularization has made for greater progress in Protestant than in Catholic countries. But this secularization is not only the psychological result of the planned policy and the convictions of the Reformers; it is also the result of the “new mobility” which Luther and Calvin brought into the world. Once the central authority was destroyed, reason attacked, and personal feelings and sentiments made the arbiter of truth and law, the boat of religion, torn loose from its moorings, was carried away by the stream of the “world”—i.e., the natural, secular tendencies of man.

Thus all the rigoristic efforts of the Reformers, their appeals to Verinnerlichung and Entäusserlichung, their calls to simplicity, earnestness and severity, came to naught. From their personal point of view the experiment has failed; and we are almost certain that Calvin or Luther would feel more at home in a modern Benedictine monastery than in a “progressive” church in New York. Protestant neo-orthodoxy is deeply conscious of this failure, but does not deem it inevitable.

There are also certain direct developments stemming from the teachings of the Reformers which evolved independently, assumed purely secular forms, and then captured whole sectors of Protestant culture and civilization. We do not quarrel with Émile Doumergue⁸²⁸ and numerous other authors who have traced the pedigree of modern democracy back to the Reformers and especially to Calvin—although they frequently omit in their “chains” the factor of antinomian reactions.⁸²⁹ The Protestant background of the French Revolution has, so far, not been sufficiently analyzed; but there are undoubtedly very important connections between the remnants of French Calvinism,⁸³⁰ British-American Protestantism,⁸³¹ and the French Revolution.⁸³² It was only too natural that the Jacobins did not feel the same hatred for the Protestants as for the Catholics.⁸³³

Luther’s indirect influence was strengthened in the nineteenth century by the commanding position of Hegel,⁸³⁴ the mentor of Treitschke and Marx, the father of statism, nationalism and socialism. It is significant that the modern democratic, nationalistic and socialist movements which arose in the Catholic countries frequently had the moral support of general public opinion in the neighbouring Protestant world; yet these movements quickly assumed a revolutionary character because they were fundamentally incompatible with the existing order, culture and mentality of the Catholic world. Hence the endless disappointment of all Protestant nations in the “progressive” movements of Catholic or Orthodox countries. Enthusiastically acclaimed in their initial stages, most “left-of-centre” movements of the Continent have quickly lost their British and American sympathies. The “misunderstandings” ended rapidly in mutual hatreds and recriminations. Burke’s changing attitudes toward the French Revolution are symptomatic of this relationship.

Thus the Austrian Social Democrats were more revolutionary-minded than their parallel organization in Prussia. Modern Protestant countries (which have broken with the notion of orthodoxy) are rather evolutionary, while Catholic countries are revolutionary. The reasons for this are manifold:

1. The completeness (catholicity) of Catholicism which, by its very nature, is antagonistic to all other “complete” ideologies (Weltanschauungen).

2. The Catholic tendency to think in absolutes.

3. Catholic personalism, which is opposed to collectivism and to concerted societal action. Co-operation and the team spirit are not well developed in Catholic civilizations. There is a reluctance to “come to terms”—unless it is done in a spirit of cynicism. No virtue is attached to it.

Consequently we see that almost all Catholic countries have broken with their ancient political traditions, and offer us the picture described in the preceding part. Protestant societies (which can “afford” democracy) are characterized by a uniform public opinion on all fundamentals, making parliamentary democracy feasible. Luther himself, though not averse to monarchy, was opposed to hierarchic concepts in the Church and had certain democratic ideas about appointments in the ministry.⁸³⁵ Yet the unquestioned sway of public opinion in modern Protestant societies, which was the despair of a man like Søren Kierkegaard,⁸³⁶ is “Lutheran” (or “Calvinistic”) only in a dialectical sense.

Kierkegaard’s reactions to official Protestantism are interesting to study, because it seems that the great Danish genius had a scant knowledge of the real Luther. His picture of the Reformer was entirely the popular and conventional one—that is, the mythological fiction of the last two hundred years.⁸³⁷ Yet in spite of his probable ignorance of the historical Reformers and the Reformation, his evaluation of the religious dangers of modern Protestantism was a very correct one. He more or less realized that the boat of Protestant Christianity was leaking and that the human—all too human—trends of the world were slowly but surely seeping into the vessel, to wit: a mechanical and naïve concept of freedom; a childlike Roussellian trust in public opinion, the “general will,” and majority rule; an enthusiasm for amateurism; a sentimental belief in “progress” coupled with an optimistic faith in some sort of natural evolution assuring the survival of the fittest.

But all these superstitions are only to a very limited extent descended from the original Protestant heritage. All these trends and beliefs, so illusory in their character, are deeply rooted in human nature. In their aggregate they can become substitutes for religious feelings of a more genuine pattern; in a “historic sense” they are inseparable from the traditional picture of sectarian liberalism with democratic and bourgeois overtones.

A great many of these “dawnist” illusions were organically incorporated into National Socialism. The Nazi underground movement in Austria prior to 1938 constantly used in its clandestine propaganda the vocabulary of sectarian liberalism and anti-clericalism, clamouring for the introduction of civil marriage, divorce laws, eugenic measures, euthanasia, non-sectarian public schools and a “break “for the “common man,” the Mann aus der Doppelreihe. (The democratic cult of anonymity also finds expression in the worship of the “unknown soldier”; the Mann aus der Doppelreihe is nothing but a living “unknown soldier.”) Here we witnessed not only the irruption of secularism into the Protestant vacuum, but also the transfer and “fanning out” of these values into the Catholic world. Hegel insisted that the ideas of the French Revolution finally triumphed in Protestant countries only.⁸³⁸ If he had lived longer he would have seen that they often only made a detour. Still, the fact remains that the Austrian “progressive” turned in a north-westerly direction for inspiration. Goebbels once said: “Besides, I pay homage to the French Revolution for all the possibilities of life and development that it brought the people. In that sense one could say, if you like, that I am a democrat.”⁸³⁹

If we look at the purely religious aspect of the Nazi vote in the Protestant regions, we will never be able to tell exactly whether the excessive strength of the Party in these areas was due to Protestantism as such or to the powerful agnostic inroads which characterized Evangelical Germany. There can be no doubt that irreligion in the Protestant parts of the Reich was greater than in the Catholic districts. We will not deny that Lutheran doctrines have here and there favoured the growth of the National Socialist ideology, but the capital guilt of modern Lutheranism (and of Protestantism in general) in the triumph of the Brown Creed can only be maintained effectively if we accept the Protestant fatherhood of modern democracy, and the democratic fatherhood of National Socialism. This is a guilt which, in the perspectives of modern and recent history, most decidedly transcends the boundaries of Germany. Thus, morally speaking, only the sincere anti-democrat should in good conscience support the Lutheran thesis of the origins of National Socialism.

In this connection it must not be forgotten that the republican character of the Third Reich was never in doubt; it was “a people’s republic” (eine völkische Republik) with “a Führer who represents the community in its personality, its being and its character.” He incorporated the “subconscious will of those he led, the volonté générale.”⁸⁴⁰

These terms were used in 1933, but they did not constitute a very new language. One author writing even before the collapse of the German army in 1918 demanded a German democracy which is “the rule of the whole people over the whole people.” And in this new German democracy blood was to be the determining factor for citizenship.⁸⁴¹ Even more concrete were the demands of a certain Wilhelm Wiskott, whose German Popular Programme was published in 1920. Ethnic nationality and biological race were his basis for nationality. And complete unity was the goal of real democracy:

In the future we have to include all folkic comrades who belong racially and linguistically to the German people in the concept “German nation.” This view implies a broadening of the concept of the nation beyond the boundaries of the Reich; it should relate to all persons of German blood on this earth. . . .⁸⁴²

The author then insisted that the Jewish race could well-nigh serve as a pattern for this new racialism. The break with the past and the advent of the republic was a very fortunate one:

The Prussian political ideal of the Hohenzollerns can be fully realized only in a democracy. But the “leadership-ideal” must permeate the whole nation. The basic truths of the Prussian state, borne by every individual and by the whole people in an independent community welded together through a common tribal feeling—that must be the aim and content of our German political and folkic thought.⁸⁴³

5. THE OTHER THREADS IN THE IDEOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT TO NAZISM

When we speak of the effects of Luther’s illiberalism on the Germans,⁸⁴⁴ we must not forget that Calvin was even less of a liberal than Luther.⁸⁴⁵ The Master of Geneva was the founder of the first totalitarian state in our civilization.⁸⁴⁶ At the same time he is also a forefather of democracy,⁸⁴⁷ although for reasons mentioned the psychological evolution of Calvinism in Western Germany was not the same as in France, Holland, Britain or in the United States.

Of greater importance than Luther’s authoritarianism was probably the elimination of the age-old antithesis between secular and ecclesiastical government—a tension which in Catholic countries always prevented the creation of a monolithic state of the Prussian or Russian pattern. Italian fascism, for instance, never became as totalitarian as either nazism or Russian communism because it had to cope (a) with the Church, (b) with the monarchy, and (c) with the latent anarchism of a Catholic nation.

Heinrich Boehmer’s enthusiasm over the termination of this forceful dialogue strikes one today as rather odd. The great German biographer of Luther (died 1927) wrote as follows:

The result of these innovations was also a great secularization, principally in favour of the temporal power. The latter, at last, gained full freedom of movement throughout the wide field of secular life; indeed, it soon succeeded in obtaining the direction of all purely spiritual matter, too. Thus there arose, wherever the evangelical movement was victorious, the peculiar picture of the evangelical state. This at first was apparently only distinguished from the medieval state by the fact that government, as the holder of the paternal power, claimed authority over all departments of social life. For the old division of society into estates at first remained, and religion continued to be treated in principle as public matter, as in the Middle Ages. But how much better fitted for action and achievement this new state was! What amazing force it could display, even in unfavourable circumstances, what a mighty progress it could effect even in a small nation, if the government went about its task only tolerably well!⁸⁴⁸

There is even something prophetic in the way Boehmer describes the attitude of Lutheran peoples towards bad government:

Just as strikingly as in this stern conception of work, Luther’s spirit manifests itself in the patience and long-suffering with which the Lutheran people endure bad government and social and political abuses. The revolutionary humour which prevailed among the masses at the beginning of the sixteenth century has already completely vanished at the time of Luther’s death. The Lutheran people show no tendency to revolt even under the worst government. As long as its faith is not attacked, it submits with patient obedience to every harshness, and in evil times comforts itself with its remarkably numerous songs of religious consolation. This certainly involves a notable lack of initiative in all questions of public life. To compel the abolition of any public abuses by force is to the Lutheran an unpardonable crime. He looks on all such evils rather as a visitation sent by God to test his faith.⁸⁴⁹

This is indeed a picture different from that of the Catholic nations, with their history rich in assassinations and revolutions. We want here to recall the fact again that the black colour in Europe symbolizes not only the Catholics (and the “clerical parties”) but also the anarchists. Thus to Catholics the attitude of Pastor Niemöller remained incomprehensible, when he offered in 1939 his services to Hitler as a U-Boat captain. He was then already in a concentration camp and suffered for his religious convictions. Hitler had power and therefore, in the pastor’s eyes, also authority. Thus Niemöller’s “act of surrender” was nothing of that sort, but merely an action strictly in keeping with Lutheran theology.

Yet the “suffering obedience” is not as exclusively Lutheran as some like to think. The different evolution of Calvinism in Western Europe and in the United States had prompted some analysts to “find” an unbridgeable abyss between the political thinking of the two Reformers. Actually, the difference is strongly overrated.⁸⁵⁰ We have, it is true, a few passages from the hand of Calvin in which he expresses sympathy with the notion of the “consent of the governed.”⁸⁵¹ There are also some mildly egalitarian implications in his theology.⁸⁵² Yet, basically, the Genevan is aristocratic, and the more pronouncedly democratic and liberal tendencies in the Calvinistic orbit stem from dissenting and reacting groups.

Calvinism in Western Germany (the Palatinate) had, perhaps, a democratic touch; but the thing which is called “Prussianism” has very strong Calvinistic aspects. The Hohenzollerns were Calvinists through several generations, and it was the French Huguenot immigration which thoroughly altered the character of Prussia from a happy-go-lucky feudal monarchy into an efficient, industrialized, aggressive and bureaucratic state. Too little has been written on that subject, but there can be no doubt that the repeal of the Edict of Nantes (Oct. 18, 1685) and the issuance of the Edict of Potsdam (Oct. 29, 1685) deeply affected the Brandenburg Electorate, which soon afterwards became the Kingdom of Prussia.⁸⁵³ The Prussian virtues, after all, are decidedly Calvinistic virtues.⁸⁵⁴ Even after Prussia, the classic ally of France, became the new ally of Britain, we see a continuation of Franco-Prussian sympathies.⁸⁵⁵ All through the eighteenth century Berlin was an outpost of French civilization;⁸⁵⁶ Frederick II was more French than German, and when the French Revolution was well under way the Revolutionaries, and especially Danton, hoped and strove for the closest Franco-Prussian collaboration.⁸⁵⁷ Only the Napoleonic Wars and Prussian domination over the Rhineland changed that picture fundamentally.

This French influence, in turn, hardly impaired German extremism. The French ideal of “clarity” (clarté) is not opposed to intolerance, and the pèlerins de l’absolu have often preached against “moderation” (mesure, μσóτης). The French Revolution was an orgy of extremism, absolutism and ideological folly; and when we read certain remarks of William James about the French, we might easily think that they refer to the Germans.⁸⁵⁸

Kierkegaard, the absolutist, lamented that everybody who dares to think an idea to its bitter end becomes unpopular.⁸⁵⁹ This is well-nigh true of Scandinavia and Denmark, but not of the Germanies. Miss Butler tried to blame the “Greek Tyranny” for this German tendency towards extremism, and though the descriptive part of her thesis is a correct one, we must doubt the validity of her argumentation:

For the Germans cherish a hopeless passion for the absolute, under whatever name and in whatever guise they imagine it. The Russians have had stranger visions; the French have shown themselves more capable of embodying abstract ideas in political institutions; but the Germans are unique perhaps in the ardour with which they pursue ideas and attempt to transform them into realities. Their great achievements, their catastrophic failures, their tragic political history are all impregnated with this dangerous idealism. If most of us are the victims of circumstances, it may truly be said of the Germans that they are at the mercy of ideas.⁸⁶⁰

We, on the other hand, think that the Germans are in this respect not very different from most other truly Continental nations. The German’s intellectual habit of thinking things on to their logical conclusions is common to all non-Protestant nations of Europe; only their efforts towards the realization of these ideas—due to their devotion towards “objects”⁸⁶¹—are often, unfortunately, quite successful.⁸⁶² Yet this “madness” of Catholic nations (which certainly exists in the eyes of Protestant countries) can also be found among the Russians and the Spaniards, the Poles and the Czechs. The Italians, with their “pagan,” sceptical aloofness, are perhaps the least absolutarian of Catholic nations.⁸⁶³ The “holy folly” of the Cross and the craving for the “middle of the road” do not mix. Even Anatole France, certainly not a Catholic but a product of Catholic culture, wrote with all sincerity in L’île des pingouins, “Nothing is endurable but extremes.”

The old, non-pragmatic Protestant cultures had this “madness” too; one has only to remember the religious picture of Britain and America in the seventeenth century, or sixteenth-century Geneva. Clémenceau thought that “madness” in the United States accumulated in small quantities “unspent,” finally exploding in major fireworks of nonsense.⁸⁶⁴ Yet the French, Spanish and Russian revolutions clearly show that the Germans are by no means alone in their striving towards the absolute, although they follow their goal with a disconcertingly methodical stubbornness.⁸⁶⁵

In other words, notwithstanding the fact that the National Socialist movement achieved fatal growth only on a Protestant, and especially Lutheran, subsoil covered with a democratic layer, the Catholic element in German culture, generating a tendency towards absolutes, not only made an organic parliamentary republic psychologically impossible, but also fostered the reductio ad absurdum in the ideological field. All these are phenomena unknown in purely Protestant areas, which are evolving peacefully towards a liberal pragmatism. This does not mean that one ought to approve of such a development, since pragmatism ends finally in complete barbarism. Pragmatism in American legal thought is already purely Nazi.⁸⁶⁶ In Germany, on the other hand, the disappearance of the patriarchal, monarchical element removed⁸⁶⁷ the last barriers to the erection of a plebiscitarian and populistic tyranny, based on a synthetic religion combining the most powerful identitarian and collectivistic movements of the last hundred and fifty years: nationalism, racialism, socialism, democracy, militarism, egalitarianism.

At the same time it must be emphasized that the Church, with all her “reactionary,” royalist, personalistic and clerical aspects, was the strongest stumbling-block to the victory of National Socialism. (It is significant that the hard core of the German July 1944 conspiracy consisted of Catholics and orthodox Protestants. It is equally significant that Hitler received his “spiritual” support from liberal, and not from conservative, Lutheran clergymen.⁸⁶⁸) Hopelessly out-numbered within the Reich, German-speaking Catholics were numerous in the areas adjoining Germany—in Austria, Bohemia-Moravia, in Alsace-Lorraine. Paradoxical as it sounds, a victory of Pan-Germanism at an earlier period would have made a parliamentary victory of nazism quite impossible. It can be argued that an Anschluss in 1919 would have materially changed the electoral picture in 1932, with the votes of the Austrian Socialists and Clericals added to those of their counterparts in the Reich. Yet Clémenceau and Wilson, fearful of a Catholic Germany, opposed this solution.⁸⁶⁹

From the foregoing it is evident that the rise of National Socialism, from a purely ideological point of view, was due to a variety of reasons, but the dialectic of Protestantism leading to democracy, and also Groethuysen’s two main forms of religious evanescence, played a leading part in this process. The “Continental” and partly Catholic⁸⁷⁰ character of the German scene, with its absolutism in the tradition of thought, completes the ideological picture. To these phenomena one has to add certain historical elements such as the tragedy of the First World War and the economic crisis.

The organizational aspects, the rise of the Nazi Party, will be dealt with in the next chapter of this book. But it is evident that the little-known history of the Party cannot be entirely divorced from the ideological development. The material and the spiritual are always interconnected.

Yet the final implications of agnosticism, creating dangerous vacuums, and the teleology of democracy, are full of ominous menaces—not only for Germany subjected to a super-Versailles, but for the world at large. The dictum of Joseph de Maistre, written down a century and a quarter ago, still holds true:

One can maintain as a general principle that no authority is strong enough to govern millions of men unless it is aided by religion or slavery or both.⁸⁷¹

CHAPTER VII

THE RISE OF THE NATIONAL SOCIALIST PARTY

The Genesis of a Totalitarian Movement—II

I am tired, Mr. Roosevelt, of hearing it said—even by M. Maritain—that the democracies are the opposite of the dictatorships. Democracy offers no defence to dictators, that is the truth. Every democracy can at any moment have an acute attack of dictatorship, as one has an acute attack of appendicitis; and national temperament can do nothing about it.

—G. BERNANOS⁸⁷²

1. ONCE MORE: DEMOCRACY AND LIBERTY

AT this stage of our book we do not deem it necessary to repeat our main thesis; the reader has consistently been warned not to confuse the democratic with the liberal principle, and he has been asked to remember that Continental democracy has a far stronger tendency to dispense with the liberal values than democracy in the Anglo-Saxon world. Renan has cautioned us that “the activists in the democratic camp who now create disturbances in practically all European states do not in any way whatever have the American republic as their ideal.”⁸⁷³ It is precisely this illiberalism which disappoints and frightens the English-speaking observer, because he frequently forgets that his enthusiasm belongs to two ideals which are not interconnected. One can be a liberal or a libertarian without being a democrat; one can also be a democrat without being a liberal or a libertarian. Nor, we must add, is a parliament of its very nature a liberal or liberty-preserving institution.⁸⁷⁴ And the anti-liberal implications of egalitarianism are too obvious to need further elucidation.

The modern totalitarian parties are all fundamentally “democratic.” They have all insisted on their right to use the democratic label. And each has been vocal in representing its political leader as the personification of “everybody,” of the “common man,” of the entire nation. (Among the Nazis, the notion that the Leader of the single party was not the organ of the state, but the very personification of the community, was put forward by the “most advanced” National Socialist theorists.⁸⁷⁵)

At the beginning of this modern trend stands the French Revolution—or more precisely, its second, illiberal phase. Hitler declared: “This revolution of ours is the exact counterpart of the French Revolution.”⁸⁷⁶ The hatred of minorities, the collective condemnation of whole groups, classes and races, the judgment of individuals according to status rather than according to personality or conviction which characterize the great totalitarian movements of today, received in those days their most concrete formulation. With the exception of biological racialism, nothing essentially new has since been added. Now, as then, the Church and the monarchical institutions⁸⁷⁷ are the main targets of the forces of collectivism. The inherent acquisitiveness of the modern state makes a struggle between it and the Church almost everywhere inevitable. The totalitarian parties will undoubtedly speed up this process—if they are parochial, because the Church is an opponent; if they are international, because the Church is a competitor. The nobility, as a libertarian and international “estate,” is, quite naturally, also under attack.⁸⁷⁸

National Socialism was ideologically the full heir, and probably the most complete synthesis, of all the ideas springing directly or indirectly from the French Revolution; it was a fulfilment, not a “relapse into the Dark Ages” or a “putting back of the clock.”⁸⁷⁹ In order to come to a fuller understanding of this terrifying phenomenon, which can boast of few genuinely German traits besides its gruesome thoroughness, it is necessary to analyze current Marxist interpretations more thoroughly, and to strip them of all the additional propaganda which made nazism more hateful to the American masses and thus bolstered “morale” during the war.⁸⁸⁰

We do not allude to the accounts of atrocities, which were often only too true, but to the picture of nazism as nothing but a continuation of “Kaiserism,” feudalism and “medievalism.”⁸⁸¹ American propaganda continued in 1933 and in 1941 where it had left off in 1918; for a fuller understanding of the catastrophe, an almost entirely new picture ought to be drawn. It must be borne in mind that monarchists, conservatives, clerics and other “reactionaries” were always in bad grace with the Nazis. And Dr. Goebbels, in a speech delivered on October 3, 1943, in the Sportpalast in Berlin, insisted very adroitly that the capitulation of Italy could never be duplicated in Germany because “in the first place at the head of the Reich is the Führer and not a traitor like Badoglio. In the second place, kings occur here only in fables and operettas. Germany is a republican Führer-state.” Yet in the United States and also in Britain we have seen numerous books, plays, short stories and movies featuring Nazi barons, counts and members of the lesser nobility. Among the writers who have harped on that curious theme are Sir Philip Gibbs, Lillian Hellman, Ethel Vance, Louis Bromfield, Kressmann Taylor, Ellin Berlin, and many others. Still it must be said that they never matched the distortion of a Soviet film which depicted S.S. men and cowled Catholic monks jointly torturing brave workers.

2. THE HUSSITE ROOT OF NATIONAL SOCIALISM

The scene of the rise of National Socialism, and its more immediate forerunners in the last five hundred years, must be sought in Bohemia and in an area within a hundred miles from the boundaries of that ancient kingdom.

This is a region originally settled by Celts (it was named after the Boii, a Celtic tribe), later by Germanic peoples, later again largely by Slavs until a German counter-drive set in. Up to 1946 only the interior of Bohemia (and Moravia) was inhabited by Czechs, but Slavic names of rivers, mountains and villages are frequent in the whole area, which was racially extremely mixed. The Slavic background is especially strong in the area north of Bohemia, and an outstanding German of Czech extraction once claimed quite rightly that there is, apart from a different sociological structure, very little difference between Czechs and Prussians.⁸⁸² The former have often been called “the Prussians among the Slavs,” and we would not be surprised if perhaps one third of the names among the East-Elbian Junkers were Slavic in origin. In many a Junker family east of the Elbe tradition even fostered the use of Slavic first names. The heroes of the poems of Detlev von Liliencron, the bard of the Junkers, mostly have Slavic Christian names. One of the most popular nationalist authors in recent years was Bogislaw von Selchow. Other well-known Slavic names in that social layer (including the aristocracy) are Prittwitz, Welczek, Drygalski, Bassewitz, Posadowsky, Bonin, Brauchitsch, Zobeltitz, Manstein-Lewiński, Bülow, Below, Bredow, Jagow, Podbielski, Reventlow, Tschirschky, Gallwitz, Radowitz, Lichnowsky, Ratibor, Flotow, Zeppelin, Koscielski, Choltitz, Waldow, Pogrell, Mechow, Rantzau, Itzeplitz, Cunow, Clausewitz. Nietzsche prided himself on his Polish, Treitschke (i.e., Trčka) on his Czech origin.

The whole region in and around Bohemia was outside the old Roman Empire, and direct Latin influences are almost nil. And although Bohemia and Moravia are still overwhelmingly Catholic, the Czech tradition is to a certain extent non-Catholic, if not anti-Catholic.⁸⁸³ This anti-Catholicism, in turn, harmonizes with a great many traditions and trends—with anti-Austrianism, anti-Germanism, anti-Hungarianism, anti-Polonism; with pro-Americanism, Anglophilia and Russophilia, with pro-Communism, nationalism, the Hussite tradition, “democracy,” sectarian liberalism, agnosticism and “laicism.” Hus preceded Luther, and the latter was born and reared in the immediate neighbourhood of Bohemia. Hitler’s parents were born in the vicinity of the Bohemian border. Saxony, Thuringia and the Prussian provinces between the Oder and the Elbe are today almost purely Protestant in religion.

Hus’ influence on Luther has been dealt with in the preceding chapter. It is less well known that, in spite of his Czech nationality, Hus strongly inspired German nationalists as a protagonist of ethnic “folkdom” (Volkstum)⁸⁸⁴ and as a hero of “anti-Romanism.” His influence on Benito Mussolini in the Italian dictator’s earlier Socialist and anti-clerical period has also been overlooked; yet there are two American editions of Mussolini’s John Hus⁸⁸⁵ and it is evident that the nature and the aims of the Taborite movement must have greatly impressed the young Socialist. Italian fascism had two different aspects: the “Roman” statism, and the populistic mass-movement of a decidedly leftist character. It was only the latter which influenced National Socialism. Fascism was also anti-clerical and particularly anti-Catholic.⁸⁸⁶

Of all the Hussite movements, Taboritism interests us more than all others as a forerunner of Central European National Socialism. It must be admitted that Hus himself was only mildly nationalistic,⁸⁸⁷ and that his insistence on the cultivation of the Czech language was not revolutionary. It is even doubtful whether he would have approved of the Taborite ideals; Peter Chelčický and the Brethren (bratři) followed Hus’ ideals more closely than Žižka. And whether Taboritism was the first true synthesis of ethnic nationalism and socialism—or “democracy,” as the historians of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries liked to depict it—cannot be proved conclusively. Their claims, at least, are a trifle exaggerated.⁸⁸⁸

The roots of Hus’ theology clearly go back to Wycliffe, to Marsiglio of Padua,⁸⁸⁹ and also to the Beghards (Pickards).⁸⁹⁰ And although the picture of Hussitism as “progressive national democracy” is probably inaccurate, the fact remains that Taboritism, including Žižka’s⁸⁹¹ semi-moderates, had strong elements of ethnic nationalism, of anti-clericalism and totalitarianism. Prokop Holý preached socialistic ideas and advocated a general expropriation. Žižka’s anti-monarchism, on the other hand, is totally unhistorical. Liberal ideas were strange to him; the militant Hussites fought for their millenarian ideals with utter brutality, which they displayed not only towards their opponents but also against their own radical dissidents (Adamites and the like).⁸⁹² The great Czech historian Josef Pekař has thoroughly corrected the picture drawn by popularizers and nationalistic historians alike; but historical facts, as we know only too well, are one thing and the effect of a historical legend quite another.⁸⁹³ The latter is frequently more potent than the former.

Ethnic nationalism, once strong in the days of Hus and Žižka, was at an ebb in Bohemia in the eighteenth and even in the early nineteenth centuries. The struggle between the countries of the crown of St. Wenceslaus and the Habsburgs in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries following the Lutheran Reformation had a patriotic and religious rather than an ethnic character. Neither Count Mathias Thurn, who headed the revolutionaries of 1619, nor the ill-fated Frederick of the Palatinate, the “Winter King,” were Czechs. Germans and Czechs suffered equally from the consequences of the Battle of White Mountain (Bíla Hora). And until about eighty years ago German- and Czech-speaking Bohemians, united by a common patriotism, lived peacefully together.

“Bohemianism “⁸⁹⁴ yielded only slowly to the evil of a rising ethnic nationalism. In the second half of the nineteenth century the nationalistic Young Czech movement, under Jung, gradually gained ascendancy over the more conservative and pro-Austrian “Old Czechs” under Rieger. The memory of Hus and the Hussites had already been revived by František Palacký, and a direct influence of his revised picture of the sanguinary events of the fifteenth century deeply influenced the writings and speeches of Miroslav Tyrš, the founder of the great athletic organization, the Sokol (“Falcons”). Until the days of Palacký, we must bear in mind, the followers of Hus—not Hus himself—had been looked upon as bloodthirsty ruffians whose memory should best be blotted out. A change now took place.

Tyrš in certain respects copied Turnvater Jahn,⁸⁹⁵ but this translator of Darwin and Taine into Czech was more modern than his German forerunner, and strove for a more total reform. Most of the co-founders of the Sokol movement were of German background: besides the two leaders Miroslav Tyrš (originally Thiersch) and Jindřich Fügner, we must mention the brothers Gregr (Greger), Tonner, K. S. Amerling, Cerný and Náprstek. Jung and Rieger also had, naturally, a German background. So had the two post-war prime ministers, Fierlinger and Gottwald. If we run through Tyrš’s writings we gain a composite picture of anti-clericalism, biologism, nationalism, militarism and democracy. Dicta like these can be found: “Personality is nothing—totality is all,”⁸⁹⁶ or:

In a healthy nation there is no room for treason, indifference and cowardice; totality is more highly valued than the parts, the interest of the nation is much more esteemed than the interest of individuals . . . only a healthy nation is able to defend itself. A sword in each hand! Military organization!⁸⁹⁷

Tyrš had a vision of a totalitarian, national and humanitarian super-Church which “will rule the world.” The Czechs would be the first members of this new “Church.”⁸⁹⁸

Because of the strong industrialization of Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia, a vigorous Czech Socialist (or Social Democratic) Party was soon organized. Socialism on the Continent has always been international rather than anti-national;⁸⁹⁹ the break with cherished ethnic notions was never complete, and Hussite influences in the Czech Social Democratic Workers Party was never denied.⁹⁰⁰ Yet the mild nationalism of this political organization did not satisfy all members, and in 1896 this party, a member of the Second Internationale, underwent a schism. A group headed by Klofač, Stříbrný and Franke rejected the international notions of the Social Democrats and formed the Czech National Socialist Party, the Národně Socialistická Strana Česká. It is significant that the word “workers” was dropped by this new N.S.S.Č.⁹⁰¹ The ideology of this party was thoroughly based on the picture (not on the reality) of the Hussite (Taborite) traditions, which had a good chance of finding concrete expression in this new movement.⁹⁰² Karel Hoch characterizes the N.S.S.Č. in the following way: “Collectivizing by means of development: the surmounting of the class struggle by national discipline: moral rebirth and democracy as the conditions of socialism: powerful popular army,” and so on.⁹⁰³

In the various Czech encyclopedias⁹⁰⁴ we see the emphasis on the same or similar points: no bias against religion, but “opposition to clerical influence” (which reminds us of the Nazi “positive Christianity” coupled with a methodic warfare against “political Catholicism”); amalgamation of ethnic nationalism and socialism; opposition to the nobility and support for the worker, peasants and petty bourgeois; a non-Marxist attitude in a limited socialism, and the rejection of class strife (since it “divides the nation”).

Unlike German National Socialism, its Czech forerunner never had an anti-Jewish platform. (Yet President Masaryk—who, unlike Dr. Beneš, was never a member of the N.S.S.Č.—complained of Austria’s favouritism towards the Jews.)⁹⁰⁵ This new party was, nevertheless, a powerful synthesis of the most dynamic collectivistic trends of the end of the century, and since the Hussite wars had been generally represented as a democratic, socialistic and nationalistic manifestation, there was, for this new group, added glamour in the form of a historical appeal.

3. THE BEGINNINGS OF GERMAN NATIONAL SOCIALISM

It is not sheer coincidence that the Czech encyclopedia Masarykův Ottův Naučný (Prague, 1931) features (V, 47), under the heading “Národně Sociální Strana” (National Socialist Party), both organizations—the Czech as well as the German. The split in the Czech Socialist Party in 1896 must have also inspired certain German-speaking workers and petty bourgeois in Bohemia, who were imbued by Schönerer’s ethnic nationalism, anti-Judaism and anti-clericalism.⁹⁰⁶ Yet these members of the lower classes extended their hatreds also to the nobility, and they aspired to far-reaching social reforms which had no place in Schönerer’s bourgeois programme.

The Social Democratic Party, on the other hand, was too international for their tastes, and its leadership too obviously Jewish. In northern Germany F. Naumann’s “German Social Party” had already gained a few adherents.⁹⁰⁷ The rivalry between nationalism and socialism among the Sudeten Germans was not one of necessity. The time for a synthesis had come. The gap was soon to be filled by the German Workers’ Party of Bohemia and Moravia which, according to Josef Pfitzner, “united the two great currents of the century (die beiden Jahrhundertkräfte), nationalism and socialism, completely in its programme . . . and thus these borderlands [of Germany] were far ahead of the mother country.”⁹⁰⁸ The socialist ideology contained in this movement and in its various successors (D.N.S.A.P., S.D.P.) was quite genuine and honestly conceived, as attested by Professor Karel Engliš of the Masaryk University of Brünn (Brno).* He wrote: “Nevertheless, in the criticism of capitalism, German socialism and Marxism meet—and even in the criticism of capital and its function, and of the social struggle.”⁹⁰⁹

Rudolf Jung dates the rise of German National Socialism back to the activities of Ferdinand Burschofsky, a bookbinder, and Ludwig Vogel, a printer.⁹¹⁰ Baron Galéra (who often freely copies from Hans Krebs’ Ein Kampf um Böhmen) seems to be more exact when he mentions a certain Franko Stein, who in 1897 transferred a small newspaper, Der Hammer, from Vienna to Eger (Cheb).⁹¹¹ Stein belonged to a tiny organization, the “Deutschnationaler Arbeiterbund.”⁹¹² The language regulations of Prime Minister Count Badeni, which made Czech an additional official language in the German-speaking districts of Bohemia and Moravia, had resulted in a sudden rise of nationalist feelings. The following year (1898) a Deutschvölkischer Arbeitertag (“German nationalistic workers’ meeting”) was convoked in Eger (Cheb); a programme of twenty-five points was agreed upon, which in many respects was similar to Schönerer’s Linzer Programm of 1882. (This, curiously enough, had received support from H. Friedjung and Viktor Adler, both of Jewish extraction.) Burschofsky, leader of the “Mährisch-Trübauer Verband”—a co-ordinating organization (what the Germans call a “roof organization”) of nationalistic workers’ associations in Moravia—was elected chairman at the Eger meeting.⁹¹³

For some time to come the Mährisch-Trübauer Verband played an active rôle, until it broke into its constituent parts in 1903. A certain Hans Knirsch had become managing leader (Geschäftsführer) of this organization in 1901, and he was, together with Jung and Krebs, one of the few original National Socialists who remained after January, 1933, in the daughter party, the N.S.D.A.P., the “Nazi” Party.

In April, 1902, we witness in Saaz (Žatec) a meeting of the Reichsorganisation der nationalen Arbeiterschaft (“National Organization of Nationalistic Workers”), and in December of the same year a mass-meeting in Reichenberg (Liberec).⁹¹⁴ At that time 26,000 members were organized in the above-mentioned league, now renamed Deutschpolitischer Arbeiterverein für Österreich (“German Political Workers’ Union for Austria”). It solemnly severed all its connections with the pronouncedly bourgeois Deutschnationale Partei, Schönerer’s middle class national-liberal party.

A political party was finally formed on November 15, 1903, in Aussig (Ústi-nad-Labem). At last the nationalist workers had something more tangible and effective than a mere Verein. The party was provisionally called “Deutsche Arbeiterpartei in Österreich,”⁹¹⁵ and less than a year later, at the first party congress in Trautenau (Trutnov) the programme of the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (D.A.P.) received its lasting basic content—which subsequently underwent many changes in detail, but none in essence. It was then declared:

We are a liberal, nationalist party which fights strenuously against reaction, against feudal, clerical and capitalist privileges, as well as against all alien influences.⁹¹⁶

There were also other demands made, such as the separation of Church and State, the stricter application of democratic principles in army promotions, and the nationalization of mines and railroads—the usual tenor of “progressive” Continental parties.

In the same year we hear of another move to change the name of the struggling party. It came from the Moravian Hans Knirsch, who proposed to call the party the “Deutschsoziale “or “Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei.” He was not successful. The reasons are obvious: the move was blocked by the Bohemian groups, which were afraid of being accused of copying the Czech National Socialist Party.

At that time the D.A.P. had two newspapers, one in Mährisch-Trübau (Moravská Třebova) and one in Gablonz (Jablonec). The leader now was a certain Wilhelm Prediger, while Burschofsky and Knirsch remained in the steering committee.⁹¹⁷ In 1905 the D.A.P. tried to oppose Viktor Adler, the former German nationalist now running for office for the Social Democratic Party in Reichenberg (Liberec); but they polled only 14,000 votes, while Adler was supported by 30,000 ballots. Yet in 1906 three deputies were sent by the D.A.P. to the Reichsrat (Imperial Diet)—thus advertising the ideology of the party in Austria proper.

In 1909 a Reichskonferenz (“national caucus”) of the D.A.P. was held in Prague, and the Moravian groups tried again to achieve a change in the label; they wanted to take the wind out of the sails of the Social Democrats, but again they failed. We hear then of new men: Rudolf Jung, a civil engineer employed by the national railways, who had been transferred, for a punishment, from Vienna (Floridsdorf) to Bohemia;⁹¹⁸ Hans Krebs; and Dr. Walter Riehl, a lawyer,⁹¹⁹ joined the party. These were “bourgeois” additions, but such were not lacking among the Marxian socialists either. Krebs was the editor-in-chief of the Iglauer Volkswehr. The party then owned seven newspapers and seven trade union periodicals.

At the elections of 1911, three deputies were again sent to Vienna, and in 1913 four representatives were elected to the Moravian Diet. Yet the outbreak of the war brought a lull in party activities; the Reichsrat was suspended, and the only event of importance in 1916 was the campaign of the D.A.P. organ Freie Stimmen in favour of adopting the name “National Socialist.”

But the reopening of the secretariat of the party in late 1917 (in Aussig) brought a new period of feverish activity. Shadows of doom and despair were over Austria. Nationalist passions were rising. The various ethnic groups were already arming themselves, in order not to be found unprepared when the day of the division of the Dual Monarchy arrived. At a meeting in Aussig in April, 1918, delegate Gattermayer again demanded the change of name, and he was defeated by a vote of 29 to 14.⁹²⁰ But a month later, at the party congress in Vienna—the first and last to be held in Austria proper before the proclamation of the Republic—the change was finally effected. The “Deutsche Nationalsozialistische Arbeiterpartei” (D.N.S.A.P.) was born—at a time when Adolf Hitler was still fighting as a private first class (lance corporal) in France.⁹²¹ It was then declared:

. . . the German National Socialist Workers’ Party is not a party exclusively for labourers; it stands for the interests of every decent and honest enterprise. It is a liberal and strictly folkic party fighting against all reactionary efforts, clerical, feudal and capitalistic privileges; but before all against the increasing influence of the Jewish commercial mentality which encroaches on public life . . .

. . . it demands the amalgamation of all European regions inhabited by Germans into a democratic and socialized Germany . . .

. . . it demands the introduction of plebiscites (referenda) for all important laws in the country . . .

. . . it demands the elimination of the rule of Jewish banks over our economic life and the establishment of People’s Banks under democratic control . . .⁹²²

This programme was the very synthesis of all collectivistic, majoritarian, egalitarian, democratic and pseudo-liberal currents of the early twentieth century. The claim of being liberal (freiheitlich) was still upheld, but finally dropped when Hitler took over, and never revived again.

The Vienna programme, moreover, was anti-clerical, anti-feudal, anti-monarchic, anti-Habsburg (there were few countries in Europe where the Jews had a more favourable position than in the Dual Monarchy),⁹²³ and anti-Austrian. It demanded the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy as vehemently as did Wilson, Clémenceau, Masaryk, Lloyd George or Beneš. It was pan-German. It was sincerely democratic (in the Continental sense) in demanding direct democracy for the decision of all important issues. It was anti-Jewish. Since the Jews were in the process of becoming in central Europe a new élite,* were an international group, and dared to be different—the mortal sin in egalitarian or identitarian societies—the offensive against them was a symbolic synthesis of the attacks against capital, international clergy and hierarchic nobility. The whole programme was extremely “progressive” and “up to date”; there was, in the whole ideology, no “putting the clock back” and no “medievalism.” Here was the common heritage of Žižka, Jan van Leyden,⁹²⁴ Rousseau, Marat, Robespierre and Gracchus Baboeuf in its final consummation.

The breakdown of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy did not materially hinder the development of the D.N.S.A.P. in Czechoslovakia, where the party protested violently against the establishment of the Czech state, which included the whole Sudeten German area. Hans Knirsch published a flamboyant appeal⁹²⁵ which extolled the political unification of all Germans into one state, der alte Sehnsuchtstraum der deutschen Demokraten (“the old nostalgic dream of the German democrats”). Of Konrad Henlein we hear nothing yet.⁹²⁶ Schönerer, the old “bourgeois” nationalist, was then still alive; he had a home in Zwettl near the Bohemian border, from which he thundered occasionally against Jews, Czechs and Catholic priests. Ohne Juda, ohne Rom, wird erbaut Germanias Dom (“without Juda, without Rome, Germania’s cathedral is built”),⁹²⁷ was his slogan. He died in 1921. But Hans Krebs, Hans Knirsch, and Rudolf Jung (who was soon to flee Germany) were extremely active.⁹²⁸ In the Czechoslovak elections of June, 1919, the D.N.S.A.P. was able to poll 42,000 votes.⁹²⁹ In Aussig the first National Socialist monthly, Volk und Gemeinde, was published, and the first party congress in the new republic took place in Dux (Duchov) on November 16, 1919. Hans Knirsch attacked the new state violently, but expressed satisfaction over the fact that the leaders of Czechoslovakia were such nationalists as Masaryk and Tusář, who had always worked for the dissolution of the rotten Habsburg state. (This speech has been published in pamphlet form.)

Konrad Heiden, Hitler’s most outstanding biographer, traces the background of the N.S.D.A.P. to the establishment of a Freier Ausschuss fur einen deutschen Arbeiterfrieden (“Free Committee for a German Workers’ Peace”) in Bremen at the beginning of 1918. Anton Drexler organized on March 7, 1918, a branch of this league in Munich.⁹³⁰ The same Drexler became Member No. 1 of this “cell,” which in 1919 changed its name to “Deutsche Arbeiterpartei”—another D.A.P. A certain Adolf Hitler—who, like Luther, was accused of being of Czech or part Czech origin⁹³¹—was the owner of Membership Card No. 7. Yet Hitler was not happy about the name of the party, and proposed to call it “Social Revolutionary Party.”⁹³² It was Rudolf Jung, the refugee from Czechoslovakia, who prevailed upon him to follow the pattern of the D.N.S.A.P., and thus—with a very slight change in the name—the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (N.S.D.A.P.) was born.

The onomastic evolution of the Bohemo-Moravian mother-party had been closely imitated. And Rudolf Jung provided the young party with an almost complete outline of a ready-made ideology . . . the volume published in Aussig in 1919.⁹³³ Hitler merely added a few confused ideas about foreign policy, and Streicher, a Franconian teacher and formerly active in the Democratic Party,⁹³⁴ provided an even more virulent anti-Judaism.

Contacts between the D.N.S.A.P., its small Austrian splinter, and the N.S.D.A.P. were quickly established, and from 1920 to 1922 so-called Zwischenstaatliche Vertretertagungen (“interstate meetings of representatives”) were held in order to co-ordinate political activity. At the first of these meetings, which took place in Salzburg (Austria) on August 7 and 8, the Vienna programme of May 15, 1918, was repeated almost verbatim; deviations are to be found in minor details only.⁹³⁵ The demand for a union of all Germans in a “democratic, social German Reich” was retained, and there was some talk about an “equal and general right to vote.” A moral renaissance was stressed, and instead of Gottfried Feder’s “positive Christianity” we hear about the postulate for a “development of the religious life in a German spirit”—a phrase perhaps even more ambiguous. New was the demand for a two-chamber system, with an upper chamber on a corporative basis.⁹³⁶

It is worth mentioning that the collective signatory of the programme appears to have been the “Nationalsozialistische Partei des deutschen Volkes,” and the same label figures, temporarily at least, at the head of the tabulation in Rudolf Jung’s opus (1922 edition). Here we find a list of all National Socialist publications in that year.⁹³⁷ The “Sudetenländische Gruppe” is mentioned first with eleven periodicals and newspapers, then the Austrian organization with two periodicals (in Vienna and Salzburg) and, finally, the German group with only one paper, the Völkische Beobachter—the name and address of the editor are given: Adolf Hitler, München, Corneliusstrasse 12. The Polish group (headed by Herr Kotschi in Bielitz) had no house organ.

The inter-state meetings were continued until 1922. By the middle of 1923 the German group must have increased considerably. The Czechoslovakian and Austrian parties were trailing.⁹³⁸ Hitler then made his first bid for power in November, 1923, and failed; but when he was released from the fortress of Landsberg in 1924 the Bohemo-Moravian mother-party formally accepted his leadership.⁹³⁹ The D.N.S.A.P. of Czechoslovakia thus became nothing but a tail on Hitler’s kite. The S.D.P. (Sudetendeutsche Partei) founded by Konrad Henlein after the outlawing of the D.N.S.A.P. by the Czechoslovak government was nothing but a badly camouflaged revival of Dr. Beneš’s Germanic counter-party.

Hitler’s attempt, in co-operation with General Ludendorff,⁹⁴⁰ to unseat the German government in November, 1923, through an open rebellion in Munich, was foiled through the efforts of the local Reichswehr under the command of Von Lossow, and the refusal of Von Kahr, Bavarian Prime Minister, to accommodate the Führer. (Von Kahr and Von Lossow were murdered in the Reichsmordwoche, the “Blood Purge,” June 30, 1934.) From that time on Hitler’s hatred for the Junkers, the Reichswehr and all clerical politicians was boundless: his paladins in the army were in the end all non-Junkers such as Jodl, Guderian and “die Keitel.” P. F. Drucker was quite right when he said of Hitler’s relation to the German army that the Führer “hated it just as much as any German liberal did.”⁹⁴¹ The Church, ably led by Cardinal von Faulhaber, also opposed Hitler on principle.

The plan to conquer Germany from the Catholic domains had thus proved a failure. After a prolonged and partly enforced lull the conquest of Germany began by legal means—that is, within the framework of the democratic process. The first states which fell a prey to Hitler were Saxony and Thuringia. In the autumn of 1930 the National Socialists won 107 seats, gaining triumph after triumph in the northeast—in East Prussia (with the exception of Catholic Varmia), in Pomerania, Mecklenburg, and Sleswig-Holstein.

Nothing is more revealing than a study of the election results of the whole period between 1928 and 1933. Not only does the comparison of the religious with the political map of Germany tell a striking story, but also does the study of the increase and decrease of the individual parties. If we divide them into three groups, viz., the National Socialists, the “Rigid Ideologists” (National Conservatives, Catholics, Socialists and Communists), and the “Demo-Liberals” (Democratic, Liberal, Protestant, non-partisan peasant and middle-class parties), we get for four of the elections of that period the following picture:

ELECTION | DEPUTIES ELECTED BY
| National Socialists | “Rigid” | Demo- Liberals
May 20, 1928   .. | ..  12 | 363 | 116
September 14, 1930 | ..107 | 351 | 119
November 6, 1932 | ..196 | 364 | 24
March 5, 1933  .. | ..288 | 346 | 13

What had happened?

Not only did the National Socialists succeed in mobilizing the inert non-voters, the “private citizens” (idiotae), who ordinarily show no interest in political matters,* but they also gobbled up the “demo-liberals.” The German Democratic Party (later called Staatspartei), which had over 80 mandates in 1919 and in 1928 still had 25 deputies, decreased finally to 5 seats. The “Wirtschaftspartei des Mittelstandes,” which boasted of 23 deputies in 1928, had none in 1933. Yet the royalist “Bavarian People’s Party” maintained and slightly increased its number of supporters, whereas the Catholic Centre Party rose slowly from 61 to 73 seats. The Socialists had small losses; the Communists increased considerably; the National Conservatives fluctuated but managed to maintain their hold. On the other hand the Deutsche Volkspartei, the heirs of Bismarck’s National Liberals, gradually declined from 45 to 2 members. It was German liberalism and German bourgeois democracy which had turned National Socialist.

This is not surprising if we remember that German liberalism was strongly sectarian, opposed to Catholicism and orthodox Protestantism alike. The attacks of some of the Nazi leaders against Christianity could have been written by any French Radical Socialist or contributor to such Soviet periodicals as Byezbozhnik or Antireligioznik.⁹⁴² These attacks were often “scientific” rather than racialist-emotionalist.⁹⁴³ Hitler, for example, declared: “National Socialism is not a religion with a cult but a popular movement based on the exact sciences.”⁹⁴⁴

About the religious implications of the elections we have written in the preceding chapter. The Catholic share of the Nazis was smaller than the Protestant,⁹⁴⁵ because the Catholics were also less conspicuous in the “demo-liberal” parties. The Catholic votes for the “Staatspartei” or the “Deutsche Volkspartei” must have been negligible. Furthermore, it must be kept in mind that the National Socialists never denied their democratic and socialist heritage. Occasionally support was given to the Nazis by noblemen, bankers, manufacturers and individual scientists; yet essentially the National Socialists were always a “movement of grocers,” a Bäckermeisterbewegung. The renegades from the upper classes who supported this mass movement of petty bourgeois and workers acted perhaps sometimes in good faith, hoping against hope to tame the beast. Some others started to pay “protection” and “conscience money” before Hitler came into power.

But if opposition becomes hopeless, collaboration is sometimes the best form of “attack.” When Hitler was taken into the government in January, 1933, the ruling clique not only bowed to the democratic principle of parliamentary support, but also hoped to destroy nazism by saddling it with responsibilities—and confronting it with “insuperable difficulties.” For instance, great care was taken that each post in the cabinet allotted to a National Socialist was counterbalanced by another position filled by a non-Nazi.⁹⁴⁶ Papen and his supporters had become afraid of their own isolated and unconstitutional position. They changed their minds; but so also had Hitler, who in October, 1932, had haughtily rejected Papen’s first offer to collaborate. In an open letter he had described Papen’s motives ironically and correctly, putting the following words in his mouth:

In this emergency only one thing could help. We wanted to invite them [i.e., the Nazis] into our cabinet, which enjoys not only the support of all Jews but also of many aristocrats, conservatives and members of the “Stahlhelm.” We were certain that they would accept our invitation without guile, freely and gladly. Then we would slowly start to pull their poison fangs. Once they shared our company they could hardly withdraw. Mitgefangen! Mitgehangen! [caught together, hanged together].⁹⁴⁷

This letter was terminated by Hitler’s proud insistence on the loyalty of his supporters, who do not belong to “Herr von Papen’s world” but “want to be the most faithful sons of our people, although they are mostly of simple origin and often living in dire poverty.” This community of millions of German workers of the “forehead and the hand” and of the German peasants “does not fight with the lips but with a suffering borne thousandfold, and with innumerable sacrifices, for a new and better German Reich.”

Yet the trick of collaboration did not work. The silly cavalry officer had underestimated the shrewd post-card painter. The clique around the President had underestimated the crushing power of mass movements functioning in complete harmony with the spirit of the age. “Insuperable difficulties” there were none, because the Western powers made concessions to Hitler which they had never made to Brüning, or to any one of his immediate successors.

Other “collaborationists” thought cynically with Baron Steiger: “La garde se rend mais elle ne meurt pas” (“The Old Guard surrenders but does not die”). Some others again were convinced that they should act as clercs in the sense in which Julien Benda uses this expression—as servants of the “general will,” of the masses, of the prevailing trends, riding the “wave of the future.” It is, needless to say, the duty of true élites to oppose the masses if they err, and to prefer death to compromise: prius mori quam superari.

The whole dangerous decay was seen by a few in utter clarity, and they had acted accordingly even before 1944. Dr. Edgar Jung (murdered in 1934) was one of those who had correctly analyzed the deadly “democratic” aspects of National Socialism. Men like Jung had rejected it because they had always repudiated all collectivistic movements.⁹⁴⁸ And the percentage of noblemen in the conspiracy of July, 1944, shows that the old virtues were even then not entirely dead; among the 119 persons condemned to death by the People’s Court no less than 41 had titles, over 60 were army and navy men, 4 were priests and ministers, about 20 were high civil servants.⁹⁴⁹ They had fought a movement and an ideology which a discerning French novelist had called a “late cancer which had thriven on the French Revolution,” and they had died in battle.⁹⁵⁰

Yet Hitler, who definitely had his eye set on the multitudes, repeatedly called National Socialism “democratic” and styled himself an “arch-democrat.” So did Goebbels and Rudolf Hess. The following are only a few instances:

Hitler: Attack against Eton and Harrow, December 10, 1940 (Völkischer Beobachter, December 11, 1940); calls himself an arch-democrat, Munich, November 8, 1938 (V.B., November 10, 1938); calls National Socialism the “truest democracy,” Berlin, January 30, 1937 (V.B., January 31, 1937); calls the National Socialist constitution democratic, Berlin, May 21, 1935 (V.B., May 22, 1935); also in Mein Kampf (Munich: Eber, 1939), p. 99: “The truly Germanic democracy with the free election of the Leader, who is obliged to assume full responsibility for all his actions.”

Goebbels: Calls National Socialism an “authoritarian democracy” (speech before the press, May 31, 1933); calls National Socialism a “Germanic democracy” (speech before the press, Frankfurt, June 21, 1933);⁹⁵¹ calls National Socialism “the noblest form of European democracy,” March 19, 1934; admits that Nazis do not talk much about democracy but insists they are nevertheless the executors of the “general will” (V.B., April 25, 1933).

Rudolf Hess: Calls National Socialism the “most modern democracy of the world” based on “the confidence of the majority.”⁹⁵²

The democratic character of National Socialism has also been clearly recognized by such observers as J. V. Ducatillon, J. T. Délos, Denis de Rougemont, Siegmund Neumann, Peter Viereck, and Ladislas Ottlik.⁹⁵³ It is also obvious that there is a deep, intrinsic connection between nationalism and populism, nationalism and democracy. Ethnic nationalism in Europe started distinctly as an anti-aristocratic and anti-monarchic movement, frequently characterized by a strong anti-Catholicism. The ambiguity of the word Volk, with its Slavic parallel narod (which, however, is etymologically stronger in its racial implications than either Volk or populus; the syllable—rod means “sex “), is not merely coincidental. The term deutsch (diutisk) had also the double meaning of German and popular.⁹⁵⁴

Neither was the assertion of the socialistic character of the Party and the régime an imposture. It is self-evident that in a totalitarian state, where the government wields an absolute power, private property loses all its reality. A manufacturer whose factory can be confiscated at a moment’s notice without compensation, who has to produce what he is told at a prescribed price, who has to invest his money in a definite manner, who has to make specific donations at certain intervals and has to deal with governmental trade unions, is an “owner” or a “master” not even on sufferance. Reventlow ridiculed the idea that private property is sacred.⁹⁵⁵ And if we look at the social background of the party members and their leaders we find the upper classes in a distinct minority. Professor Abel found among a large group of leading Nazis only 7 per cent. belonging to the “upper crust,” 7 per cent. peasants, 35 per cent. workers, and 51 per cent. who belonged to the lower middle class. The number of school teachers was especially high in the party hierarchy.⁹⁵⁶

The Jacobin and revolutionary element was never dormant in National Socialism.⁹⁵⁷ At the beginning a certain confusion could be seen on the “proletarian” issue, and in the Rehse collection of early National Socialist documents we see not only violently anti-capitalist handbills but also the original programme of the (German) D.A.P., which shows the following curious passage:

The German Workers’ Party wants the ennoblement of the German worker. The skilled and settled workers have a right to be considered members of the middle classes. A sharp line of demarcation should be drawn between workers and proletarians.⁹⁵⁸

This attitude disappears at a later stage. Count Reventlow insisted on a mere juxtaposition between “Nationalsozialismus” and “Internationalsozialismus.”⁹⁵⁹ Later he tried to establish a common front between National Socialism and Communism, based on Russo-German collaboration and the “common destruction of the Polish state.”⁹⁶⁰ The Communist organ Rote Fahne published and commented on two of his open letters. The Communist reception of his proposals was friendly, but the subsequent electoral defeats of the National Socialists deprived them of much of their bargaining power.

Still, Dr. Goebbels declared in 1932:

Where can we get the moral justification to attack the proletarian concept of a class war if the bourgeois class-state has not been first fundamentally smashed and replaced by a socialist structure of the German community?⁹⁶¹ And another National Socialist meditated sadly:

The fact that we lost the war [World War I] is not the worst of all. Yet that they cheated us out of the revolution, that is really preposterous.⁹⁶²

After 1939 the National Socialists received not only open support from the Communists (until 1941) but also, in France, Belgium and Denmark, from various leftist elements. Ex-Socialists and ex-Communists like Laval, Doriot and Déat became collaborators. The left Œuvre became pro-Nazi, and only forty of the original Socialist deputies were able to run again for Parliament in 1945. The Danish Social Democrats under Stauning collaborated until 1943. The Finnish Social Democrats under Väinö Tanner were in the same boat. Some Belgian Socialists led by Hendrik de Man were, by and large, also collaborationists.

But why blame them when such an outstanding “liberal” as David Lloyd George declared solemnly that Hitler was wonderful, the German people the happiest under the sun, and the fate of Poland rightly deserved?⁹⁶³

On the other hand it would be unjust to overlook the social welfare activities of the National Socialists, who probably did more for the “common man” than any other régime before them.⁹⁶⁴ The philosophical dangers of Gemeinnutz geht vor Eigennutz—“the good of all takes precedence over the good of the individual”—are, however, a different matter. The man in the street could hardly guess that it led straight to Frank’s Recht ist was dem deutschen Volke nutzt—“whatever is of advantage to the German people is right.” He could not possibly foresee what the final implications of such a dictum might be.

The attack against the upper classes, the bourgeois with status, and the nobleman, as well as the violent anti-Judaism, were intrinsically connected with the socialist attitude⁹⁶⁵ and the acceptance of the “common man” as the very pillar of the régime. Goebbels declared frankly, with complete omission of all racialist argumentation: “The National Socialist is an anti-Semite because he is a socialist.”⁹⁶⁶ The inherently anti-Jewish attitude of socialism in general was well outlined by Antonio Machado:

Marxism, gentlemen, is a Judaic interpretation of history. Nevertheless Marxism will hang the bankers and persecute the Jews.⁹⁶⁷

Marx himself could be violently anti-Jewish, not only in his essays,⁹⁶⁸ but also in his private letters,⁹⁶⁹ where, curiously enough, his anti-Judaism took a decidedly racialist turn. Some of his remarks about Lasalle have a distinctly Streicheresque tenor.⁹⁷⁰ Yet Lasalle also gave vent to his anti-Jewish feelings,⁹⁷¹ and even Engels was not free from this vice.⁹⁷² And it would be a great mistake to believe that the position of the Jews in the U.S.S.R. is a very happy one.⁹⁷³

All in all it might be said that the spirit of National Socialism has to be treated in a factual way, and must be analyzed in its living reality. Unfortunately we cannot reproduce here the melodies of Nazi songs, which were often very telling and characteristic of the mentality of the movement. The Horst Wessel Lied, for instance, has a distinctly sombre, menacing and even melancholy tune, thus almost implicitly announcing the Nacht der langen Messer—“the night of the long knives.”⁹⁷⁴ Its text lamented those killed by the “Red Front” and “Reaction” alike—the victims of the “competitors” and those of the “enemies.” In other chants the leftist note comes out even more clearly. As for instance Kleo Pleyer’s:

Wir sind das Heer vorn Hakenkreuz, | We are the army of the swastika,
Hebt hoch die roten Fahnen! | Raise high the red banners!
Der deutschen Arbeit wollen wir | We want to build German labour’s
Den Weg zur Freiheit bahnen. | Road to liberty.⁹⁷⁵

or:

Wir Nationalen Sozialisten, | We National Socialists
Wir wollen keine Reaktion | Want no reaction.
Wir hassen Juden und Marxisten | We loathe Jews and Marxists.
Ein Hoch der deutschen Revolution! | Long live the German Revolution!
(Refrain) | (Refrain)
Drum Brüder auf die Barrikaden! | Onward, brothers, to the barricades!
Der Führer ruft, so folget gleich | The Führer calls, follow him now!
Die Reaktion hat ihn verraten, | Reaction has betrayed him
Und dennoch kommt das Dritte Reich! | But the Third Reich comes nevertheless.⁹⁷⁶

National Socialism, as we have seen, is neither a conservative nor a reactionary movement, but merely the synthesis of practically all ideas dominant in the last 160 years. It is obvious that the roots of these ideas antedate the French Revolution.

National Socialism had naturally also a local colour, but how much of it is based on historical reminiscences going back for centuries is difficult to decide. We are inclined to think that remote historical events, apart from shaping (to a certain extent) a national character, do not mysteriously slumber in some sort of “racial subconscious,” but are revived in “re-representations “provoked by entirely new political happenings. That these re-representations are sometimes not only slightly inaccurate, but often downright historical falsehoods, is too well known to need further emphasis.

Of course, it is possible that the East German, Czech⁹⁷⁷ and North Austrian character has certain affinities and certain traits which made it receptive to specific manifestations of the phenomenon whose genesis we have tried to trace, in such fields as have been hitherto neglected by most authors. On the other hand, we have to bear in mind that the movement was a failure in the Bohemo-Austro-Bavarian domain, and that its important victories were reaped in Northern Germany. We would therefore act more wisely, if we debate the gyrations of an ideology, to look first and foremost to competing and opposing philosophies, rather than to the still fairly unexplored world of ethnic psychology (Volkspsychologie). We certainly do not believe that National Socialism as a basic movement was any more “German” than “Czech” or “Austrian” or “Germanized Slav” or “Prussian.”⁹⁷⁸ Characteristics which are usually termed “Nazi” can be found in most nations—but especially in “progressive” and “democratic” nations.

4. SUMMARY

In tracing the origins of the Nazi Party we have first outlined the relationship between nazism and democracy and nazism and the Reformation. After this preparatory work we investigated the influence of the popular conception of Hus on the Czech Socialists and National Socialists. Since the conscious living up to this picture has always been freely acknowledged by these two Czech groups, it is hardly necessary to concern ourselves with this connection any further.

A more difficult matter is the copying of the Czech example by the German-speaking proto-Nazis of Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia. It is evident that neither did the Czech National Socialists want to boast of their Teutonic epigones, nor did the men of the D.A.P. and the D.N.S.A.P., in their ethnic and racial pride, desire to acknowledge their Slavic forerunners. The whole struggle, from 1904 to 1918, against the acceptance of the term “National Socialist” shows this very clearly.

Yet the ideological connection is undeniable. The lack of anti-Semitism in the N.S.S.Č. is no counter-argument. The highly industrialized Sudeten Germans often faced Jewish capitalists, whereas the Czech agrarian population had no such material invitation to anti-Judaism. The expression “Workers’ Party” actually “jumped a generation” and was adopted by the D.A.P. from its “grandfather,” the Czech Socialist Workers’ Party. The symbiosis between Germans and Czechs was also a very close one (no German in Bohemia lived more than forty miles from the Czech ethnographic area), and we know that numerous Germans and Czechs crossed over incessantly to the other ethnic community. The number of “Germans” with Czech names in the D.A.P. and D.N.S.A.P. was always very great—a situation which later, among the Austrian Nazis, assumed grotesque proportions.⁹⁷⁹ There are many obvious psychological reasons for it. It is also interesting that not only Czech but also German encyclopedias used a common heading for all National Socialist parties.⁹⁸⁰

When we come to the influence of the D.N.S.A.P. on the N.S.D.A.P., we see it confirmed by three authors whose works have been published in English.⁹⁸¹ Those who wrote inside the Reich after 1933 had to be careful about it lest they steal the thunder of the Führer—there was always the danger of lèse-majesté—but some Nazi authors tried to minimize the influence,⁹⁸² others (especially Sudeten Germans) gave cautiously factual accounts without analyzing them. Only Pfitzner claimed a full fatherhood. Yet we have only to read the various programmes from the meetings in Trautenau up to the Interstate Congress of Salzburg in 1920 (where Adolf Hitler participated) in order to see the unbroken chain. Rudolf Jung’s influence must have been considerable as co-ordinator. He had a ready-made ideology by 1919, when Hitler was still a paid informer in Munich.

Of course, there are also other prehistories⁹⁸³ of National Socialism; a narrower one which deals with the genius loci of Germany, and a broader one which includes world-wide influences. Some of the material unearthed in these researches is valid, some invalid. The Teutonic Knights or Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, Spengler, Nietzsche, Major General Haushofer and Stefan George, have been very needlessly invoked as forerunners.⁹⁸⁴ The powerful religious angle and other cultural factors have been ruefully neglected.

Nor has this study only the interest of a post-mortem. Though nazism is overthrown and Hitler dead (they tell us), unfortunately National Socialism is by no means a phenomenon of the past. It must be borne in mind that socialism, unless realized on a world-wide scale, is bound to be a national socialism; and although British “national socialism,” with its liberal nostalgia, clings to the Western World, the quarrel between Yugoslavia and the U.S.S.R. is one between South Slav and Russian national socialism. Nothing is more significant than the Soviets’ strict ban on the use of the term “National Socialism,” which at all times had to be replaced by “Fascism” or “Hitlerism”—save for the period when Russian national socialism was allied with German racial socialism. Thus we have to face the fact that as long as collectivism, totalitarianism, the Continental tradition of democracy—as long as racialism, ethnic nationalism, the subordination of ends to means, egalitarianism, socialism and utilitarianism remain the characteristic traits of our civilization and epoch, the danger of a new, deadly synthesis will by no means be eliminated. The defeat, even the destruction of the Third Reich is after all too minor an incident to thwart or permanently discredit these evil powers and negative currents which are present everywhere.

Wrote David Rousset, a former inmate of one of the deadliest German concentration camps about National Socialism and its horrors:

Ce serait une duperie, et criminelle, que de prétendre qu’il est impossible aux autres peuples de faire une experience analogue pour des raisons d’ opposition de nature.*

We add the Czech names of the cities in parentheses.

Count Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi, founder of the Pan-Europe movement, repeatedly called the Jews the new aristocracy of Europe.

With strict proportional representation—60,000 votes for one seat in the Reichstag—the total number of deputies rose from 481 to 647.

L’Univers Concentrationnaire (Paris: Editions du Pavois, 1946), pp. 186–87.

CHAPTER VIII

POSTSCRIPT

Humanity is perhaps going to be shrewder and more clever, but certainly not better, more intelligent and more enterprising. I see the time coming when God will lose His delight in mankind, and when He will let it be beaten into fragments so that creation can be remade and rejuvenated.

—GOETHE

I will not cease to hold under the banner of religion in one hand the oriflamme of monarchy, and in the other the flag of the civil liberties.

—CHATEAUBRIAND (1827)

I CAN very well imagine that the patient English or American reader who has followed me to the bitter end and has often asked himself what sort of blueprint for the establishment of a lasting, just, and truly liberal order the writer of these lines would propose. Whoever peruses this book cannot fail to make the observation that these studies have by and large a negative, a critical character; he may have expected the rejection of totalitarian tyranny, but probably not the no less emphatic condemnation of the “only” alternative, the “universally accepted” palliative of democracy.

Yet at this point an important remark has to be inserted. The author is very well aware of the fact that there are countries, that there are situations, historical periods and psychological environments, which narrow the scope of practical choices. A monarchy in Rome around the year 100 A.D. might have prevented the outbreak of the civil wars which shook the nation to its foundations; but psychologically there was not the slightest chance for a return to Tarquinius Superbus, and it took the Romans centuries of imperial rule until they realized that their republic had gone. No monarchic “restoration” is offered in these pages to the United States; a political change of that sort could at present only end in ridicule—and disaster. A harmony between constitutional forms and national characters is absolutely necessary, and nothing is more calamitous than to overlook this fact. Political theory, political practice, and human realities are to a certain extent distinct elements, but the necessity of having them brought into some sort of organic relationship cannot be disregarded.

Another and no less menacing danger lies in the occasional non sequiturs besetting well-meaning nations. There are only too many Americans who cannot clearly distinguish between the rôle of the Preamble of the Declaration of Independence and that of the Constitution. The former contains philosophical statements, and these are either universally true or not true at all. The latter is a political blueprint tailored to the measure of the United States, which has also “grown into” these clothes. It is true that the drafters of the Constitution had the aims of the Preamble in mind; but the Constitution always remains a means to a specific end, and in different times, in different countries, other means for the preservation of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” may be more reasonable and effective. The catastrophic history of democracy in republican Europe and republican South America should be a terrible lesson to all pan-democrats—not only because it meant bitter suffering for the millions directly involved, but also because these truly “awful” mistakes are literally “brought home” to Americans by the recurrent necessity of sending millions of their sons and fathers to the sausage grinders of the Old World. Here the grim lament of St. Augustine could be repeated: Acceperunt mercedem suam vani vanam. The exhortation of the great Swiss conservative thinker, A. P. von Segesscr, not to reduce the guarantees of liberty to a single, invariable pattern,⁹⁸⁵ had clearly not been heard.

On the other hand, we do not want to create the impression that we believe America faces these problems merely in the channels and the media of foreign policy. The frightening victories of technology render the issue of amateurism versus expert knowledge as serious in America as in the Old World.⁹⁸⁶ The time is not far off when it will no longer be possible to skirt this problem by a shallow optimism, or by the empirically untenable assertion that to deny the average man’s perspicacity in political matters is “sheer Manichæism.” (This sort of frivolous credulity we find even in the Catholic camp.)

Still, we want to use as the background for our own constitutional blueprint countries other than the United States and Switzerland—in other words, countries of the non-Protestant world. We are naturally conscious of the fact that dabbling in blueprints for ideal forms of government would invite a great many scholars to raise their eyebrows, since they do not want to deal with even “theoretically possible” utopias. But such a projection and speculation is precisely the thing we here have in mind.

Our proposal for a form of government adapted to preserve liberty in modern times, and steer clear of the calamitous errors we have described, is based on four premises or, rather, postulates: (1) the greatest reasonably possible liberty of the person must be preserved and protected, since liberty is part and parcel of the common good; (2) the party system must be abolished because of its inherent drive and tendencies toward totalitarianism; (3) the ideological and philosophical struggles, which can neither be suppressed nor made an organic part of the governmental machine, have to be relegated to the private sphere of society; (4) the will of the majority has no right to prevail over the reasonable and the useful; the utilitarian and rational values in turn have to be subordinated to the commands of ethics and religion.

On the basis of the first three premises we therefore propose to establish a constitutional “equality” between a corporative popular representative body and the executive, administering the “bureaucracy.” The representatives in the corporative “Diet” are freely elected. The administration consists of officials coming from all layers of the population; they are employed on the basis of competitive examinations, plus one or two probationary years after having thus demonstrated their knowledge and ability.

Neither the popular representation nor the executive has an ideological pattern. The popular representation expresses honestly and freely the wishes and demands of the various groups of interest (ordines, to use a Latin term). In a sense it consists of “lobbies.” The executive, dominated by the ministries, tries to attain the useful and the feasible.

The corporative Diet can reach decisions which have binding power if they are unopposed by the executive or the Supreme Court, and receive the signature of the head of the state. But the ministries also can issue regulations, which become laws if they are not vetoed by the Diet, the Supreme Court or the chief of the state. Thus we get a clear and unequivocal separation of the two things: “What is good,” and “What the people want.” The pretensions, make-believes and dishonesties of mere “politics” can thus be dispensed with.

It will be evident that this writer prefers a hereditary monarch as the chief of state, because through the biological process he can also represent the element of continuity.⁹⁸⁷ Taine spoke of “the family, the only cure for death.” Yet the monarch’s main task is certainly not procreation but—together with a Crown Council—to act as an umpire between the people and the experts. He can vote with the “people” (the Diet) against the experts and bureaucrats, or with the latter against the representatives of the corporations. He can also act as an intermediary by helping to work out a compromise. Thus the monarch is the neutral element in the state. His Crown Council consists partly of his appointees, and partly of men delegated by the Diet, the executive and the Supreme Court.

The fourth organ is the Supreme Court, which also has the right to propose motions, through a representative in the Diet. This Supreme Court, whose members are appointed by the Church (or churches) and the universities, but can be vetoed by a three-quarter majority of the Diet, has to examine all laws and decide as to their compatibility with (a) the constitution and (b) the moral law and ethics. The Supreme Court with its two departments holds a right of absolute veto. It is obvious that a deep religious cleavage or a variety of denominations would constitute a not inconsiderable obstacle to the establishment of such a court.

It is self-evident that this whole system has to be based on a constitution which clearly defines and limits the prerogatives and powers of the state. The rights and liberties of man (liberty of the press, printing, association, private property and so on), must be duly safeguarded in such a written document.

The principle of federation would have to be fully applied in our “royal free state.” The democratic principle could find a limited expression not only in the corporate Diet but also in the administration of smaller units. The smaller the unit, the more justifiable the application of democracy. (The individual person, the very last unit, is fundamentally always “self-governing.”) Democracy becomes a rational proposition if the danger of mass anonymity and irresponsibility can be avoided, and if the otherwise so dangerous gap between the issues under judgment and the general level of knowledge is practically absent. Rousseau no less than Voltaire⁹⁸⁸ rejected democracy for larger units outright.

“Parties” on an ideological basis will have the opportunity to organize as private associations with the right to propagandize their ideas. Ideas and ideologies would probably make themselves felt in the Diet no less than in the executive, and even in the Supreme Court; but their strife, not being able to find full expression, will hardly assume that destructive character it has in the purely parliamentary state of the non-Protestant pattern.⁹⁸⁹

This very rough blueprint could be supplemented by an endless score of minor details, which we leave to the imagination of the reader.

After reading this proposal a person with libertarian convictions might ask himself what liberal implications this concept of a government has, after all, since it is definitely a government-from-above. Yet every government, with the exception of those belonging to the rare type of the direct democracy, are governments-from-above, and the reader, if he has closely followed our line of reasoning, ought himself to be able to provide the answer. First of all our plan eliminates the necessity of a totalitarian society bent on preserving at all costs the “common denominator” since it is not based on the existence of political parties. Diverging political views, different interests and even opposing ideologies would probably manifest themselves in the “Parliament” and in the administration without being able to tear the state asunder or, what is worse, to enslave it. Thus also the totalitarian element inherent in every political party imbued by a fixed ideology could be dispensed with. The reader, furthermore, will remember that there is no inherent connection between the precepts of democracy and those of liberalism; he remembers that the masses are the poorest guardians of liberty which has its real guarantee not in large numbers of voters (who might prefer security to liberty) but in immutable laws curtailing the prerogatives of the state and protecting the rights (and privileges) of the individual, the family and the smaller political (i.e., administrative) units. We also have to admit that this blueprint rests finally on the oaths given to the Constitution by all those serving it and that these solemn oaths are, in the last resort, only subject to religious convictions and thus to religious sanctions. Every other system of purely human checks and balances rests on sand. There is, in a democracy, no Supreme Court which a political party long enough in power, cannot “pack.” Hence also our proposal to remove it altogether from the control of one of the three legislating, administrating and “co-ordinating” bodies. On the other hand, we have also tried to give to the “administration” the character of an élite which might frighten a certain type of libertarian who suspects quality in an administration because quality gives prestige and prestige arrogance. Yet it stands to reason that if we cannot avoid having administrators we should use the best ones available. Both the Russian chinovniki and the members of the Indian Civil Service in the old days were representatives of “an absolutism,” but while the whole level of the I.C.S. was much higher than that of the rank and file chinovniki, the actual power of the Indian Civil Servant was far more curtailed than that of his Russian colleague. Similarly, the crowned absolutists like Maria Theresa or Frederick II, had a better training for their offices but far less power than modern parliamentarians over the destinies of the citizens. What a reasonable libertarian has to wish for is stable, just and efficient minimal government. What we usually get now is unstable, just and inefficient oversized government in the “democracies” and stable, unjust and fairly efficient maximal government in the totalitarian dictatorships. We have to look for a third way which, it so happens, resembles in many respects the old way.⁹⁹⁰

We are being forced, anyway, to rely increasingly on government by experts, and we have pointed out before that the discrepancy between the things which are theoretically known, the scita, and those which ought to be known by the “politicized” masses, the scienda, is increasing by leaps and bounds. Even if it is true that general education is improving and that the general level of education is rising—which we sincerely doubt—the political and economical problems with their implications as well as the scientific answers for their solution are growing in number as well as in complexity. This is a race between an arithmetical and a geometrical progression. To ask a peasant from Central Switzerland in a Landsgemeinde whether a concession should be given to a cheese factory is one thing, and to ask a man in the street in Kalamazoo or Welwyn Garden City what sort of diplomacy should be used towards Mao-Tse-Tung’s China is quite another. Yet this discrepancy is equally apparent in the modern “politicized” executives. In 1815, at the Congress of Vienna, it was sufficient for a Foreign Minister to have a good grasp of history, geography, genealogy and human psychology—besides the mastering of the French language. Today such knowledge, even theoretically, would be entirely insufficient. Twenty years of intensive study and travel, twenty years of delving into such additional subjects as international law, racial psychology, military affairs, economics, agrarian sciences, geopolitics and a whole score of other disciplines seem to be indispensable. And yet, the grim truth has to be found in the fact that our modern foreign ministers have not ten per cent of the knowledge, the insight, the manners and the experience of a Metternich, a Castlereagh, a Talleyrand, a vom Stein or a Humboldt. Usually their linguistic capacities are so limited that without the help of interpreters they could only bark at each other. We have seen in the immediate past men who had the fine experience of selling champagne, of driving buses or imbibing their knowledge for their tasks from reading H. G. Wells. And the decline from 1815 to the level of 1919 is probably as great as the dègringolade from 1919 to 1945.

We have insisted before, in a note, that the system of bricklayers lording it over architects will not work because it is opposed to reason and that knowledge is even necessary to choose experts or to co-ordinate their divergent views. A chimney-sweep sitting in council with three medical experts will hardly derive a profit from the exchange of their opinions, nor will a theologian listening to three atomic physicists debating an aspect of nuclear fission. Knowledge cannot be disregarded. It must be prevented from becoming a weapon for enslavement (which it might), but it must be respected in its place.

Let us even load the dice and compare the brilliant amateur with the miserable professional. Let us imagine we have suffered an attack of appendicitis and have been duly warned by a qualified physician that in case of a repetition of the pains an operation should be immediately performed. Yet one day on a trip through the South Seas, thousands of miles from the coast, another severe attack sets in. On board the ship there is the nastiest, dirtiest doctor we have ever seen in our life, an alcoholic with trembling hands and ill-fitting glasses. On the other hand, on the self-same boat there is a young man of excellent qualities, a poet and thinker, a painter and philosopher, who receives our whole-hearted admiration. Hearing about our predicament, he offers his help; he can borrow a scalpel from the doctor or a knife from the kitchen; there is an encyclopedia in the saloon with diagrams of the human body and he sincerely promises to do his best. Yet what stands to reason? Will we turn in our emergency to the horrible surgeon or to the brilliant young man? It is needless to comment any further on the obvious answer. And herein lies the advantage of mediocre monarchs trained for their jobs over dashing popular amateurs.

Thus the problem of our time remains—to have good government with personal liberty; to have a maximum of security with a maximum of liberty. For the solution of such a problem, democracy offers no solution, because the masses, choosing between freedom and the illusion of economic security, will usually head straight for the will-o’-the-wisp. After having fallen prey to the fausse idée claire of democracy they will succumb to the even falser idée claire of national or international socialism. When we mention the masses, all the optimistic demagogy about the superb qualities of the Common Man comes to our mind. Indeed, the old monarchies were far from being models of perfection. The ancien régime, if we look merely at its seamy side, was made up of murder, inefficiency, corruption, narrowness, immorality, procrastination, intrigue, egoism, deceit and pettiness and it had long been in need of radical reform when it disappeared. Yet it never promised a New Dawn or a Paradise on Earth and it must be conceded that it relinquished the stage of history with little opposition, almost in the expectation that the bombastically heralded New Experiments were bound to fail. And fail they did! The ancien régime had lasted a thousand years, and for over a hundred years the Continentals had tried to make a synthesis with the new forces. Then the stage was entirely left to the “Dawnists,” to our noble friend, the Common Man, and bankruptcy arrived not within a thousand years, but within half a generation. It came in a swift and deadly way. It murdered liberty by entirely new methods and it repeated the errors of the Old Government on a colossal scale: all the persecutions of Jews through the ages were dwarfed to microscopic size by Hitler’s delirious mass murders, and all the victims of the Inquisition burnt at the stake through centuries did not amount to one-fourth of the number of those cremated alive one afternoon in Dresden, when among 150,000 killed at least two-thirds perished fully conscious in the fiery flames . . . and this without an inquest, without the slightest effort to establish a real or even a subjectively imputed guilt at the very end of a war. To the horrors of the concentration camps almost girdling the globe we are at a loss to find any parallel. Thus, the crown to many a European, especially to a Central European, indeed is a symbol of freedom—not only when he thinks of the terrors of the East, but also when he reflects upon the sly process of enslavement in the West. There popular representations, resting on the comfortable fiction that the parliaments are “us,” “our-selves,” control the private lives of the “citizens” to a far greater extent than the monarchs of the past would ever have dared to regulate the doings of their “subjects.” Even a Louis XIV, autocrat, centralist and breaker of many of the best traditions as he was, would hardly have ventured to exercise three prerogatives which “progressive democracies” have claimed and do claim without batting an eye: prohibition of alcoholic beverages, conscription, and an income tax involving annual economic “confession” to the State . . . not to mention “nationalization” which is a specious form of theft.

History, unfortunately, is not rational or strictly logical, but a process which takes place in a Vale of Tears. Democracy rose in our civilization when the condition of the world least warranted it. It put tremendous weapons of technical progress into the hands of those least qualified to use them, and, allied with nationalism, it now becomes a powerful obstacle to the necessary unification of large regions. The Federation of Europe is lamentably handicapped by “politics,” that is, party-politics; and every word spoken by the various party leaders in the democracies must be weighed not so much as to their effect abroad as to their possible repercussions at the next elections. The disappearance of an effective monarchy is a special blow to the co-operation and amalgamation of the Old World, because monarchy alone would by now possess the full necessary supra-national outlook. It has got past the stage of tribal affiliations, which republicanism and democracy have by no means achieved. A Council of European Monarchs could be an effective co-ordinating body for Europe; an all-European Parliament, on the other hand, could not. Not only would it be faced, as a genuinely elected body of popular representatives, by an insuperable language problem, but, considering the level of our parliaments in wisdom and manners, as well as their ideological divisions, it would merely serve to break up, not to unify Europe. It is one thing that French deputies in the Chamber should shout at each other Scélérat! Assassin! Voleur!; but such verbal exchanges between a Communist gentleman from Toulouse and a Carlist gentleman from Pamplona might have deadly consequences. “Civil wars” on an unprecedented scale could be the result.

Thus the historical problem of our day is and remains the establishment of minimal government-from-above assuring and maintaining personal liberty. This issue cannot be shirked or permanently delayed by preserving the illusory fluidity of democratic institutions which have final control of the central government. Sooner or later this flux will congeal into the tyranny or the virtual dictatorship of a mass-party. Little it matters whether such rule is based on repeated elections won through permanent appeals to the lower half of the social pyramid, or whether it rests squarely, as in the “People’s Democracies,” on the efficiency of a ubiquitous police. Little it matters that finally a new oligarchy arises which methodically suppresses even those layers who helped to establish its sway. And since only real élites have a genuine psychological and intellectual interest in liberty, it is evident that they must have a position in political life which is more substantial than their numerical share. Needless to say, we do not identify such élites with classes or castes; they are the people capable of creative action. And creation as well as creativeness stands in constant need of liberty.

We are also convinced that the attentive reader will approach us with yet another question. He may have told himself that our numerous ironic remarks about the character of a totalitarian society watching grimly over the purity and uniformity of the “common framework of reference” lose much of their pungency if one keeps in mind that our Catholic convictions must force us to defend something “rather similar.” Is Catholicism in its own way not of a fairly totalitarian nature?

We would like to answer this question by two illustrations. Let us remember, first of all, the old programme: “In necessities unity; in doubtful things liberty; in everything charity.” This programme should be heartily endorsed.

The first two postulates can well be likened to a tree standing with its trunk well rooted in the soil while its long branches, rich in leaves, are playfully moved by the wind. The trunk and the roots are the “necessities,” the branches and leaves the “doubtful things.” Yet the totalitarian societies of our modern era can be compared to a tree whose roots are perversely hanging in the air, while its branches and leaves are screwed to long metal poles and have thus become immovable.

This picture—at first glance—may seem to be rather unjust. But let us conjure up the memory of a late medieval feast. The guests have arrived in a great variety of clothes, and even the costumes of the males show the most adventurous diversity. But they all would have belonged to one faith and one basic ideology. Based on this common denominator, they would have uttered a whole score of views. Yet we can very well imagine a dinner given in a “modern democracy”—and not only a so-called “people’s democracy” of the Eastern pattern!—in which all the men arrive in a black uniform (the tuxedo or “tails”), all of them with clean-shaven faces, all of them uttering in unison with parrot-like monotony the same identical political and social clichés. After some questioning and investigation one would nevertheless find that this monotony stems from a chaotic cauldron of the most variegated religions and philosophies. If a deist Mason, a Catholic, a Barthian, a vegetarian with Hinduist notions, and a “Freethinker” consider it as natural that they all believe in equality, majority rule, compulsory education and “progress”—then we have to doubt sincerely not only the logicality of their capacity to think, but also their real freedom of thinking! And it is also self-evident that a society with different premises, but bent upon achieving the same results from its “thinking” process, has to exercise a far greater pressure than one with a uniform religious basis. In its stark irrationalism such a society must be strictly anti-intellectual, and arrive at the very rejection of methodic thought.

The concrete political situation of the present moment is not the subject of our analysis; it is nevertheless fairly obvious that “democracy,” in spite of the ubiquity of this term, has failed the expectations of mankind. Democracy, no less than its bitter fruit—the tyranny of the one-party state—has foundered as a guarantor of freedom, the rôle in which it has posed for so long. Democracy, moreover, has betrayed its own idealism (which found such pregnant expression in the “Atlantic Charter”) with greater levity than any modern despotism. Democracy, no less than modern tyranny, is morally dead, a living corpse, a whitened sepulchre; yet tyranny with its monarchical externals is at least a sinister concentration of material forces and drives.

The latter’s physical menace, heralded by the dark cloud of corroding and demoralizing fear, is addressed to all of us. Therefore we need forms of government which can give us both freedom and strength—forms of government which fulfil the ethical as well as the practical demands of the times—of all times. If historical and geographic accidents had not favoured the rise of a gigantic empire on the western rim of the Atlantic which, through its dimensions, its numerous citizenry, and its safe distance, represented a unique counterweight, the western rim of the Old World would have lost its freedom twice within the last decade. Yet how inefficient this giant can be at times in face of the planning powers of evil we have seen when, in tired confusion, it surrendered at the green table after so many splendid military triumphs. Victory gained through the twin hierarchies of industry and the armed forces, was thrown away by the politicians.

America would act wisely if she would return to her great traditions; Europe, on the other hand, insofar as she is not enslaved, is faced by a categoric imperative. She must, must find the way back to her eternal well-springs or perish. The illusions, myths and lies of the last hundred years are going to save neither her soul nor her precarious physical existence.

NOTES

NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE

¹ See Francis Stuart Campbell [pseud, of E. R. von Kuehnelt-Leddihn], The Menace of the Herd: Procrustes at Large (Milwaukee: The Bruce Publishing Company, 1943).

² Cf. Gustave Thibon, “L’inégalité, facteur d’harmonie,” Études carmélitaines, 24e Année, Vol. II (1939), p. 78.

³ Cf. Pitirim Sorokin, The Crisis of Our Age: The Social and Cultural Outlook (New York: Dutton, 1941), pp. 173–74. Compare this with R. W. Emerson’s “nothing is more disgusting than the crowing about liberty by slaves, as most men are, and the flippant mistaking for freedom of some paper preamble like a Declaration of Independence, or the statutory right to vote, by those who have never dared to think or act.”

⁴ Cf. The Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “liberal,” B1 (Vol. VI, Part 1, p. 238). Roman Oyarzun, Historia del carlismo (Bilbao: Ediciones Fé, 1939), p. 12, note, claims that the term liberales was used of the supporters of free press in 1810. (Their opponents were named serviles.)

⁵ Carlton J. H. Hayes, A Generation of Materialism (New York: Harper and Brother, 1941), p. 49.

⁶ Campbell, op. cit., pp. 301–2, note. It is evident that persecution creates martyrdom. It also serves frequently to satisfy sadistic cravings among the persecutors. Nothing should appear to an intelligent Christian more diabolic than the synthesis of error and virtue, of truth and vice.

⁷ The Inquisition was basically ecclesiastical appraisal in the service of the state. It could only be established upon governmental request, and did not exist in the majority of European countries prior to or after the Reformation. Philip II tried in vain to persuade Pope Pius V to establish the Inquisition in the Papal States. In the Holy Roman Empire the Inquisition functioned only for a few decades during the thirteenth century.

⁸ Cf. George Ticknor, The Life, Letters and Journals of George Ticknor (Boston: James Osgood, 1876), I, 174 (letter to Elisha Ticknor, dated Rome, February 1, 1818): “The Pope talked a good deal about our universal toleration, and praised it as much as if it were a doctrine of his own religion, adding that he thanked God continually for having at last driven all thoughts of persecution from the world, since persuasion was the only possible means of promoting piety, though violence might promote hypocrisy.”

⁹ Codex Iuris Canonici, Article 1351: Ad amplexandam fidem catholicam nemo invitus cogatur.

¹⁰ Here we disagree with James Parkes’ otherwise excellent The Jew in the Mediaeval Community (London: Soncino Press, 1938), p. 104.

¹¹ Cf. E. v. Kuehnelt-Leddihn, “Thoughts on ‘The Faith of a Liberal,’” The Catholic World, July, 1946, p. 314.

¹² Cambridge Mediaeval History, VI, 724. This formula does not exonerate collaboration in a very dubious cause, but it does make clear the basic position of the Church.

¹³ On the teleological identity of “capitalism” and “socialism” cf. F. S. Campbell, op. cit., p. 134. Compare Henry Adams in his letter to Brooks Adams, dated Paris, October 21, 1899: “Some day I may find it convenient to know about socialist theories; they seem to be now on the verge of ousting all others except the pure capitalistic, which comes to the same result by any road.”—Henry Adams and his Friends, ed. H. D. Cater (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1947), p. 484.

¹⁴ Note that the Greek word demos had the meanings of the Latin plebs and populus; sometimes it was practically synonymous with ochlos, “the mob.” Only in modern Greek (koiné) is no pejorative sense whatever attached to this term.

¹⁵ On demophily cf. Emile Faguet, Le culte de l’incompétence, and Gonzague de Reynold, L’Europe tragique.

¹⁶ See John Adams, Defence, etc. (new ed.; London, 1794), III, 493–95.

¹⁷ Cf. The Works of John Adams, ed. Charles F. Adams (Boston: C. Little and J. Brown, 1851), VI, 462, 472, 516 (letters to John Taylor); also X, 267–68 (letter to James Madison, dated June 17, 1817).

¹⁸ Ibid., IX, 635–36 (letter to Benjamin Rush, dated August 28, 1811).

¹⁹ Cf. The Encyclopaedia Britannica (14th ed.), VII, 183. Van Buren quite rightly saw in Hamilton a monarchist: cf. Martin van Buren, Inquiry into the Origin and Course of Political Parties in the United States, ed. by his son (New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1867), p. 88.

²⁰ Cf. Henry Adams, The Formative Years; a History of the United States During the Administrations of Jefferson and Madison, ed. Herbert Agar (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1947), I, 41–44; Arthur H. Vandenberg, If Hamilton Were Here Today (New York: Putnam, 1923), pp. xxiv–xxvi; Nicholas Murray Butler, Why Should We Change Our Form of Government? (New York: Charles Scribner, 1912), p. 6; Ralph Adams Cram, The End of Democracy (Boston: Marshall Jones, 1937), 20, 131–32; Andrew Cunningham MacLaughlin, “Democracy and Constitution,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, New Series, XXII (1912), 296, 310, 317.

²¹ M. Adler, “In Terms of What Moral Principle Is Democracy the Best Government?” The Philosophy of the State: Fifteenth Annual Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association, ed. Charles A. Hart (Washington, D.C., 1939), p. 163. As to Andrew Jackson’s conviction about the superfluousness of experience and education in statecraft cf. his First Annual Message of Congress in A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents (Washington: Bureau of National Literature, 1897), III, 1011–12.

²² Cf. Heinrich von Treitschke, Politik; Vorlesungen gehalten an der Universität zu Berlin (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1900), II, 6: “The basic principle of democracy is equality. On the assumption of the equality of all human beings rest not only the ideals but also the illusions of democracy.”

²³ Cf. E. M. Burns, James Madison, Philosopher of the Constitution (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1938), p. 63.

²⁴ T. Jefferson, The Works of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Paul Leicester Ford (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1892), IX, 12.

²⁵ Ibid., p. 14–15.

²⁶ Jefferson, Works, ed. Washington (New York: Derby and Jackson, 1859), I, 403.

²⁷ Jefferson, Collected Writings, Monticello Edition (Washington, 1904), XV, 73.

²⁸ As quoted in J. T. Adams, Jeffersonian Principles and Hamiltonian Principles (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1932).

²⁹ One of the last correct definitions of democracy in an official publication can be found in the U.S. War Department’s military manual TM 2000–25, published in 1928 and in use for four succeeding years. See especially Section IX, Lesson 9, “Representative Government” (pp. 91–92). The definition is somewhat limited to direct democracy.

On the early horror for the republican form of government cf. John C. Miller, Origins of the American Revolution (Boston: Little, Brown, 1943), p. 499.

³⁰ Cf. Montesquieu, De l’esprit des lois, XI, 2 and 4.

³¹ Cf. Y. Stalin, Ob osnovakh leninizma; k voprosam leninizma (Moscow: Partizdat, 1935), pp. 4, 31, 35, 50; V. I. Lenin, Sotchinenija, ed. Adoratski and others (Moscow; Partizdat, 1926–32), XXIV, 13; XII, 131. Cf. also M. I. Kalinine, Que fait le pouvoir soviétiste pour réaliser la démocratie? (Paris: Bureau d’éditions de diffusion et de publicité, 1926); L. Trotzki, Parlamentnaya revolutsiya (Berlin: Izdatelstvo Granit, 1930), pp. 164–70.

NOTES TO CHAPTER TWO

³² “Know how to be royalists; formerly it was an instinct, today it is a science.”—Joseph de Maistre, “Lettre d’un royaliste savoisien,” Oeuvres compléetes (Lyons, 1884–87), VII, 155–56.

³³ Metternich, though, we do not consider to be one of the genuine conservatives, and this for the simple reason that he was a “libertarian” only in a very indirect way. On many things his judgment was warped, in some other respects his vistas were remarkably clear; yet he had learned too much from his enemies—much more than was good for the cause he sincerely professed to stand for. He felt rather uncomfortable in his period, a fact testified to by his own confession written on October 16th, 1819: “My life fell into a disgusting historical period. I was born either much too early or much too late; now I actually feel good for nothing. At an earlier period I would have enjoyed life, in a future period I could have been truly constructive; today I spend my life propping up decaying buildings. I ought to have been born in 1900, thus having before me the twentieth century.”—Cf. Aus Metternichs nachgelassenen Papieren, ed. Prince Richard Metternich-Winneburg (Vienna: Wilhelm Braumüller, 1881), III, 348 (No. 442).

³⁴ See Francis Stuart Campbell [Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn], Op. cit., PP. 15–30. 379.

³⁵ We distinguish between “citizenship” (a legal term), “race” (a biological characteristic), and “nationality,” which has cultural (primarily linguistic) implications. We prefer this Central European terminology to the vagueness of British and American usage, where “citizenship” is often synonymous with “nationality,” and “race” is given alternatively ethnic and biological meanings.

³⁶ John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (London: Dent, 1910 [“Everyman’s Library”]), p. 131.

³⁷ Montesquieu, De l’esprit des lois, Livre XXIX, Chap. 18.

³⁸ Benjamin Constant, De l’esprit de conquête et de l’usurpation dans leurs rapports avec la civilisation européenne, together with Adolphe (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1924 [?]), xiii, 212.

³⁹ Ibid., pp. 207–208. “Demagogy” is here the revolutionary period, and “despotism” the Napoleonic period.

⁴⁰ Ibid. This volume was first published in 1814 (it was written during Constant’s sojourn in Hanover). Yet the reader is reminded that this most penetrating analyst of the French Revolution and the plebiscitarian dictatorship of Napoleon succumbed in 1815, during the Hundred Days, to the first great temptation, and supported the Emperor in return for a brilliant position. It is obvious that there is no connection between intellectual and moral qualities.

⁴¹ Cf. Juan Donoso Cortes, Marques de Valdegamas, Oeuvres, publiés par sa famille, ed. Veuillot (Paris: Librairie Auguste Valon, 1858), p. 520.

⁴² Among modern authors cf. Vilfredo Pareto, The Mind and Society, ed. A. Livingston (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1935), II, 664 (§1115, iv, Beta and §1126, iv, Beta 2); George Santayana, The Life of Reason (New York: Scribner, 1932), p. 91; Wilfrid Trotter, Instincts of the Herd in Peace and in War (New York: Macmillan, 1919), 29–30.

⁴³ Constantine Leontyev, “Plemënnaya politika kak orudie vsemirnoy revolyutsii” (Pisma k O.I. Fudel), in Vostok, Rossiya i Slavyanstvo, Vol. VI of Sobraniye Sochineniy K. Leontyeva (Moscow: Izdanie V. M. Sablina, 1912).

⁴⁴ Jacob Burckhardt, Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen, ed. J. Oeri (2nd ed.; Berlin & Stuttgart: Spemann, 1910), p. 208. Comment on President Grant’s Second Inaugural Address, made on March 4, 1873.

⁴⁵ Ibid., p. 171.

⁴⁶ “Oh, yes, sir, now no one has any power—neither count nor proletarian.”—Walter Bagehot, “Essay on Sterne and Thackeray,” Works, ed. Forrest Morgan (Hartford: Travelers’ Insurance Co., 1891), II, 191. The story is from Montalembert.

⁴⁷ Cf. Iwan Bloch [“Dr. Eugen Duehren”], Le Marquis de Sade et son temps, (Berlin: Barsdorf, 1901; Paris: A. Michalon, 1901), pp. 392–93.

⁴⁸ Numa D. Fustel de Coulanges, La cité antique (8e édition; Paris: Hachette, 1880), pp. 404–405.

⁴⁹ F. M. Dostoyevski, The Possessed, Part II, viii, 2.

⁵⁰ Jacob Burckhardt, op. cit., p. 137.

⁵¹ Letter to F. S. Vögelin, dated February 15, 1863: Jacob Burckhardt, Briefe zur Erkenntnis seiner geistigen Gestalt, ed. Fritz Kaphahn (Leipzig: Alfred Kröner, 1935), p. 274.

⁵² Jacob Burckhardts Briefe an Seinen Freund Friedrich von Preen 1864–1893, ed. Emil Strauss (Stuttgart & Berlin: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1922), p. 222 (letter, dated March 17, 1888).

⁵³ Cf. for instance Herbert Read, The Politics of an Unpolitical (London: Routledge, 1943), pp. 26–27. For a critique of these egalitarian tendencies cf. Karl Jaspers, Die geistige Situation der Zeit (Leipzig: Walter de Gruyter, 1932 [Sammlung Göschen, Vol. 1000]), p. 36.

⁵⁴ “Fragments des entretiens de Tocqueville avec Nassau W. Senior,” in Eugène Eichthal, Alexis de Tocqueville et la démocratie libérale (Paris: C. Lévy, 1897), p. 247.

⁵⁵ Cf. David W. Petegorsky, Left-Wing Democracy in the English Civil War: a Study of the Social Philosophy of Gerrard Winstanley (London: Gollancz, 1940).

⁵⁶ Cf. Donoso Cortés, loc. cit.

⁵⁷ John C. Calhoun, A Disquisition on Government (New York: Appleton, 1853), P. 56.

⁵⁸ Cf. Irving Babbitt, Democracy and Leadership (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1924), p. 298; W. H. Chamberlin, The World’s Iron Age (New York: Macmillan, 1941), pp. 46–47; Christopher Dawson, The Judgment of the Nations (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1942), p. 62; Dr. Hermann Hefele, “Demokratie und Liberalismus,” Hochland, Jahrg. XXII, Vol. I (October, 1924), pp. 34–43; Luis Legaz y Lacambra, Introduction a la teoría del estado nacionalsindicalista (Barcelona: Bosch, 1940), p. 49; José Ortega y Gasset, Invertebrate Spain, trans. Mildred Adams (New York: W. W. Norton, 1937), pp. 125–26.—(These passages are not contained in the Spanish edition of España Invertebrada, Madrid, 1921–22, but in Ortega’s Castilla y sus castillos (Madrid: Afrodisio Aguado, 1949 [Colección “Mas Allá”]), pp. 96–98.—Gustav Radbruch, Rechtsphilosophie (Leipzig: Quelle und Meyer, 1932), p. 66 sq.; Dr. Wilhelm Röpke, “Das Zeitalter der Tyrannis,” special reprint of No. 5–6 of Die Friedenswarte, XXXIX (Zürich, 1939), p. 8; Denis de Rougemont and Charlotte Muret, The Heart of Europe (New York: Putnam, 1941), p. 114; Guido de Ruggiero, Storia del liberalismo europeo (Bari: G. Laterza, 1925), pp. 403, 410; Dr. Carl Schmitt, “Die geistesgeschichtliche Lage des heutigen Parlamentarismus,” Bonner Festgabe für E. Zitelmann (Munich and Leipzig: Duncker und Humblot, 1923), p. 428 (here this later supporter of National Socialism affirms the compatibility between dictatorship and democracy); Petko Staynov, Kompetentnost i narodovlastië: polititsheski izutshvaniya vârkhu krizata na parlamentarisma i demokratsiyata (Sofia: Pridvorna Petshatnitsa, 1923), pp. 5, 39 (only in Bulgar, but excellent and comprehensive); Frank Thiess, Das Reich der Dämonen; der Roman eines Jahrtausends (Vienna and Leipzig: Zsolnay, 1941), p. 203; Bernard Wall, European Notebook (London: Sheed and Ward, 1939), PP. 107–8; 108; Max Weber, Grundriss der Sozialökonomik, III Abt.: “Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft,” p. 745 (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1922). Hans Kelsen in Vom Wesen und Wert der Demokratie (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1929), pp. 3–4, identifies democracy with liberty. Plato and Aristotle have similar notions. See Note 366.

Among other authors who have stressed the distinction between democracy and liberty cf. G. Frh. v. Hertling, Recht, Staat und Gesellschaft (Kempten and Munich: Josef Kösel, 1907), p. 146; Adalbert Stifter, “Der Staat II.” in Constitutionelle Donauzeitung, No. 18 reprinted in Politisches Vermächtnis (Vienna: Klassiker der Staatskunst, Braumüller, 1950). Among American sources Everett Dean Martin’s Liberty (New York: Norton, 1930) has perhaps the greatest value (cf. especially p. 126). The author, a Congregationalist minister and writer, was a critically gifted thinker of keen insight.

⁵⁹ Yet how stupidly the Western Powers subordinated their hopes for greater liberty to the democratic dogma in the frenzy of two World Wars has been shown by Jules Romains in “Le tapis magique,” Les hommes de bonne volonté (Paris: Flammarion, 1946), XXV, 76–77, and by Raymond Aron, in Les guerres en chaîne (Paris: Gallimard, 1951), pp. 38, 42, 61, 97.

⁶⁰ Eduard Heimann, “The Rediscovery of Liberalism,” Social Research, VIII, No. 4 (November, 1941), p. 479. On the other hand, the degradation of the term “liberal “in the United States is without parallel and without limit.

⁶¹ Orestes Brownson, “Legitimacy and Revolution” (written in 1848), in Essays on Theology, Politics and Socialism (New York: Sadlier, 1852), pp. 390–91.

⁶² Quoted in full in Charles H. Betts, “Macaulay’s Criticism of Democracy and Garfield’s Reply,” Open Court, XXXII (1918), p. 273 sq.

⁶³ John H. E. Dalberg-Acton, The History of Freedom and Other Essays, ed. Figgis and Laurence (London: Macmillan, 1922), p. 88.

⁶⁴ Ibid., pp. 63–64. (Italics ours.)

⁶⁵ William E. H. Lecky, Democracy and Liberty (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1896), pp. 256–57.

⁶⁶ Ibid., pp. 257–58. Chateaubriand also was haunted by the fear of the ubiquité de la tyrannie populaire. Cf. his Mémoires d’Outre-Tombe, ed. Maurice Levaillant (Paris: Flammarion, 1948), I, p. 371. (I. ix, 3.) “C’est la présence universelle d’un universel Tibère,” he adds.

⁶⁷ J. P. Proudhon, Du principe de fédération, Vol. VIII of his Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Librairie Internationale, 1868). Proudhon’s fears stemmed partly from the electional aspects of democracy. Cf. also his letter, dated April 26, 1852, on universal suffrage.

⁶⁸ Proudhon, “Solution du problème sociale,” Oeuvres (Paris: Marpon et Flammarion, n.d.), VI, 86. See also ibid., p. 56 (about democracy and majority rule) and p. 64, where he writes with great insight: “Authority, which in monarchy is the principle of governmental action, in democracy is the aim of government.”

⁶⁹ Jacob Burckhardt, Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen, ed. R. Marx (Leipzig: Kröner, n.d.), pp. 197–198.

⁷⁰ As quoted by Doran Whalen, Granite for God’s House (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1941), p. 161.

⁷¹ Cf. Anatole France, quoted by Sir Charles Petrie in Twenty Years Armistice and After (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1940), p. 12.

⁷² Cf. Thomas Mann, Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen (Berlin: S. Fischer, 1929), PP. 285–87.

⁷³ Cf. Karl Mannheim, Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1940), p. 108f.

⁷⁴ Friedrich Nietzsche, “Jenseits von Gut und Böse,” Werke (Leipzig: Kröner, 1910), VIII, 207–8.

⁷⁵ Cf. Stringfellow Barr, “Ourselves As We Are,” Tomorrow, October, 1944; Christopher Dawson, Beyond Politics (London: Sheed and Ward, 1939), pp. 40–41, 84, 102–3; T. S. Eliot, The Idea of a Christian Society (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1940), pp. 11, 17, 69; Friedrich A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944), pp. 70–71, 82–83, 101, etc.; Jean de Ménasce, “Ecclesia malignantium,” La nouvelle relève, II, No. 3 (Jan., 1943), p. 135; Alain Locke’s lecture on “Pluralism and Intellectual Democracy “at the Conference on Science, Philosophy and Religion, September, 1941; George Santayana, The Life of Reason, pp. 127–28; Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (New York: Harper, 1942), pp. 241–43. Cf. also Montesquieu’s dictum (Esprit des lois, IX, 2) that “the power of the people has been confused with the liberty of the people,” and: “Democracy and aristocracy are not states which are free by their nature” (ibid., p. 4).

⁷⁶ Herman Melville, “Clarel,” II; The Works of Herman Melville (London: Constable, 1924), XV, 249–50.

⁷⁷ Mill, On Liberty, pp. 129–31.

⁷⁸ Ibid.

⁷⁹ J. J. Bachofen, “Autobiographische Aufzeichnungen,” ed. H. Blocher, Basler Fahrbuch, 1917, 328–29. See also ibid., p. 295f. See p. 367.

⁸⁰ Cf. Gonzague de Reynold, L’Europe tragique (Paris: Spes, 1935); also La conscience de la Suisse: billets à ces messieurs de Berne (Neuchatel: Baconnière, 1938), p. 92.

⁸¹ James Madison, Works, ed. Elliot (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1889), I, 501.

⁸² Cf. (Senator) Arthur H. Vandenberg, If Hamilton Were Here Today, pp. xxv–xxvi.

⁸³ Cf. Friedrich Engels, Der Ursprung der Familie, des Privateigenthums und des Staats (6th ed.; Stuttgart: I. H. W. Dietz, 1894), p. 181.

⁸⁴ Cf. Harold Laski, Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time (London: Allen and Unwin, 1943), p. 128 f; Gaetano Mosca, The Ruling Class, trans. Arthur Livingston (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1939), p. 276; Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, Germany’s Third Empire, trans. and ed. E. O. Lorimer (London: Allen and Unwin, 1934), pp. 118–19 (compare with J. A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, pp. 238–40, and the thesis of L. von Mises, F. A. von Hayek, etc.); Louis Rougier, La mystique démocratique (Paris: Flammarion, 1929), pp. 257–58—in which this author maintains that democracy leads theoretically towards socialism but practically to plutocracy. Mr. Ben Hecht, in the past at least, permitted one of his heroes to derive bolshevism from democracy: see O. Cargill, Intellectual America: Ideas on the March (New York: Macmillan, 1941), p. 503, and Ben Hecht, Erik Dorn (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1921), p. 381.

⁸⁵ Cf. Alexis de Tocqueville, letter to M. de Corcelles, dated Bonn, July 22, 1852, in Memoirs, Letters and Remains of Alexis de Tocqueville (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1862), II, 260.

⁸⁶ He once wrote in a letter: “I have for democratic institutions an intellectual preference, but I am an aristocrat by instinct; this means that I detest and fear the masses. I love with passion freedom, legality, the respect for rights—but not democracy. These things are at the bottom of my heart . . . Liberty is the foremost of my passions. That’s the truth!” Quoted in Antoine Redier, Comme disait M. de Tocqueville (Paris: Perrin, 1925), pp. 47–48. Compare this with Chateaubriand’s: “I am born a nobleman. I have profited from the advantages of my birth, and I have always kept this strong love for freedom which belongs so eminently to the aristocracy, whose last hour has now struck.”—Mémoires d’outre-tombe (Paris: Penaud Frères, n.d.), I, 13. One of the reasons why De Tocqueville left for America was the July revolution, which displeased this strictly legitimist nobleman. Only the confusion between liberty and democracy could turn the count into a “democrat.” Cf. also Francis J. Lippitt, former war attaché in Paris (1834), whose letter (dated July 24, 1897) is quoted by Daniel C. Gilman in an introduction to De Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, trans. Henry Reeve (New York: The Century Co., 1898), xvii: “From the ensemble of our conversations I certainly did carry away with me an impression that his political views and sympathies were not favourable to democracy.” Cf. also Lord Acton: “For De Tocqueville was a Liberal of the purest breed—a Liberal and nothing else, deeply suspicious of democracy and its kindred, equality, centralisation and utilitarianism.”—Lectures on the French Revolution (London: Macmillan, 1910), p. 357.—On De Tocqueville’s political views and his preference for a constitutional hereditary monarchy to other forms of government, see George Wilson Pierson, Tocqueville and Beaumont in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1938), pp. 750–51 n.

⁸⁷ Quoted in A. Redier, op. cit., p. 112.

⁸⁸ Cf. M. l’abbé Baunard, La foi et ses victoires dans le siècle présent (2nd ed.; Paris: Poussielgue Frères, 1884), II.

⁸⁹ Letter dated January 24, 1854, published in Revue des deux mondes, Année LXXVII, 5me Période, Tome XL [Paris, 1907], p. 539.

⁹⁰ Cf. A. de Tocqueville, Oeuvres de A. de Tocqueville (14th ed.; Paris: Michel Lévy, 1864), III, vi, vii (516 ff.); or Democracy in America, ed. Bowen & Bradley (New York; Alfred A. Knopf, 1945), II, 316 f.

⁹¹ De Tocqueville, Oeuvres, III, 518; Democracy in America, trans. Reeve (1898), p. 808.

⁹² De Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Reeve (1898), p. 810; French text, Oeuvres, III, 520.

⁹³ Oeuvres, III, 520–21; Reeve’s trans. (1898), p. 810.

⁹⁴ Oeuvres, III, 522–23; Reeve’s trans. (1898), p. 811–12.

⁹⁵ Oeuvres, III, 523; Reeve’s trans. (1898), p. 812.

⁹⁶ Oeuvres, III, 523. Reeve’s trans. (1898), p. 812–13.

⁹⁷ Oeuvres, III, 524. Reeve’s trans. (1898), p. 814.

⁹⁸ Letter to J. S. Mill, dated November 10, 1836; Oeuvres, VI, p. 65.

⁹⁹ Cf. Léon Ferrero, Amérique, miroir grossissant de l’Europe (Paris: Editions Rieder, 1939).

¹⁰⁰ Cf. James N. Wood, Democracy and the Will to Power (New York: Knopf, 1921), p. 221; Georges Bernanos, Lettre aux Anglais (Rio de Janeiro: Atlantica Editora, 1942), pp. 234–35.

¹⁰¹ But apart from these tendencies there is also such a thing as a doctrinaire liberalism, whose intolerance impressed even a Metternich, as can be seen from the following remark: “The unbalanced views of the liberal parties are being used by the radical groups in order to bring about a full control of the free movements of the citizens in the most tyrannical fashion. The omnipotence of the state, of this ideal means [of coercion], grows out of the teachings of modern constitutionalism just as the result from its cause; and the result is the most far-reaching limitation of individual freedom in the shadow of the omnipotence of a personified idea.”—Aus Metternichs nachgelassenen Papieren, VIII, 536 (No. 1959).

¹⁰² Cf. Sigmund Neumann, Permanent Revolution; the Total State in the World at War (New York: Harper, 1942), pp. 3–4: Karl Otten, A Combine of Aggression: Masses, Élite and Dictatorship (London: Allen and Unwin, 1942), pp. 7, 292–93; Gerhard Leibholz, “Die Auflösung der liberalen Demokratie in Deutschland und das autoritäre Staatsbild,” Wissenschaftliche Abhandlungen und Reden (Munich: Duncker und Humblot, 1933), XII, 78–79; Jacques Maritain, Scholasticism and Politics, ed. and trans. Mortimer Adler (New York: Macmillan, 1940), pp. 94–95; J. T. Délos, in La vie intellectuelle, quoted by J. V. Ducatillon, O.P., in La guerre, cette revolution (New York: Maison Française, 1941), pp. 32–33; Emil Lederer, The State of the Masses: the Threat of a Classless Society (New York: W. W. Norton, 1940), pp. 98, 110; Jules Monnerot, Sociologie du communisme (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), pp. 367–68.

¹⁰³ Herman Melville, “Clarel,” II; The Works of Herman Melville, XV, 240. Compare with G. de Reynold, L’Europe tragique (Paris: Spes, 1935), p. 136: “There has been an attempt to give modern democracy ancestors—the democracies of antiquity, the urban and peasant democracies of the Middle Ages. These are only paintings acquired by a nouveau riche to give elegance to his mansion. Assume the name as he will, he does not belong.”

¹⁰⁴ F. M. Dostoyevsky, The Possessed, Part II, Chapter iv, No. 2.

¹⁰⁵ Speech delivered February 5, 1852. Reprint in pamphlet form by the Académie Française.

¹⁰⁶ Cf. Fustel de Coulanges, La cité antique, p. 397: “Democracy does not suppress misery; on the contrary, it renders it more painful. The equality of political rights makes the inequality of status stand out by contrast.”

¹⁰⁷ H. F. Amiel, Amiel’s Journal, trans. Mrs. Humphrey Ward (New York: Brentano, 1928), pp. 136–37; Fragments d’un journal intime, ed. Bernard Bouvier (Geneva: George et Cie., 1922 [Collection Helvétique]), p. 321. Entry of March 20, 1865.

¹⁰⁸ Cf. Drieu la Rochelle, “A propos de cent cinquante ans de la révolution,” Revue de Paris, Année XLVI, No. 11 (June 1, 1939).

¹⁰⁹ Cf. The Letters of William James, ed. Henry James (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1920), I, 161–62. (See below, Notes 705 and 858.)

¹¹⁰ As quoted in N. Byelozerski, “The Slavophiles, the Westerners and Herzen,” Vestnik Yevropy, Year XXXIII, Vol. VI (Nov., 1898), p. 187. Cf. also p. 183 f.

¹¹¹ Ernest Hello, “Le monde,” in L’homme: la vie—la science—l’art (Montreal: Editions Variétés, n.d.), p. 109. This collection contains also (pp. 58–66) Hello’s famous “L’homme médiocre,” an excellent analysis of nineteenth-century agnostic decadence.

¹¹² Søren Kierkegaard, The Present Age, trans. A. Dru and W. Lowrie (New York & London: Oxford University Press, 1940), pp. 61–62.

¹¹³ T. Dostoyevski, La confession de Stavroguine, completée par une partie inédite du Journal d’un écrivain, trans. Elie Halpérine-Kaminsky (Paris: Plon, 1922), pp. 200–1.

¹¹⁴ On the political necessity of group control in a democracy (i.e., the enforcement of a homogeneous opinion for the insurance of a common framework of reference), see pp. 98–100.

¹¹⁵ Cf. A. Redier, Comme disait M. de Tocqueville, pp. 113, 114.

¹¹⁶ James Fenimore Cooper, The American Democrat (New York: Knopf, 1931), PP. 64, 141–42.

¹¹⁷ Cf. for instance William Cothren, History of Ancient Woodbury, Connecticut, 1657–1872 (Woodbury, Conn., 1872), II, 1280–82. Cf. Stewart H. Holbrook, “Lost Men of American History,” Part I, Life, XXII, No. 2 (Jan. 13, 1947), pp. 81–82, about the persecution of Joseph Palmer of Fitchburg, Mass., who in the 1830’s displeased his fellow citizens by wearing a beard; and also Bertha Damon, Grandma Called It Carnal (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1938), p. 242 sq. For good examples of “horizontal pressure” in the Southern United States see William March’s narratives “Happy Jack” and “Trial Balance” in his Collected Short Stories (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1945).

¹¹⁸ Mill, On Liberty, pp. 92–93.

¹¹⁹ Ibid., pp. 71–72. Compare with President Wilson’s declaration in 1917 at the outbreak of World War I: “Conformity will be the only virtue. And every man who refuses to conform will have to pay the penalty.” See Harold U. Faulkner, From Versailles to the New Deal (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950).

¹²⁰ Thomas Huxley, letter to Haeckel, Nov. 13, 1863; Life and Letters of Thomas H. Huxley, ed. Leonard Huxley (New York: Appleton, 1902), I, 328.

¹²¹ Jefferson, The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Paul Leicester Ford (New York: Putnam, 1896), XIII, 396; VII, 24.

¹²² Cf. his letter to Randolph, Jan. 10, 1788. Madison, Writings, ed. Hunt, V, 81; quoted in Albert J. Beveridge, The Life of John Marshall (Boston: Houghton and Mifflin, 1916), I, 301.

¹²³ Cf. Matthew Arnold, “Democracy,” Mixed Essays (New York: Macmillan, 1880), p. 4. There are also egalitarian tendencies within some of the nobilities. About the concept of the una eademque nobilitas in Poland cf. Rudolf Leonhard, “Zur Soziologie des Polentums,” Finanz-und wirtschaftliche Zeitfragen, XXXIX [Stuttgart, 1917], p. 13.

¹²⁴ Cf. N. Berdyaev, Slavery and Freedom, trans. R. M. French (New York: Scribner, 1944); p. 176; G. K. Chesterton, The Man who was Thursday (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1908), p. 190.

¹²⁵ Cf. Albert Jay Nock, Memoirs of a Superfluous Man (New York: Harper, 1943), p. 88; also James N. Wood, Democracy and the Will to Power, pp. 198, 223.

¹²⁶ Cf. Helmut Kuhn, “The Common Man on Trial,” Review of Politics, VI, No. 1 (Jan., 1944), 34; Wilhelm Röpke, International Economic Disintegration (New York: Macmillan, 1942), p. 248; Frank Thiess, Das Reich der Dämonen, pp. 43–44.

¹²⁷ Cf. Herbert L. Matthews, The Fruits of Fascism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1943), p. 47; see also Dorothy Thompson, Listen, Hans (New York, 1942), p. 82.

¹²⁸ Letter to Vögelin, dated Basel, September, 1866; as quoted by Emil Dürr, Freiheit und Macht (Basel: Helbing-Lichtental, 1918), p. 53.

¹²⁹ Cf. Jacob Burckhardt, Briefe an seinen Freund Friedrich von Preen, 1864–1893, p. 130 (letter dated Basel, Jan. 1, 1879).

¹³⁰ Cf. Max Adler, Démocratie, politique et sociale (Brussels: Editions Eglantine, 1930 [Etudes politiques et sociales, No. xx]), p. 117; E. M. Burns, James Madison, Philosopher of the Constitution (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1938), p. 63; Georg Simmel, Soziologie (Leipzig: Duncker und Humblot, 1908), p. 140; Irving Babbitt, Democracy and Leadership, p. 298; Roger Secrétain, Péguy, soldat de la liberté (Montreal: Valiquette, 1941), PP. 117–18.

¹³¹ Cf. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, pp. 67–68.

¹³² Ibid., p. 68.

¹³³ Redier, Comme disait M. de Tocqueville, p. 114.

¹³⁴ Cf. Graham Wallas, Human Nature in Politics (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1916), p. 275 (citing Stapleton’s Canning).

¹³⁵ The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard, trans. & ed. A. Dru (London & New York: Oxford University Press, 1938), No. 959 (p. 330) and No. 1317 (p. 502). Cf. also No. 657 (p. 204), No. 1063 (p. 377), No. 1082 (p. 386) and No. 1310 (p. 500).

¹³⁶ O. A. Brownson, Legitimacy and Revolutionism (New York: Sadlier, 1852), pp. 368–69. This resignation and defeatism is a far cry from the aggressiveness of his co-religionist and contemporary Le Play, who exclaimed: “We must make a frontal attack, without reserve, on democratic theory!”—Charles de Ribbe, Le Play d’après sa correspondance (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1884), p. 394.

¹³⁷ Cf. Karl Jaspers, Die geistige Situation der Zeit, pp. 64–65; José Ortega y Gasset, Invertebrate Spain, trans. Mildred Adams (New York: W. W. Norton, 1937), pp. 67–68, 170–71; James N. Wood, Democracy and the Will to Power, pp. 53–54, 82–83; Hermann, Graf Keyserling, Das Spektrum Europas (Heidelberg: Niels Kampmann, 1928), pp. 487–88; Wilfrid Trotter, Instincts of the Herd in Peace and in War (New York: Macmillan, 1919), pp. 29–30. Cf. his remark (p. 31), “Loneliness will be a real terror, unsurmountable by reason.”

¹³⁸ Cf. Emil Lederer, State of the Masses, p. 98.

¹³⁹ Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. F. G. Selby (London: Macmillan, 1924), pp. 139–40. Cf. Henry, Lord Brougham, Historical Sketches of Statesmen who Flourished in the Time of George III; to which are added Remarks on the French Revolution, New Series, followed by Principles of Democratic and Mixed Governments (Paris: Baudry’s European Library, 1844). The passages on pp. 318–19, which express exactly the same idea, unmistakably show Burke’s influence.

¹⁴⁰ Cf. Lederer, op. cit., 110–11.

¹⁴¹ J. Donoso Cortés, “Discurso del 4 enero 1849, pronunciado en el congreso,” Obras de Don Juan Donoso Cortes, ed. J. M. Orti y Lara (Madrid: Sociedad Editoria S. Francisco de Sales, 1892), II, 87. Better are the modern Obras completas de Don Juan Donoso Cortes, Marques de Valdegamas, ed. Don Juan Juretschke (Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 1946), 2 vols.

¹⁴² Ibid., p. 89.

¹⁴³ Ibid., p. 91.

¹⁴⁴ Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen, ed. Oeri, p. 188. Compare this with the dictum of Burckhardt’s present-day compatriot, Denis de Rougemont, that totalitarian tyranny is nothing but la forme basse de la démocratie. See Denis de Rougemont, La part du diable, nouvelle version (New York: Brentano, 1944). P. 105.

¹⁴⁵ Fisher Ames, The Influence of Democracy on Liberty, Property and the Happiness of Society Considered by an American (London: John W. Parker, 1835), p. 51. Compare p. 75: “However discordant all the parts of a democracy may be, they all seek a centre, and that centre is the single arbitrary power of a chief.” Fisher Ames expected democracies to become military despotisms.

¹⁴⁶ Walter Bagehot, “Letters on the French Coup d’Etat,” The Works of Walter Bagehot (Hartford: Travelers Insurance Co., 1891), II, 440.

¹⁴⁷ Ibid., p. 445. (This was written in 1865.)

¹⁴⁸ Among these Wilhelm Röpke, International Economic Disintegration, pp. 5–6.

¹⁴⁹ See Chapter VII (pp. 264–265), and notes.

¹⁵⁰ Cf. P. J. Proudhon, “Du principe de federation,” p. 34.

¹⁵¹ Ibid., p. 35.

¹⁵² H. H. van Kol (“Rienzi”), Socialisme et liberté (Paris: Giard et Brière, 1898), p. 253; Dutch text, Socialisme en Vrijheit (Amsterdam: J. A. Fortun, 1893), p. 201.

¹⁵³ Cf. Max Weber, Grundriss der Sozialäkonomik, III, Abteilung, “Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft” (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1922), p. 156. Weber, so enthusiastic about charismatisches Führertum, was responsible for the direct election of German presidents in the Weimar constitution whose drafting he had influenced. Cf. J. P. Mayer, Max Weber and German Politics (London: Faber and Faber, 1944), p. 76.

¹⁵⁴ Cf. Theodor Geiger, Die Masse und ihre Aktion (Stuttgart: Ferdinand Enke, 1926), p. 147 sq.; Guglielmo Ferrero, “La vague dictatoriale,” L’Illustration, [Paris], January 20th, 1923; Aurél Kolnai, The War Against the West (London: Gollancz, 1938), p. 125; Irving Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1919), pp. 345–46; Robert Michels, Zur Soziologie des Parteienwesens; die moderne Demokratie (Leipzig: Duncker und Humblot, 1911), pp. 67–68; F. Funck-Brentano, Ce qu’il faut connaître de la dictature (Paris: Boivin, 1928), pp. 10, 150; J. P. Mayer, Political Thought: the European Tradition (London: Dent, 1939), pp. 317–18.

¹⁵⁵ Alexandre Vinet, too, feared “that odious combination of popular sovereignty and paternalism, that absorption of all liberties and the whole civilization in a single liberty, that of a faction or a system . . .”—Cf. Alexandre Vinet, Littérature et histoire suisses, ed. Henri Perrochon (Lausanne and Geneva: Payot et Cie., 1932), 475–76.

¹⁵⁶ Cf. Aristotle, Politics, v. 8, 2–3: “The majority of tyrants are the product of demagogues, so to speak, who won trust by berating the outstanding.”

¹⁵⁷ Cf. Charles W. Eliot, Twentieth Century Christianity (Boston: American Unitarian Association, 1914), p. 5.

¹⁵⁸ Quoted by Stanley A. Hunter, The Religious Ideals of the President (Allahabad Mission Press, 1914), p. 8:

“It has been said that the best leaders are those with ordinary opinions and extraordinary abilities, those who hold the opinion of the generation in which they live, uphold it with such vitality, perceive it with such executive insight, that they can walk at the front and show the paths by which the things generally purposed can be accomplished.”

¹⁵⁹ Cf. Lord Brougham, Historical Sketches, etc., p. 318.

¹⁶⁰ Ibid.

¹⁶¹ Cf. Euclides da Cunha, Rebellion in the Backlands (Os Sertões), ed. and trans. Samuel Putnam (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944), p. 129: “And so the evangelist arose, a monstrous being, but an automaton. This man who swayed the masses was but a puppet. Passive as a shade, he moved them. When all is said, he was doing no more than to condense the obscurantism of three separate races. And he grew in stature until he was projected into history.”

¹⁶² J. W. von Goethe, Dichtung und Wahrheit, Book XX.

¹⁶³ Friedrich Nietzsche, Also sprach Zarathustra, in Werke (Leipzig: Kröner, n.d.), VI, 69 f.

¹⁶⁴ Cf. Dmitri Merezhkovski, Ot Voiny k Revolyutsii; Dnyevnik (Petrograd: Ogni, 1917).

¹⁶⁵ Cf. Élie Halévy, L’ère des tyrannies (Paris: Gallimard, 1938), p. 243.

¹⁶⁶ Cf. Friedrich Gogarten, Politische Ethik: Versuch einer Grundlegung (Jena: Eugen Diederichs, 1932), p. 217.

¹⁶⁷ Constantin Frantz, Die Weltpolitik, Chapter iii. Quoted by Dr. E. Stamm in the preface to Frantz’ Deutschland und der Föderalismus (Stuttgart & Berlin: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1921), p. xi. (For the original title see Note 312.) Compare with Denis de Rougemont’s “Gedanken über den Föderalismus,” Mass und Wert, [Zürich], March-April, 1940.

¹⁶⁸ Frantz, op. cit., p. 89.

¹⁶⁹ Ibid., p. 41. Frantz, nevertheless, had no illusions about the conflict between the federalistic principle and the spirit of modernity; cf. pp. 36–37.

¹⁷⁰ Letter to Brooks Adams, Athens, April 2, 1898; Worthington Chauncey Ford, Letters of Henry Adams, 1892–1918 (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1938), p. 163.

¹⁷¹ Cf. Lucien Romier, Explication de notre temps (Paris: Grasset, 1925), pp. 60, 195.

¹⁷² Cf. F. Aulard, La société des Jacobins (Paris, 1889–97), VI, 47; quoted by Crane Brinton, The Jacobins (New York: Macmillan, 1930), pp. 145–46.

¹⁷³ Michel Bakounine, “Fédéralisme, socialisme et antithéologisme,” Oeuvres (5e éd.; Paris: Stock, 1907), I, 11–12.

¹⁷⁴ Ibid.

¹⁷⁵ Cf. Georges Sorel, Les illusions du progrès (Paris: Rivière, 1908 [“Études sur le devenir social,” I]), p. 9 f.

¹⁷⁶ Cf. Paul Bourget, Outre-mer; notes sur l’Amérique (Paris: Lemarre, 1895), II, ii, 320–21.

¹⁷⁷ Cf. Irving Babbitt, Democracy and Leadership, p. 314.

¹⁷⁸ Jacob Burckhardt, Briefe an Preen, pp. 35–36 (letter, dated July 2, 1871).

¹⁷⁹ Cf. David J. Dallin, The Real Soviet Russia, trans. J. Shaplen (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1944), p. 126 f.

¹⁸⁰ Cf. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, iv, 166.

¹⁸¹ Cf. Herbert Spencer, “The Coming Slavery,” Man versus State (Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton Printers, 1940), p. 36.

¹⁸² Auguste Comte, Considerations sur le pouvoir spirituel (1826), as quoted by Charles Maurras, Romanticisme et révolution (Paris: Nouvelle Librairie Nationale, 1925), p. 235.

¹⁸³ As quoted in M. de Barante, La vie politique de M. Royer-Collard (Paris: Didier, 1861), II, 130–31. (“Individual” is here obviously the opposite of “person.”)

¹⁸⁴ Cf. Crane Brinton, op. cit., pp. 206–7.

¹⁸⁵ Cf. Benjamin Constant, De l’esprit de conquête, pp. 195–96.

¹⁸⁶ Cf. Waldo Frank, A Chart for Rough Water (New York: Doubleday Doran, 1940), pp. 94–95.

¹⁸⁷ Cf. Wilhelm Röpke, International Economie Disintegration (New York: Macmillan, 1942), p. 248.

¹⁸⁸ Cf. Jacob Burckhardt, Briefe an Preen, p. 248 (letter dated July 24, 1889).

¹⁸⁹ Cf. Richard Müller-Freienfels, Psychologie des deutschen Menschen und seiner Kultur, ed. C. H. Beck (2nd ed.; Munich, 1930), p. 5; Peter Viereck, Metapolitics from the Romantics to Hitler (New York: Knopf, 1941), pp. 40, 56 (“. . . the worshipful attitude towards Volk gave tremendous impetus to both democracy and nationalism . . . but also, via nationalism to nazism”).

¹⁹⁰ Wilhelm Röpke very adroitly pointed out the fact that ethnic nationalism and xenophobia are diseases of the lower social layers and not of the aristocracies. Quoting René Gillouin (Aristarchie ou recherche d’un gouvernement, Geneva, 1946) to the effect that nations can only communicate through their élites, but not through their masses, he sounds a note of deep pessimism. Cf. W. Röpke, “Die Nationalisierung des Menschen,” Merkur, IV, 9 (September, 1950), PP. 933–34. Cf. also Joseph Folliet, Les chrétiens au carrefour (Lyon: Éditions de la chronique sociale de France, 1947), p. 79, an author dealing effectively with the xenophobia of the masses which dislike all deviations from their own patterns. Friedrich von Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, pp. 8–9.

¹⁹¹ Cf. Crane Brinton, op. cit., pp. 147–52.

¹⁹² Franz Grillparzer, Sämmtliche Werke (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1872), II, 213.

¹⁹³ Franz Grillparzer, Werke (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1887), II, 139.

¹⁹⁴ Alexandre Vinet, op. cit., p. 278.

¹⁹⁵ Cf. Constantine Leontyev, “Plemënnaya politika,” Sobraniye sotshinyeniy, VI, p. 178.

¹⁹⁶Ibid., p. 164.

¹⁹⁷ Ibid., p. 188.

¹⁹⁸ Ibid., p. 189.

¹⁹⁹ Cf. Josef Leo Seifert, Die Weltrevolutionäre: von Bogumil über Hus zu Lenin (Vienna: Amalthea, 1930), p. 366; Nikolay S. Trubetzkoy, Yevropa i tshelovyetshestvo (Sofia: Rossiysko-bolgarskoye knigoizdatel’stvo, 1920), pp. 9–13.

²⁰⁰ Cf. Constantine Leontyev, op. cit., p. 150.

²⁰¹ Sir Henry Maine, Popular Government: Four Essays (London: John Murray, 1885), p. 28.

²⁰² Ibid., p. 27.

²⁰³ Cf. William E. H. Lecky, Democracy and Liberty (New York: Longmans, Green, 1896), p. 479.

²⁰¹ Cf. Carlton J. H. Hayes, Essays on Nationalism (New York: Macmillan, 1926), pp. 44 sq., 69 sq., 78 sq.; Lucien Romier, op. cit., p. 163.

²⁰⁵ Ernest Renan, Histoire générale et Système comparé des langues sémitiques (Paris: M. Lévy Frères, 1863), p. 4.

²⁰⁶ Ernest Renan, La Réforme Intellectuelle et Morale (3rd ed.; Paris: Michel Lévy, 1872), p. 199. (This letter was written towards the end of 1871.)

²⁰⁷ Ibid., p. 200.

²⁰⁸ Ibid., pp. 200–1.

²⁰⁹ Cf. Jacques Bainville, Les conséquences politiques de la paix (Paris: Nouvelle Librairie Nationale, 1920).

²¹⁰ Cf. Ernest Renan, op. cit., p. 49.

²¹¹ Cf. A. de Tocqueville, letter to Count Gobineau (dated: St. Cyr près de Tour, November 17, 1853), Revue des deux mondes, Année 77, 5e période, XL [Paris, 1907], p. 62 f.

²¹² Cf. Montesquieu, De l’esprit des lois, XV, 5.

²¹³ Cf. Werner Sombart, Vom Menschen: Versuch einer geisteswissenschaftlichen Anthropologie (Berlin: Buchholz und Weisswage, 1938), pp. 287–88.

²¹⁴ Emile Zola, Germinal (Paris: Fasquelle, n.d.), II, 179.

²¹⁵ Cf. Carlton J. H. Hayes, A Generation of Materialism (New York: Harper, 1941), p. 260. These ideas later greatly influenced not only the Ku Klux Klan but also the immigration legislation of 1921 and 1924, with their obvious racial implications (the “zoning” of Italy, etc.).

²¹⁶ Benjamin Disraeli (Lord Beaconsfield) as quoted in Arthur Bryant, The English Saga, 1840–1940 (London: Collins, Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1941), p. 182.

²¹⁷ Cf. Dixon Wecter, The Saga of American Society: a Record of Social Aspirations, 1607–1937 (New York: Scribner’s, 1937), pp. 152–53.

²¹⁸ Cf. F. Molnár to S. N. Behrman in The New Yorker, June 8, 1946, p. 46.

²¹⁹ Cf. Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: the Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Harper, 1944), I, 69.

²²⁰ Cf. Leopold von Wiese in Kölner Vierteljahrsschrift für Soziologie, Jahrg. VI, No. 4, p. 376.

²²¹ Cf. Ferdinand A. Hermens, The Tyrant’s War and the People’s Peace (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1944), p. 13.

²²² Cf. John Holland Rose, The Life of Napoleon (London: Bell, 1904), I, 426.

²²³ James Bryce, The Holy Roman Empire (New York: Macmillan, 1942), p. 442.

²²⁴ Cf. Robert Lansing’s letter in The Intimate Papers of Colonel House, ed. Charles Seymour (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1928), IV, 13–14.

²²⁵ Cf. Georges Sorel, La ruine du monde antique: conception matérialiste de l’histoire (3rd ed.; Paris: Rivière, 1933 [“Etudes sur le devenir social,” XIX]), pp. 248–50.

²²⁶ Cf. Sir Charles Petrie, Twenty Years Armistice and After (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1940), p. 12.

²²⁷ Cf. the thesis of Hoffman Nickerson (the best American author on this subject) in The Armed Horde, 1793–1939 (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1942).

²²⁸ Cf. Jacob Burckhardt, Briefe an Preen, p. 216 (letter, dated Oct. 15, 1887).

²²⁹ Herman Melville, Clarel (London: Constable, 1922), II, 240.

²³⁰ Cf. Ortega y Gasset, Invertebrate Spain, p. 131.

²³¹ Cf. Aristotle, Politics iv, 4.

²³² H. Taine, “Le régime moderne,” Les origines de la France contemporaine (Paris: Hachette, 1891), III, part I, pp. 288–89.

²³³ Cf. J. Holland Rose, The Rise of Democracy (London: Blackie and Sons, 1897), PP. 236–37.

²³⁴ Among these James Burnham, The Machiavellians (New York: John Day, 1943), pp. 238–39.

²³⁵ John Adams, Works, ed. Charles F. Adams (Boston: Little and Brown, 1851), VI, 485.

²³⁶ Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. Selby (London: Macmillan, 1924), p. 247.

²³⁷ Cf. John Adams to James Madison, June 17, 1817; The Selected Writings of John and John Quincy Adams, ed. Koch and Peden (New York: Knopf, 1946), p. 202.

²³⁸ Compare (Sénateur) Edmond Schérer, La démocratie en France: études (Paris: Librairie Nouvelle, 1884), p. 70.

²³⁹ Fisher Ames, Influence of Democracy, pp. 74, 75.

²⁴⁰ Cf. Johann Georg Hülsemann, Geschichte der Demokratie in den Vereinigten Staaten von Nord-Amerika (Göttingen: Vandenhoek und Ruprecht, 1832), p. xi. A similar attitude can be found in Cornélis de Witt, Jefferson and the American Democracy: a Historical Study, authorized translation from the French by R. S. H. Church (London: Longmans, Green, 1862).

²⁴¹ Among these cf. J. P. Mayer, Alexis de Tocqueville, trans. Bozman and Hahn (New York: Viking, 1940), p. 203.

²⁴² Lecky, Democracy and Liberty, pp. 259–60.

²⁴³ About the dilemma of democratic critics who preferred to see the continuation of the unpopular dictatorships of 1931–33 to the yielding of the “junkers and militarists” to the Nazi volonté générale, see pp. 262–63 Papen, in broadening (i.e., “democratizing”) the narrow basis of his dictatorship by letting in the biggest party, became a traitor in the eyes of democrats.

²⁴⁴ Cf. Pitirim Sorokin, Social and Cultural Dynamics (New York: American Book Co., 1941), IV, 259–60.

²⁴⁵ Cf. Peter Viereck, Metapolitics, p. 307.

²⁴⁶ Cf. Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History, IV, 196–97.

²⁴⁷ Cf. Sir Henry Maine, Popular Government, p. 36.

²⁴⁸ Among those who did recognise it cf. Louis Rougier, Les mystiques économiques (Paris: Librairie de Médicis, 1938), p. 20; Isabel Paterson, The God of the Machine (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1943), pp. 258–59; Cicely Hamilton, Modern Sweden (London: Dutton, 1939), p. 91 n.

²⁴⁹ Cf. De Sade, L’oeuvre du marquis de Sade: pages choisies, ed. Guillaume Apollinaire (Paris: Bibliothèque des Curieux, 1909), pp. 227–28.

²⁵⁰ Cf. Hans Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism (New York: Macmillan, 1944), p. 304.

²⁵¹ Ibid.

²⁵² Ibid.

²⁵³ Cf. Theodore Maynard, Orestes Brownson: Yankee, Radical, Catholic (New York: Macmillan, 1943), pp. 36–37.

²⁵⁴ Cf. Wilhelm Hasbach, Die moderne Demokratie (Jena: G. Fischer, 1921), p. 200.

²⁵⁵ Proudhon, Du principe de fédération, p. 35.

²⁵⁶ The spoils system partly fathered this view. On amateurism and democracy cf. also Henri Frederic Amiel, Fragments d’un journal intime, with preface by B. Bouvier (Paris: Stock, 1927), II, 32. Administrative government and democracy are not fully compatible; whereas a monarch (for life) is the natural head of a permanent administrative machinery. Recently former President Herbert Hoover, whose libertarian views cannot be doubted, came out vigorously for expert leadership. “The United States Government,” he wrote in a letter to the American University, “needs direction by trained public servants rather than administration by haphazard political appointees—leadership by professionals, not from amateurs.” (Chicago Sunday Tribune, March 25, 1951, Part I, p. 11F.)

²⁵⁷ Cf. Geoffrey Bourne, War, Politics and Emotion (New York: Liveright, 1941), pp. 49, 55; Aldous Huxley, Ends and Means (London: Chatto and Windus, 1937), p. 174.

²⁵⁸ Baruch Spinoza, Tractatus theologico-politicus, cap. vi and xvii; and Ethics, IV, 58. It should not be forgotten that even such a fiery democrat as J. S. Mill was not entirely averse to intellectual differentiations in political matters; cf. J. S. Mill, Considerations on Representative Government (New York, 1882), p. 188.

²⁵⁹ Barthold Georg Niebuhr, Lebensnachrichten von Barthold Georg Niebuhr (Hamburg: F. Perthes, 1838), p. 429.

²⁶⁰ Cf. D. S. Merezhkovski, Gryadushchiy Kham i Tshekhov i Gorkiy (St. Petersburg: Izdanie M. V. Pirozhkova, 1906). About the origin of the term Kham (from Ham) and its implications, cf. Felix Wiercinski, S. J., “Zur Vorgeschichte des russischen Bolschewismus,” Stimmen der Zeit, XCIX (1919), p. 498.

²⁶¹ B. G. Niebuhr, op. cit., II, 274 (letter No. 600, dated Bonn, November 22, 1830).

²⁶² Ibid., p. 275.

²⁶³ Ernest Renan, La réforme intellectuelle, p. 290.

²⁶⁴ Friedrich Nietzsche, “Der Wille zur Macht,” Gesammelte Werke, Musarion-Ausgabe (Munich, 1925), XVIII, 96 (no. 128).

²⁶⁵ Among them Ernst Jünger, Der Arbeiter: Herrschaft und Gestalt (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1932), p. 160.

²⁶⁶ Jacob Burckhardt, Briefe an Preen, p. 271. Compare with the slightly shrewder prophecy of Henry Adams: “So with the capitalists. They have abandoned their old teachers and principles, and have adopted socialist practices. There seems to be no reason why the capitalist should not become a socialist functionary. Solidarity is now law.”—Letter to Brooks Adams, Paris, Nov. 5, 1899; Letters of Henry Adams, p. 248.

²⁶⁷ Cf. C. Frantz, Kritik aller Parteien (Berlin: F. Schneider, 1862), p. 138.

²⁶⁸ Ernst Troeltsch, Die Bedeutung des Protestantismus für die Entstehung der modernern Welt (Munich & Berlin: Oldenbourg, 1911), p. 102.

²⁶⁹ Cf. Hermann Rauschning, Hitler Speaks (London: Thornton Butter-worth, 1939), p. 230.

²⁷⁰ Cf. G. F. Jünger, Der Mohn (Berlin: Widerstandsverlag, 1935). See also F. S. Campbell, “The Literary Revolt against Nazism,” The Catholic World, Sept., 1944, pp. 491–99.

²⁷¹ Benjamin Constant, De l’esprit de conquête, p. 240.

²⁷² Cf. Vladimir Solovyov as quoted by Miguel de Unamuno, Del sentimiento tràgico de la vida (7th ed.; Buenos Aires: Espasa-Calpe, 1945 [“Colección Austral”]), p. 85.

²⁷³ V. Rozanov, “Apokalipsis nashego vremeni,” Vërsty, No. 2 (Paris, 1927), p. 289 sq.

²⁷⁴ Cf. Max Weber, “Die Protestantische Ethik und der Geist der Kapitalismus,” Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1920), p. 20.

²⁷⁵ Henri Frederic Amiel, Diary, p. 45 (entry of June 17, 1853).

²⁷⁶ De la démocratie en Amérique, pp. 143–44. Our translation is from the American edition (New York: Knopf, 1945), pp. 87, 88.

²⁷⁷ De Sade as quoted by Paul Éluard, La revolution surréaliste, II, No. 8, p. 8.

²⁷⁸ Peter F. Drucker, The Future of Industrial Man (New York: John Day, 1942), p. 127.

²⁷⁹ Cf. Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon, trans. D. Hardy (New York: Macmillan, 1941), pp. 257–258.

²⁸⁰ L. Kuzmin, “Svoboda i Neobkhodimost,” Pravda, June 22, 1941.

²⁸¹ Cf. Ernst Troeltsch, Die Bedeutung des Protestantismus . . . , p. 46.

²⁸² On the problem compare F. S. Campbell, “The Whiff from the Empty Bottle,” The Catholic World, October, 1945, pp. 20–27.

²⁸³ As reported by M. Marquiset, quoted by Maurice Baring in his Have You Anything to Declare? (New York: Knopf, 1937), p. 197.

²⁸⁴ Herman Melville, Clarel (London, 1922), I, 276.

²⁸⁵ Ibid., p. 282. Compare with Khomyakov’s letter to the Rev. G. Williams in Sotshineniya Aleksyeya Stepanovitsha Kkomyakova (Moscow: Kunsheryev, 1904), VIII, 442.

²⁸⁶ Burckhardt, Briefe an Preen, p. 178 (letter, dated April 13, 1882).

²⁸⁷ Cf. Constantin Frantz, “Die Quelle des Übels,” Betrachtungen über die preussische Verfassungskrise (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1863), pp. 5, 209.

²⁸⁸ What roused Weber’s ire against Kaiser William II was primarily his lack of resistance against the military clique during World War I. Cf. Max Weber, “Deutschlands künftige Staatsform,” Gesammelte politische Schriften (Munich: Dreimasken-Verlag, 1921), p. 343.

²⁸⁹ B. G. Niebuhr, Lebensnachrichten, pp. 429–30 (letter dated Rome, March 25, 1820).

²⁹⁰ Cf. José Ortega y Gasset, Invertebrate Spain, pp. 67–68.

²⁹¹ Cf. B. G. Niebuhr, op. cit., p. 280 (letter to Dorothea Hensler, Dec. 19, 1830).

²⁹² Ibid., p. 275 (letter to Moltke, Nov. 22, 1830).

²⁹³ Cf. Keyserling’s estimate of “socialist” America, America Set Free (London and New York: Harper, 1929). To Heinrich Heine the United States were an ungeheures Freiheitsgefängnis (“immense prison of freedom”).

²⁹⁴ D. S. Merezhkovski, Pyotr i Alexey (St. Petersburg: V. M. Pirozhkov, 1905). PP. 155–56.

²⁹⁵ A. I. Herzen, Sochineniya (Geneva, Basel, Lyon: Georg, 1878), V, 256 (letter to V. Linton, editor of the English Republic, dated Jan. 2, 1854).

²⁹⁶ Ibid., p. 255.

²⁹⁷ Ibid., p. 209 (letter to J. Michelet, 1851). Yet the same violent rejection of the juste milieu had been made by Josef von Görres. Cf. his Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Maria Görres (München: Literarisch-Artistische Anstalt, 1854), VI, 87.

²⁹⁸ Ibid., p. 207. Compare with Joseph de Maistre, Quatre chapitres inédits sur la Russie (Paris: Vaton Frères, 1859), pp. 26–27: “Thus exposed without preparation, the Russians infallibly and brusquely went from superstition to atheism, from passive obedience to unbridled activity.” Similar views have been expressed by F. M. Dostoyevski in The Idiot.

²⁹⁹ Herzen, op. cit., V, 271 (letter to V. Linton, dated February 17, 1854). Compare with Imbart de la-Tour-du-Pin, Note 474.

³⁰⁰ Ibid., p. 289 (letter to V. Linton, dated February 20, 1854).

³⁰¹ Ibid., p. 266.

³⁰² Ibid. The passage quoted in Prince Lobanov-Rostovsky’s Russia and Asia (New York: Macmillan, 1933), p. 312—“On the wings of socialism, Russia can fly over the whole of Europe and reach the Atlantic. This struggle between Russia and Europe is inevitable”—has not so far been discovered in Herzen’s works or letters; yet the passages repeated here imply practically the same thought.

³⁰³ Herzen, op. cit., p. 296.

³⁰⁴ Cf. F. M. Dostoyevski, Sotshineniya (Moscow and Leningrad: Gosudarst-vennoye Izdatel’stvo, 1929), XII (Dnyevnik pisatelya za 1877, 1880 i 1881 godÿ), 60–62.

³⁰⁵ C. Leontyev, as quoted by Nicholas Berdyaev in Konstantin Leontyev, trans. G. Reavey (London: G. Bles, 1940), p. 185.

³⁰⁶ Ibid., p. 186.

³⁰⁷ Le Marquis de Custine, La Russie en 1839 (Paris: Librairie d’Amyot, 1843), I, 314. Yet Custine must be read with historical discretion. It can be admitted, though, that Russia finally “lived up” to the picture painted by her detractors—just as Germany which waged World War II in a fashion described by Allied propagandists during World War I.

³⁰⁸ Quoted in Life, Letters and Journals of George Ticknor (Boston: James Osgood, 1876), I, 140.

³⁰⁹ Ibid., p. 141.

³¹⁰ Memoirs, Letters and Remains of A. de Tocqueville (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1862), pp. 296–97 (letter to N. W. Senior, dated Tocqueville, Sept. 16, 1855).

³¹¹ Jules Michelet, France Before Europe (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1871), p. 92. The French original was published in 1871 in Florence.

³¹² C. Frantz, Der Föderalismus als das leitende Prinzip für die soziale, staatliche und internationale Organisation, unter besonderer Bezugnahme auf Deutschland (Mainz: F. Kirchheim, 1879), p. 170. (Reprinted in Stuttgart in 1921 under the title Deutschland und der Föderalismus.)

³¹³ Ibid., p. 171.

³¹⁴ Ibid., p. 177.

³¹⁵ Ibid., p. 178.

³¹⁶ Burckhardt, Briefe zur Erkenntnis . . . , p. 430.

³¹⁷ Le Marquis de Custine, La Russie en 1839, II, 150.

³¹⁸ Cf. Irving Babbitt, “The Breakdown of Internationalism,” The Nation, No. 2608 (June, 1915), p. 704.

³¹⁹ Henry Adams, Letters of Henry Adams: 1892–1918, ed. W. C. Ford (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1938), pp. 347–48 (letter to Elizabeth Cameron, dated St. Petersburg, Sept. 1, 1900).

³²⁰ Letter to Brooks Adams, dated Paris, Oct. 21, 1899, Harold Dean Cater, Henry Adams and his Friends: a Collection of his Unpublished Letters (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1947), p. 484.

³²¹ Letters of Henry Adams, p. 339 (letter dated Moscow, August 17, 1901). An interesting parallel to Adams’ speculations are the musings of the Austrian Catholic historian and essayist Richard von Kralik, who wrote before World War I in connection with the invasions of Asiatic hordes on the European Continent: “Europe has even now to fear the Russian Empire and Eastern Asia which represent elements half or fully Mongol. This issue marks the most decisive struggle in world history which is the antagonism between East and West. . . . Here the future will by no means spare us disagreeable surprises. It is equally possible that American ships will rule the Mediterranean just as the Normans did it in the past, and that the Americans will occupy Rome, Byzantium and Alexandria thus emulating the Goths and the Vandals. It is possible that Asiatics penetrate France and Spain as it happened in the 8th century, or that they get to Germany, as in the 13th century the Mongols, or that they appear before Vienna, as the Turks in the 16th and 17th centuries. But it will always be possible to defeat them as Belisarius, Charles Martell or Eugene of Savoy did in the past. Nor is it unthinkable that it will, perhaps, be America which pushes back the Asiatic East on European soil very much to the advantage of our civilization, just as Charles Martell, the Frank, repulsed the Moors.” (Cited by A. Wirth in Der Gang der Weltgeschichte (Gotha: F. A. Perthes A. G., 1913, pp. 337–38).)

³²² Ibid., p. 341 (letter dated Moscow, August 21, 1901).

³²³ Ibid., p. 649 (letter to Charles Milnes Gaskell, dated Washington, Feb. 19, 1918). De Tocqueville similarly spoke about the necessity of putting Germany on her feet in order that she could resist a Russian onslaught. The traditional French policy of keeping Germany weak and divided he rejected with rare foresight. Cf. Souvenirs d’Alexis de Tocqueville (Paris: Gallimard, 1942), p. 227. Custine said substantially the same thing when he insisted that only Germany could parry the blow while “in France, England or Spain we could do nothing but await it.”—Op. cit., I, 164.

³²⁴ Ibid., p. 341. Still, Adams was no mean prophet, either as to technical or as to economic development. The basic identity of capitalism and socialism was well known to him: cf. his letter to Brooks Adams, Paris, Oct. 21, 1899 (H. D. Cater, op. cit., p. 484). In an earlier letter he had wisely confessed: “Much as I loathe the regime of Manchester and of Lombard Street in the nineteenth century, I am glad to think I shall be dead before I am ruled by the Trade Unions of the Twentieth. Luckily society will go to pieces then.”—Letter to Brooks Adams, London, June 11, 1898 (Ibid., p. 438). His prediction as to the collapse of Germany appears in a letter to C. M. Gaskell (Ashintully, Tyringham, Mass., Oct. 3, 1916): “As for the war-cloud, it is moving accurately on time. On my figures, based in 1863, it should take you till August, 1918, to reduce Germany to absolute extinction.” (The great retreat started in that year and month.)

³²⁵ Cf. Werner Sombart, Der proletarische Sozialismus (Marxismus) [10th ed. of Sozialismus und soziale Bewegung] (Berlin, 1924), II, 499. Max Weber, in a letter to Professor Friedrich Crusius (Nov. 24, 1918), stated that Germany had, at least for the time being, escaped the Russian knout, but that danger had not been averted for all time to come: see Weber’s Gesammelte Schriften, pp. 483–84. Yet Max Weber was almost equally afraid of the United States. Looking into the future, he wrote at the beginning of this century: “No new continent is at our disposal; just as in later Antiquity we see large continental areas cut off from the sea on whose plains we see assembled huge populations but which are monotonous and favour the establishment of ‘schematic’ civilizations.” Only in Russia and in the United States new cultures can arise because these countries have little history and vast plains. Even in the realm of economics everything indicates a coming decrease of liberties. Cf. Max Weber, “Zur Lage der bürgerlichen Demokratie in Russland,” Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, XIII (IV) Tübingen, 1906, pp. 347–50.

³²⁶ De la démocratie en Amérique, II, 430–31. Here the author calls America individualistic, but about Russia he says: “The second in a way concentrates in one man all the power of society.” Summing up, he concludes: “Their starting point is different, their paths divergent: nevertheless, each of them seems called by a secret plan of Providence to hold in its hands some day the fate of half the world.”

³²⁷ Cortés’ speeches before the Diet in Madrid were famous all over Europe, and Herzen commented on them (cf. Herzen, op. cit., V, 270). It must also be borne in mind that all Russians were not always in an aggressive mood, and even Dostoyevski was subject to depressed feelings of national inferiority upon sensing the hostility of Europe: cf. D. Merezhkovski, Prorok russkoi revolutsii: k Yubileyu Dostoyevskago (St. Petersburg: Izdatelstvo Pirozhkova, 1906).

³²⁸ Donoso Cortés, “Discurso del 30 Jan., 1850,” Obras, II, 134.

³²⁹ Cf. Joseph de Maistre, Quatre chapitres . . sur la Russie, p. 27.

³³⁰ Le Marquis de Custine, La Russie en 1839, IV, 436–37.

³³¹ Donoso Cortés, “Estado de las relaciones diplomáticas entre Francia y España,” Obras, III, 515–16.

³³² Ibid., p. 579.

³³³ Cf. Juan de Valera, Obras completas (2nd ed.; Madrid: Aguilar, 1942), I, 1531 (letter dated St. Petersburg, December 28, 1856).

³³⁴ Donoso Cortés, Obras, II, 623 (letter dated Paris, May 24, 1852). Our text is from the Spanish translation in the Obras. The correspondence between Donoso Cortés and Count Raczynski in its French original is contained in Deux diplomates: le Comte Raczynski et Donoso Cortés . . . dépêches et correspondance politique, 1848–1853, ed. Adhémar d’Antioche (Paris: Plon, 1880).

³³⁵ Donoso Cortés, “Cartas políticas acerca de la situación de Prusia en 1849,” letter dated Berlin, June 12, 1849 (Obras, II, 237–38).

³³⁶ See the letter of Count Raczynski to Donoso Cortés (January 4, 1849) in Cortés Obras, II, 560.

³³⁷ Donoso Cortés, “Cartas políticas acerca de la situación en Francia en 1851 y 1852,” letter dated Paris, March 10, 1852, Obras, II, 471–72.

³³⁸ Cf. Durnovo’s Memorandum (February, 1914), in Documents of Russian History, ed. F. A. Golder (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1927).

³³⁹ Cf. A. S. Khomyakov’s letter on England in his Polnoye sobraniye sotshinenii (Moscow: Universitetskaya Tipografiya, 1900), I, 138–39.

³⁴⁰ Cf. A. Herzen, second letter to V. Linton, Sochineniya, V, 273.

³⁴¹ Abbé de Pradt, Parallèle de la puissance anglaise et russe à l’Europe; suivi d’un aperçu sur la Grèce (Paris: Béchet Ainé, 1823), p. 143.

³⁴² Ibid., pp. 148–49.

³⁴³ Ibid., p. 154.

³⁴⁴ Ibid., p. 156.

³⁴⁵ Ibid., pp. 158–59.

³⁴⁶ Ibid., p. 168.

³⁴⁷ Ibid., p. 170.

³⁴⁸ Cf. B. Huldermann, Albert Ballin, trans. W. J. Eggers (London: Cassell, 1922), p. 284.

³⁴⁹ Henri Frédéric Amiel, Diary, pp. 220–21 (entry of Dec. 13, 1866).

³⁵⁰ Cf. Søren Kierkegaard, Journals, No. 511 (1845), p. 138.

³⁵¹ About the concept of the time-lag cf. Carlton J. H. Hayes, A Generation of Materialism (New York: Harper, 1941), passim; and A. E. Taylor, Does God Exist? (New York: Macmillan, 1947), pp. 116–19.

³⁵² Cf. Everett Dean Martin, “The Religion of the State” (Colver Lectures, 1931), reprinted in Waldo R. Browne, Leviathan in Crisis (New York: Viking, 1946), p. 216; and Bertrand de Jouvenel’s excellent Du pouvoir: histoire naturel de sa croissance (Geneva: Les Éditions du Cheval Ailé, 1945 [“Collections Princeps”]).

³⁵³ Jacob Burckhardt, Briefe an Preen, p. 262 (letter, dated September 14, 1890). (Italics ours.)

³⁵⁴ Jacob Burckhardt, Briefe an Preen, pp. 287–88 (letter, dated April 26, 1872).

³⁵⁵ Letter to Hermann Schauenburg, Sept., 1849, as quoted by Edgar Salin, Jacob Burckhardt und Nietzsche (Basel: Universitätsbibliothek, 1938), p. 35.

³⁵⁶ Letter to Henry Osborn Taylor, Washington, Jan. 17, 1905; in Cater, op. cit., pp. 558–559

³⁵⁷ Rossel, Le peuple roi, ou Grandeur et misère de la démocratie (Paris: Marcel Rivière, 1934 [“Librairie des sciences politiques ou sociales”]), p. 25.

³⁵⁸ H. G. Wells, The Mind at the End of its Tether (New York: Didier, 1946), p. 15.

³⁵⁹ Ibid., p. 18. Burckhardt’s pessimism was not so complete. He wrote to F. von Preen on Sept. 19, 1875: “Finally there will be a world war between optimism and—not pessimism, but only Malism (excuse the insipid word).”—Briefe an Preen, p. 84. Burckhardt did not reject the possibility that this battle could be won.

³⁶⁰ E. Schérer, La démocratie en France, p. 86.

³⁶¹ J. W. von Goethe, “Maximen und Reflexionen,” Werke (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1867), p. 230 (No. VII).

NOTES TO CHAPTER THREE

³⁶² E. A. Robinson, “Demos,” Collected Poems (New York: Macmillan, 1928), p. 372.

³⁶³ Eduard von Hartmann, Zur Zeitgeschichte; neue Tagesfragen. Gedanken über Staat, Politik, Sozialismus, ed. Alma Hartmann (Leipzig: Alfred Kröner, n.d.), pp. 14, 15.

³⁶⁴ Thought, March, 1946, p. 62.

³⁶⁵ It is interesting to note that the term “liberalism” has recently been used by two Catholic authors in a very different sense. We think of Emmet J. Hughes, The Church and the Liberal Society (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1944), and William Aylott Orton’s The Liberal Tradition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1945). Though Mr. Hughes’ formulation is nearer to that of Pius IX, we still prefer the concept of Professor Orton, whose book bears the descriptive subtitle A Study of the Social and Spiritual Conditions of Freedom.

³⁶⁶ There is, naturally, also such a thing as a confusion between liberty and equality resting on deeper, psychological reasons. If all are equal, nobody is “superior,” nobody has to be afraid of everybody else; and absence of fear is a very genuine and real type of freedom (i.e., the “Freedom from Fear” which, since the issuance of the Atlantic Charter, is conspicuous through its almost total absence). Yet these are psychological considerations of a purely theoretical nature which have little to do with the problems of state or society. Treitschke has tackled this question very wisely by alluding to Herodotus’ remark that “the majority in democracies is taken for the whole,” and to Rousseau’s arbitrary theory of “Freedom,” equating it with the volonté générale. See Heinrich von Treitschke, Politik, II, 252–53. Rougier has written in a similar vein: cf. his La défaite des vainqueurs (Paris and Brussels: Éditions du Cheval Ailé, 1947), p. 192. Yet how self-defeating the theories of Rousseau on liberty in connection with the General Will can be at times was very well shown, as far back as 1852, by the acutely observant Austrian ambassador to Paris, Count Hübner. See his Neuf ans de souvenir d’un ambassadeur d’Autriche sous le Second Empire, 1851–1859 (Paris: Plon, Nourrit et Cie, 1904), I, 50–51. [Original text Graf Joseph A. von Hübner, Neun Jahre der Erinnerungen (Berlin: Paetel, 1904), pp. 29–30.]

³⁶⁷ Cf. Fisher Ames, Influence of Democracy, pp. 13, 80–81.

³⁶⁸ The Christian values of liberty were felt with great clarity by Alexandre Vinet. It is to him that we owe the expression “the double lie of an illiberal stability and of an irreligious liberalism.”—Vinet, Littérature et histoire suisses, p. 346. Nor did he overlook the fact that a liberalism without a religious basis was bound to founder in nihilistic barbarism (ibid., p. 131).—On the “identitarian hostility” to otherness cf. Aurèle Kolnai, “Privilege and Liberty,” Laval théologique et philosophique, V, No. 1, p. 75.

³⁶⁹ Cf. Wladimir Astrow, Grenzen der Freiheit in der Demokratie (Zürich: Max Niehand, 1940), p. 30.

³⁷⁰ Cf. the American Declaration of Independence, which states only that “all men are created equal.”

³⁷¹ Cf. also St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theol., I, p. 96, a. 3. Jacques Maritain very wisely proposes to replace the misleading term “equality of man” with unité du genre humain: see his article “L’égalité chrétienne,” Études carmélitaines, XXIV (1939), No. 2 (Autumn), p. 186. Cf. also Bernard Iddings Bell, “We Lack Leaders; Is Education at Fault?” The New York Times Magazine, January 18, 1948, pp. 12, 21, 23.

³⁷² Abbé de Mably, Observations sur les Grecs (Geneva: Compagnie des Libraires, 1749), p. 270–71.

³⁷³ Rosalind Murray, “Political Terms and Spiritual Values,” The Dublin Review, No. 440 (Spring, 1947), p. 65.

³⁷⁴ Cf. Peter F. Drucker, The Future of Industrial Man (New York: John Day, 1942), p. 179.

³⁷⁵ De regimine principum, i. 1. The pro-democratic tendencies of some of our modern Catholic thinkers would have received strong censure from men like Orestes Brownson in the 19th century. Cf. Henry F. Brownson, Orestes A. Brownson’s Latter Life, from 1855–1876 (Detroit, 1900), pp. 493–94; quoted by Theodore Maynard, Orestes Brownson, p. 367. Compare also Nicholas Berdyaev, The End of Our Time, trans. Donald Attwater (London: Sheed and Ward, 1932), p. 175.

³⁷⁶ Cf. Dr. Friedrich Julius Stahl, Der Protestantismus als politisches Prinzip (Berlin: Wilhelm Schultze, 1853), p. 29.

³⁷⁷ Summa Theol., I, q. 96, a. 4, and I, q. 98, a. 2. Cf. also St. Augustine, De gen. ad lit., 8, 9, 17.

³⁷⁸ Cf. St. Thomas, Summa contra Gentiles, iii, cap. 85.

³⁷⁹ Cf. Pope Gregory VII, Epistilæ:, viii, letter 21 (1080 A.D.), in Migne, Patr. Lat., CXLVIII, col. 594–601.

³⁸⁰ Cf. Martin Luther, “Ein Sendbrief von dem harten Buchlein wider die Bauern,” Werke: kritische Gesamtausgabe (Weimar: Böhlau, 1908), XVIII, 389.

³⁸¹ Which St. Thomas recommends, Summa Theol., I–II, q. 105, a. 1. On St. Thomas and democracy cf. Wilfred Parsons, S.J. “Aquinas and Popular Sovereignty,” Thought, September, 1941.

³⁸² Georges Bernanos, La France contre les robots (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1947). p. 70.

³⁸³ Cf. Harold Laski, Parliamentary Government in England (New York: The Viking Press, 1938), pp. 8, 56–57, 72–73.

³⁸⁴ Cf. Carl Schmitt, “Lage des heutigen Parlamentarismus,” p. 9.

³⁸⁵ Compare the lines of Ogden Nash’s “The Politician” (The Selected Verse of Ogden Nash [New York: Random House, 1946], p. 215):

Some politicians are Republican, some Democratic
And their feud is dramatic.
But except for the name
They are indentically the same,

and see also the remark of President Eliot of Harvard, as quoted by Henry James, Charles W. Eliot (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1930), II, 230.

³⁸⁶ Cf. A. S. Khomyakov, Sochineniya, I, 124; also Hans Delückbr, Historische und politische Aufsätze (Berlin, 1907), p. 97.

³⁸⁷ Hence the reluctance to display flags in Catholic churches on the Continent (save old, discarded regimental banners). Whereas no American (not even a Southerner with a Confederate ancestry) would object to receiving Holy Communion under the Stars and Stripes, a few years ago it would have been hard to imagine a German Catholic worshipping under a swastika. Yet what other flag could have been used? A royalist would have objected to the black-red-gold design, and a Bavarian conservative might not even have liked the colours black, white and red. A similar situation exists in a score of other countries.

³⁸⁸ N.Y. Times Magazine, Feb. 7, 1943, p. 36. It is obvious that American discipline and obedience is a horizontal (societal), not a vertical (statist) phenomenon. Resentful of commands from “above,” the citizen of a democracy is a respecter of public opinion. Cf. James F. Cooper, The American Democrat, 108–9, 174–75; James F. Cooper, Gleanings in Europe, ed. R. E. Spiller (New York: Oxford University Press, 1928), I, 354–55, 356, 357, 358n, 359; Hugo Münsterberg, American Traits from the Point of View of a German (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1902), p. 200.

³⁸⁹ Cf. Francis S. Campbell [Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn], “Is America Menaced by Totalitarianism?” The Catholic World, April, 1945, pp. 18–24.

³⁹⁰ Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, “Präsidentschaftskandidaten in den U.S.A.” Die Furche, [Vienna], March 27, 1948.

³⁹¹ In his Nationalismus und Ethik (Vienna: Braumüller, 1935), pp. 97–116.—To what extent the Christian opposition in the Third Reich clung to existential, non-collective notions can be seen in Theodor Haecker’s famous Tag-und Nachtbücher, 1939–1945 (Munich: Josef Kösel, 1947), p. 157.

³⁹² Cf. Note 496 and Henri Gaidoz, “Introduction à l’étude d’ethnographie politique,” Revue internationale de l’enseignement, April-June, 1907, reprinted by the Librairie Générale de Droit et de Jurisprudence (Paris, 1907), pp. 23–25.

³⁹³ The majoritarian principle in the American Constitution (which avoids the term “democracy” all through its text) is accidental. The majoritarian principle is merely a means for transferring political power or designating political appointees, and it is by no means universally applied. Even the President can be elected by a minority of voters (though by a majority of electors). The term “government by the people” does not necessarily imply majority rule. The majoritarian principles cannot possibly be defended as absolute by any philosophical reasoning.

³⁹⁴ Cf. B. Spinoza, Tractatus theologico-politicus, cap. XVI. According to Spinoza, men are “citizens” in a republic, “children” (subjects) in a monarchy and “slaves” in a tyranny.

³⁹⁵ Cf. Jacques Maritain, Three Reformers (London: Sheed and Ward, 1928), pp. 19–25; R. Garrigou-Lagrange, Le sens commun, la Philosophie de l’être et les formules dogmatiques (3rd ed.; Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1936), ii, Part III, pp. 332–33. Compare with Ottmar Dittrich, Individualismus, Universalismus und Persönlichkeit (Berlin: Reuther und Reichard, 1917 [Philosophische Vorträge der Kantgesellschaft No. 14]), and M. C. D’Arcy, S.J., The Mind and Heart of Love (New York: Henry Holt, 1947), p. 169 f. See also Miguel de Unamuno, Del sentimiento trágico de la vida (Buenos Aires: Espasa-Calpe, 1945), p. 146, and Nicolas Berdiaeff: Cinque méditations sur l’existence, trans. Irèné Vilder-Lot (Paris: Aubier, 1936), pp. 165–66, 170–71. He remarks (p. 176): “Democratic metaphysics misunderstand the problem of personality, which is not a political, but a spiritual shortcoming.” Max Scheler alone seems to differ; he speaks of a “Christian individualism.” See his Vom Ewigen im Menschen (Leipzig: Verlag Der Neue Geist, Dr. Reinhold, 1921), p. 169.

³⁹⁶ Cf. Fisher Ames, Influence of Democracy, p. 54.

³⁹⁷ Cf. E. Kern, Über die Äusserung des Volkswillens in der Demokratie (Basel: R. Reich, 1893), p. 39; Richard Müller-Freienfels, Mysteries of the Soul, trans. B. Miall (New York: Knopf, 1929), p. 247 (on statistical thinking); Edmund Burke, “Appeal from the New to the Old Whig,” Works (Boston: Little, Brown, 1866), IV, 173–74; John C. Calhoun, A Disquisition on Govern ment (New York: Appleton, 1853), p. 60; Peter F. Drucker, The Future of Industrial Man, pp. 174–75, 178–79; Rosalind Murray, The Good Pagan’s Failure (New York: Longmans, Green, 1939), pp. 137–39. Compare also with Bertrand Russell’s dictum: “You have, it is true, a twenty-millionth share in the government of others, but only a twenty-millionth share in the government of yourself. You are therefore much more conscious of being governed than of governing.”—“Authority and the Individual,” The First Reith Lectures (London: Allen and Unwin, 1949). Russell, incidentally, is also one of the few modern authors to stress the factor of envy and jealousy in the democratic ideology. See his The Conquest of Happiness (London: Allen and Unwin, 1931), pp. 84, 91. His view on the impotence of the voter in the parliamentary democracy is, of course, not an entirely new one. We find it in Melville’s Mardi and, even earlier, in the writings of Adam von Müller. Cf. Adam Müller, Von der Nothwendigkeit einer theologischen Grundlage der gesammten Staatswissenschaften und der Staatswirtschaft insbesondere (Vienna and Leipzig: Wilhelm Braumüller, n.d.), p. 18. Müller’s argument is almost exactly the same as Russell’s.

³⁹⁸ The cultivation of sportsmanship is characteristic of old, established parliamentary nations, especially in English-speaking countries. Yet sportsmanship is only possible if the issues are trifling and in the nature of a game. The “gentleman” thrives in such an atmosphere of minor issues; but Newman was rightly suspicious about the compatibility of Christianity and the gentlemanly ideal (which, after all, is a secularized version of the knightly ideal): cf. his Idea of a University, Discourse VIII, Chapters ix and x. Chesterton said quite rightly that a gentleman was a man who could keep one thousand commandments—but not Ten.

³⁹⁹Cf. Francis Lieber, op. cit., p. 286. There still remains the problem of the devotee of parliamentarism what to propose. R. A. Cram offered in his The End of Democracy a reform of the voting system, but Albert Jay Nock saw, rightly, no chances for putting it into effect. See The Letters from Albert Jay Nock, 1924–1945 (Caldwell: Caxton Printers, 1949) letter dated Canaan, June 10, 1943. The illiberal essence of democracy probably also stems from the fact that it is essentially domination of the many, crushing the few. In other words, a Mehrheitsüberlagerung. Cf. Alexander Rüstow, Ortsbestimmung der Gegenwart (Erlenbach-Zürich: Eugen Rentsch, 1950), I, 120.

⁴⁰⁰ Cf. Alfred H. Lloyd, “The Duplicity of Democracy; Democratic Equality and the Principle of Relativity,” American Journal of Sociology, XXI, No. 1 (July, 1915), p. 9: “. . . democracy must mark at once the closing stage of an aristocracy of some lower order, this being the object of its legitimate attack, and the inception of an aristocracy of some higher order, this being the proper object of its ideal endeavour.”

⁴⁰¹ Cf. Fisher Ames, Influence of Democracy, p. 87.

⁴⁰² Cf. P. J. Proudhon, “Solution du problème sociale,” Oeuvres complètes, VI, 48–49. This oligarchy Proudhon called (p. 59) a “patriciat de médiocrités.”

⁴⁰³ Cf. H. G. Wells, Anticipations, p. 147; quoted by Graham Wallas, Human Nature in Politics (New York: Crofts, 1937), p. 217 n.

⁴⁰⁴ Cf. Robert Michels, Zur Soziologie des Parteienwesens (Leipzig: Kröner, 1925), p. 479 f. (The first edition was published before World War I.)

⁴⁰⁵ Cf. Roberto Michels, “Studi sulla democrazia e sull’ autorità,” in R. Università di Perugia, Facoltà fascista di scienze politiche, Collana di studi fascisti, No. 24–25 (Firenze: La Nuova Italia, 1933).

⁴⁰⁶ Maine, Popular Government: Four Essays (London: John Murray, 1885), pp. 188–89.

⁴⁰⁷ Cf. René Schwob, “Le règne de l’imposture,” in L’homme et la péché, ed. F. Mauriac and Eugenio d’Ors (Paris: Plon, 1938), pp. 121–22.

⁴⁰⁸ Cf. the analysis of Sir Cyril Burt’s Intelligence and Fertility (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1946) by Christopher Hollis in an article entitled “Eugenics and the New Inequalities,” The Tablet, CLXXXIX, No. 5568 (Jan. 25, 1947), PP. 55–56.

⁴⁰⁹ Even religious kings admittedly neglected their duties or became virtual tyrants. Still, there remained a language in which to reproach them. Bossuet attacked Louis XIV personally with his sermons in the King’s private chapel before an audience; and even a Louis XV died with fear in his heart for the divine judgment. Cf. Casimir Stryienski, Le dix-huitième siècle (Paris: Hachette, 1923), pp. 228–29.

⁴¹⁰ “To flatter the vices of the people is even more cowardly and dirty than to flatter the vices of the great.”—Charles Péguy, “Mémoires et dossiers,” Cahiers de la quinzaine, IIe Série, No. 15 (July 23, 1901).

⁴¹¹ Treitschke made the remark that the average of the demagogues is morally on a far lower level than the adulator one finds at courts; because the former always lies consciously, since he knows only too well that “intelligence never resides in the callous fist.”—Heinrich von Treitschke, Politik, p. 265.

⁴¹² For a criticism of the Vox populi vox Dei notion cf. Francis Lieber, op cit., pp. 389 sq.

⁴¹³ About the desirability of the independence of deputies from their constituents cf. James Bryce, The American Commonwealth (new ed.; New York: Macmillan, 1911), I, 303, and William Aylott Orton, The Liberal Tradition, p. 8. Yet a contrary opinion we find expressed by Hans Kelsen, author of the first Republican Austrian constitution, at present a professor at the University of Chicago. He insists that the representatives have merely to voice the opinions of their constituents. Cf. Hans Kelsen, General Theory of Law and State, trans. A. Wedberg (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1946), p. 289.

⁴¹⁴ Cf. Article 21 of the Weimar Constitution: “the deputies are representatives of all the people; they are subject only to their conscience and are not bound to particular promises or mandates.” A similar wording can be found in the Swiss constitution (Article 91); cf. William E. Rappard, The Government of Switzerland (New York: Van Nostrand, 1936), pp. 59, 64.

⁴¹⁵ Cf. Edmond Schérer, La démocratie en France, p. 50: “One of the vices of democracy, just as of all half-cultures, is the passion for the simple ideas and, by consequence, for absolute principles. It is simpliste. . . .” The next step is obviously the rise of Burckhardt’s “terribles simplificateurs.”

⁴¹⁶ On the type of the politician, cf. Moises Yakovlevitch Ostrogorski, Democracy and the Organization of Political Parties, trans. F. Clarke (London: Macmillan, 1902), II, 632. Compare with Charles Péguy, “Débats parlémentaires,” Cahiers, May 12, 1903, and “Avertissement du monde sans Dieu,” Cahiers, March 1, 1904.

⁴¹⁷ Blaise Pascal, Pensées, ed. V. Giraud (Paris: Crès, 1924), p. 186 (No. 336).

⁴¹⁸ This was well foreseen by Donoso Cortés, who asked the question: “What would happen to parliamentarism in a people truly Catholic, that is, where a man knows from birth that he must account to God even for his idle words?”—Obras, ed. Orti y Larra, II, 315.

The spiritual pitfalls of “popular sovereignty” can be gathered from Napoleon’s cynical declaration: “Voudrait-on rétablir la souveraineté du peuple? Eh bien, dans ce cas, je me fais peuple; car je prétends être toujours là on se trouve la souveraineté.” (See Chateaubriand, Mémoires d’Outre-Tombe, ed. Levaillant, II, 481.)

⁴¹⁹ Letter to F. von Preen, March 17, 1888; in J. Burckhardt, Briefe an Preen, p. 222. Which reminds one also of Franz Grillparzer’s statement in his “Aṕhorismen zur Welt-und Menschenwürde”: “In certain countries the opinion seems to be held that the addition of three asses results in an intelligent man. This is completely erroneous. Several asses in concreto are the equivalent of an ass in abstracto and that is a terrifying animal.”

⁴²⁰ Compare with E. I. Watkin, The Catholic Centre (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1939), P. 159.

⁴²¹ A description of the essence of a republic (“representative government”) can be found in James Bryce, The American Commonwealth (New York: Macmillan, 1911), I, xxvi, 298–311.

⁴²² Letter to F. von Preen, Christmas, 1885, in J. Burckhardt, Briefe an Preen, p. 200. Yet to what extent the irrational, intuitional element is practically forced to replace reason and knowledge—and with what disastrous results—we can gather from accounts of that supreme amateur, the late President Roosevelt. Cf., for instance, William C. Bullitt, “How We Won the War and Lost the Peace,” Life, International Edition, V, No. 7 (Sept. 27, 1948), p. 48; Frances Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew (New York: Viking Press, 1946), pp. 34 and 352; and The Stilwell Papers (New York: W. Sloane Associates, 1948), pp. 251–254. Naturally, when reason abdicates intuition has to take its place. “The idea that the multitude is more likely to be right than the dissenting few is really an assertion of the superiority of intuitions, right feelings, belief over reason as a guide to behaviour.”—Everett Dean Martin, Liberty, p. 120.

⁴²³ Cf. Albert Jay Nock, Our Enemy the State (New York: William Morrow, 1935). P. 136: “We all are aware that not only the vision of the ordinary man, but also his wisdom and sentiment, have a very short radius of operation; they cannot be stretched over an area of much more than township size.”

⁴²⁴ Cf. William Graham Sumner, The Challenge of Facts and Other Essays, ed. A. G. Keller (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1914), p. 286: “Democracy is only available as a political system in the simple society of a new country—it is not adequate for a great nation; we have reached a point at which its faults and imperfections are mischievous, and, in the growth and advance of the nation, these evils must become continually more apparent.” (This was written in 1877.) Compare this with the words of Prince Sapieha in Schiller’s Demetrius (first scene): “One ought to weigh votes, not count them. The state must sooner or later perish when the majority triumphs and ignorance decides.”

⁴²⁵ C. H. Betts, “Macaulay’s Criticism. . . .” Open Court, XXXII (1918), p. 287.

⁴²⁶ Representative Government, pp. 282–88.

⁴²⁷ Cf. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles, iii, 78, 81; Summa Theol., I, q. 96, art. 3 and 4, I–II, q. 92, a. 1, ad 3; Expos, in VIII lib. Pol. Aristotelis, iii, lect. 7; v, lectio 1; vii, lectio 4; St.Augustine, In Heptateuch, libri VII, i, 153; Aristotle, Politics, i, 2, 13f.

⁴²⁸ Compare with Alexis Carrel, Man, the Unknown (New York: Harper, 1935). p. 271.

⁴²⁹ Ernest Renan, Réforme intellectuelle et morale, p. 79, pp. 103–4.

⁴³⁰ Cf. Henry Adams, The Tendency of History (New York: Macmillan, 1928), p. 170: “The average man in 1850 could understand what Davy or Darwin had to say; he could not understand what Clerk Maxwell meant. The later terms were not translatable unto the earlier; even the mathematics became higher hyper-mathematics.”

⁴³¹ The correct definition of the “common good” is one of the trickiest problems for the philosopher and the theologian. Here is also, incidentally (in its misdefinition), an ideal opening wedge for a system favouring a utilitarian totalitarianism. St. Thomas in Summa Theol., II–II, q. 57, a. 7, offers us part of a definition which is potentially pregnant with that particular danger. (Cf. also II–II, q. 152, a. 4 ad 3, and I–II, q. 113, a. 9 ad 3.) Yet the doctor angelicus implies rightly that the gubernatorial use of those more naturally gifted and/or instructed conforms with the common good: Summa Theol., I, q. 96, a. 4; I–II, q. 95, a. 2; I, q. 92, a. 1, ad 2.

⁴³² French taxi drivers like to use the insult: “Espèce de deputè!” Bismarck was no more optimistic when he said: “Politics destroys character.” Cf. also Gyula Kornis, Kultura és politika: tanulmányok (Budapest: Franklin, 1928), and Az allamférfi; a politikai lélek vizsálata (Budapest: Franklin, 1933), I, 245–49; James Bryce on the American presidency in The American Commonwealth, I, viii, 77 sq; Edmond Schérer, La démocratie en France, p. 50; Aldous Huxley, Time Must Have a Stop (New York: Harper, 1944), P. 45.

⁴³³ This element of imposture is closely connected with the equation: majority = entirety. On the dangerous numeralism of the democracies cf. A. Valensin and Y. de Montcheuil, Maurice Blondel (Paris: Lecoffre, Gabalda et Cie, 1934), pp. 285–294. Recently Pope Pius XII criticized the dogmatic concepts of majority rule with great vigour. Cf. The New York Times, No. 34,041 (April 7, 1951), p. 3, col. 6–7.

⁴³⁴ On the object of reason cf. Summa Theol., I–II, q. 1, a. 2. For a definition of art see Jacques Maritain, Art and Scholasticism, trans. J. F. Scanlan (New York: Scribner, 1934).

⁴³⁵ An “artistic” description of the æsthetic-daimonic aspects of nazism can be found in Ernst Jünger’s symbolic narration Auf den Marmorklippen (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1939). The author paints a picture devoid of all historical, geographic, sociological, racial or economic implications.

⁴³⁶ Pascal, Pensées, ed. Leon Brunschvicg (Paris: Hachette, 1926), p. 458, No. 277. Compare ibid., p. 451, No. 253: “Il y a deux excès: exclure la raison et rien admettre que la raison.”

⁴³⁷ These notions are, needless to say, entirely contrary to those of Jefferson: cf. J. Dewey, The Living Thoughts of Thomas Jefferson (New York: Longmans, Green, 1940), p. 63.

⁴³⁸ Cf. Henri Frederic Amiel, Diary, ed. Bouvier, II, 32 (Jan. 25, 1872); Wilhelm Hasbach, Die moderne Demokratie, p. 200; Aldous Huxley, Ends and Means (London: Chatto and Windus, 1937), p. 174.

⁴³⁹ For two sketches describing actual situations cf. The Economist, CLII, No. 5393 (Jan. 4, 1947), pp. 20–21 (describing President Roosevelt and Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau arbitrarily fixing the value of the dollar by referring to “lucky numbers”), and Jan Ciechanowski, Defeat in Victory (Garden City: Doubleday, 1947), p. 223, giving a “snapshot” of Mr. Stettinius as a Secretary of State.

⁴⁴⁰ Cf. G. Ticknor, Life, Letters and Journals, II, 17 (July 1, 1836). Democratic amateurism in the United States has not—so far—produced fatal results, for the reasons given. This is, nevertheless, true only of her internal affairs. Her foreign policy has to be judged in a more pessimistic vein.

⁴⁴¹ Cf. the pessimistic conclusion of Hanson W. Baldwin in his article “The Myth of Security,” Foreign Affairs, XXVI, No. 2 (January, 1948), p. 262.

⁴⁴² Henry Adams, The Formative Years, p. 45.

⁴⁴³ Cf. Gerhard Leibholz, “La nature et les formes de la démocratie,” Archives de philosophie et de droit juridique, VI, No. 34 (1936), p. 133.

⁴⁴⁴ Cf. Guido de Ruggiero, Storia del liberalismo europeo (Paris: Laterza, 1925). P. 410.

⁴⁴⁵ Bertrand de Jouvenel in his Du pouvoir: histoire naturelle de sa croissance (Geneva: Editions du Cheval Ailé, 1945 [“Collection Princeps”]) points out that the elimination of monarchs has resulted in a depersonalization of power. “They” is the mystical power which rules: “They raise our taxes; they draft us.”

⁴⁴⁶ See the humorous analysis of the mass mind in Max Beerbohm’s Zuleika Dobson (London: Heinemann, 1922), pp. 150–51.

⁴⁴⁷ The Tablet, CLXXXVI, No. 5493 ([London], Aug. 18, 1945), p. 74.

⁴⁴⁸ Compare with S. Kierkegaard, Present Age, p. 15.

⁴⁴⁹ Lehre vom modernen Staat (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1876), III, Teil, pp. 382–83. A similar view was expressed by Carl Ludwig von Haller, who looked at the ethical aspect of this problem: cf. his Restauration der Staatswissenschaften, oder Theorie des natürlichgeselligen Zustandes (Winterthur: Steinersche Buch-handlung, 1820), II, part i, p. 374; compare with Douglas Jerrold, The Future of Freedom (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1938), pp. 116–117.

⁴⁵⁰ E. I. Watkin, The Catholic Centre, p. 119. His only reference to democracy in his work can be found in a short footnote: “Democracy, so highly vaunted, possesses in itself little value, for the majorities in the Fascist countries support their tyrants.”

⁴⁵¹ In fact, thanks to the curious humanitarianism of the Potsdam Decisions, this percentage has again been somewhat decreased. Yet even without these “surgical interventions” the Protestant share is bound to shrink because of the higher Catholic and Greek-Oriental birth rates. Cf. E. von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, “The Geographic and Demographic Aspects of Religion in Europe,” Bulletin of the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences, [New York], III, No. 2, PP. 313–43.

⁴⁵² This is especially true of modern, liberal Protestantism, and not so much of sixteenth and seventeenth century Protestant orthodoxy. Yet the principle of a (subjective) private interpretation of the Bible laid the foundations for the subjectivistic relativism of our days. On subjective relativism cf. Eduard May, Am Abgrund des Relativismus (Berlin: Dr. Georg Lüttke Verlag, 1941). Catholic opposition to relativism is fully appreciated in this work, which received a prize from the Prussian Academy of Sciences.

⁴⁵³ For the definitions of democracy in antiquity cf. Quintiliano Saldana, “La démocratologie,” Revue internationale de sociologie, XXX, No. 11–12 (Nov.-Dec, 1922), p. 583 f.

⁴⁵⁴ Cf. S. Kierkegaard, Journals, No. 1210 (April, 1851): “Statecraft in modern states is not what must one do in order to be a minister, but what must one do in order to become a minister.”

⁴⁵⁵ For a contrary opinion cf. J. B. Jaccoud, Droit naturel et démocratie (Fribourg: Oeuvre de St. Paul, 1923), pp. 292–95. This author insists that only direct democracy is true democracy, and that it could be realized in larger areas. He is convinced that indirect democracy is nothing but a camouflaged oligarchy, and that the referendum should be more liberally applied.

⁴⁵⁶ Walt Whitman, for example, had such visions. Cf. his postulate: “I demand races of orbic bards, with unconditional and uncompromising sway. Come forth, sweet democratic despots of the West!”—Democratic Vistas (London: Walter Scott, 1888), p. 58. And though the ideal race of the future should be a “divine average,” the level was supposed to be rather elevated. Whitman dreamt of a “copious race of superb American men and women, cheerful, religious, ahead of any known.” With such Übermenschen in the guise of “sweet democratic despots” even democracy was bound to succeed.

⁴⁵⁷ On democracy in antiquity cf. A. Croiset, Les démocraties antiques (Paris: Flammarion, 1916); Hans Bogner, Die verwirklichte Demokratie: die Lehre der Antike (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1930); Gustav Strohm, Demos und Monarch (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1922). The last-mentioned author, trying to derive a lesson from the examples of antiquity, wrote prophetically (p. 220) about Germany’s post-war years: “Various persons are going to offer themselves under the mask of the ‘best man,’ are going to disappoint hopes and increase despair”; and a few lines later he talks about a “modern Cleon—as it seems that Bismarck was the last Pericles. . . .”

⁴⁵⁸ Compare Aristotle on the tyrannical potentialities of democracy, Politics, v. 9, §6; vi. 2, §§9, 12. St. Thomas Aquinas (De regimine principum) thinks that tyranny of a majority is better than the tyranny of a single person. This is true if we identify the common good with the material advantage of the majority (“the greatest happiness of the greatest number”)—a formula which, without the gravest restrictions and reservations would open the gates to the worst immoralities. The humanitarian will prefer a town participating in the lynching of an innocent to a tyrant exterminating all the innocent inhabitants of a city. The Christian focusing his attention on an active trespass (one guilty vs. many innocents, many guilty vs. one innocent), ought to come to an opposite conclusion. We have only to remember Newman’s comparison of the wilful theft of one farthing with the perishing of the whole world in terrible agony! Needless to say that Newman preferred universal cataclysm to sin.

⁴⁵⁹ Pius XII and Democracy; the Christmas Message of Pope Pius XII, December 24, 1944, revised translation by Rev. John B. Harney, C.S.P. (New York: The Paulist Press, 1945); also in The New York Times, Dec. 25, 1944. Italics ours.

⁴⁶⁰ Yet more than a hundred years ago the possibility of a Christian-democratic synthesis was gravely doubted, and not only by Catholics, as is clearly demonstrated by the words of the Swiss Protestant, Alexandre Vinet: “A ‘Christian democracy’; there you have the final aspect of Chateaubriand’s perspectives. But if, as nobody can deny, Christianity has made the family the unique basis of civil society, it is in the spirit of the Christian family that society must be reconstituted. Yet the family is not a democracy. Democracy, considered today to be the final and normal condition of society, is perhaps nothing but an important crisis, a transitory stage through which society has to go. The attribute ‘Christian’ makes little difference; in such a combination of words the noun devours the adjective.”—Alexandre Vinet, “Mme de Staël et Chateaubriand,” Études sur la littérature française du XIXe siécle (Paris: Librairie Fischbacher, n.d.), I, 437.

⁴⁶¹ Gonzague de Reynold, Conscience de la Suisse: lettres à ces messieurs de Berne, p. 92.

⁴⁶² We have not dealt with the concept of a popular democracy (“people’s democracy”) of the East European style. An authoritative explanation of this term can be found in Endre Sós’ article “A demokraták demokráciája,” Népszava, LXXVI, No. 20 (January 25, 1948), p. 11. These explanations have to be supplemented by Mr. Matthew Rákosi’s declaration, which can be found in the Vienna Communist newspaper Die Volksstimme (issue of January 22, 1949).

⁴⁶³ This omission has been noted by Karl Loewenstein in Political Reconstruction (New York: Macmillan, 1946). It seems that this neglect is partly due to the immense sway of the fausse idée claire of democracy, a sway which has been continuing for more than a century. Guizot wrote as early as 1849: “Such is the empire of the word democracy that no government, no party dares to live—and does not believe it can—without inscribing this word on its flag.” The psychological attraction lies in the illusion of “self-government,” i.e., “liberty.” Hans Kelsen is, nevertheless, one of the few theorists who make the equation: democracy = liberty; see his Vom Wesen und Wert der Demokratie (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1929), pp. 3–4. But later in the same book he concedes the totalitarian character of this “liberty”: “The citizen is only free through the will of the community. . . . It is more a paradox, it is the very symbol of democracy when the word LIBERTAS could be read over the gates of the jails of the Genoese Republic and on the chains of the galley slaves.” Yet the confusion between liberty and equality is as old, if not older, than the American Republic. Cf. Moreau de St. Méry’s American Journey 1793–1798, trsl. and ed. Kenneth and Anna M. Roberts (Garden City: Doubleday, 1947), p. 121.

⁴⁶⁴ For an analysis of the term “myth” cf. Louis Rougier, La mystique démocratique (Paris: Flammarion, 1929), pp. 17–18. For a deeper understanding of the “mystique” of democracy cf. Hans Kelsen, op. cit., pp. 11–12, 30. From a theological point of view Kelsen’s vistas of democracy remind one of Maurras’ view of monarchy.

⁴⁶⁵ A. L. Thomas (1732–85), “Ode sur le temps,” Poésies diverses (Lyon: Frères Périsse, 1767), p. 88.

NOTES TO CHAPTER FOUR

⁴⁶⁶ J. W. von Goethe, “Zahme Xenien,” Part 2.

⁴⁶⁷ Journals, No. 179 (Dec. 31, 1837).

⁴⁶⁸ Still, we may give the devil his due and remember the argumentation offered by Sir Robert Filmer in his Patriarcha for the so-called “divine right of kings.” Filmer argued that Adam was the first king, and that his kingdom increased numerically with those generations which he ruled patriarchically (as a grandfather, and so on). Without the Fall there still would have been society as well as a family, and thus a kingship with purely social aspects (see below, p. 93) can well be imagined. Neither should it be forgotten that the Fall not only necessitated the state but also corrupted society—the latter effecting the former. For reasons which it would lead us too far to enumerate and to analyze, it is corrupt human society, not the (naturally “unsatisfactory”) state, which is the source of most evils. Our whole discussion here turns around the efficacy of palliative medicines, which will not heal a permanently sick body.

⁴⁶⁹ Frédéric le Grand, Mémoires de Brandebourg (Berlin, 1751), I, 123.

⁴⁷⁰ Cf. the closing paragraph of Chapter iii of his On Liberty.

⁴⁷¹ As quoted by Douglas Woodruff in The [London] Tablet, February 28, 1942. The passage is from a late seventeenth-century number of the magazine.

⁴⁷² Cf. E. von Kuehnelt-Leddihn [“Francis S. Campbell”], “Organic Government and the Reconstruction of Europe,” Thought, XVIII, No. 68 (March, 1943), where may be found the definition of the term “organic,” in conjunction with Ferrero’s concept of “legitimacy” and P. Sorokin’s notion of “ideational.” A situation similar to that in the United States exists in the U.S.S.R., where the younger generation, though frequently hostile to the present régime, is thoroughly unable even to visualize a concrete alternative.

⁴⁷³ Hugo Münsterberg wrote that Americans frequently see in monarchy a basically “rotten institution”: cf. his American Patriotism and Other Social Studies (New York: Moffat, Yard and Co., 1913), pp. 15–16. Yet curiously enough it is, with the exception of Switzerland and Finland, the remainder of the monarchical world—viz., the British Commonwealth, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands and Belgium—which the average American considers “enlightened” and “progressive.”

Yet how different were the views of Gouverneur Morris, to whom monarchy appeared to be one of the soundest forms of government. He wrote to Robert Walsh in 1811: “History, the parent of political science, had told them [the framers of America’s Constitution] that it was almost as vain to expect permanency from democracy as to construct a palace on the surface of the sea.”—In Jared Sparks, The Life of Gouverneur Morris with Selections of His Correspondence (Boston: Gray and Bowen, 1832), III, 263. On the person and views of Morris cf. Daniel Walther, Gouverneur Morris, témoin de deux révolutions (Lausanne: Imprimerie Merinat, 1932).

⁴⁷⁴ Cf. Marquis de la-Tour-du-Pin la Charce, Aphorismes de politique sociale (Paris: Nouvelle Librairie Nationale, 1909), pp. 35–37. On democratic conditions among primitives cf. Professor W. A. Bonger, Problemen der Demokratie: een sociologische en psychologische Studie (Groningen and Batavia: Noordhoff, 1934), P. 46; sq.; Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf, The Aboriginal Tribes of Hyderabad, I: The Chenchus (London: Macmillan, 1943), p. 123; Gunnar Landtmann, The Origin of Inequality of the Social Classes (London: Kegan, Paul, Trench, Truebner, 1938), pp. 1–14, 309–10; Samuel L. Lothrop, The Indians of the Tierra del Fuego (New York: Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation, 1928), pp. 84–160; P. Wilhelm Schmidt, The Religion of Earliest Man (London: Catholic Truth Society, n.d.), p. 6; Sylvester A. Sieber and Franz H. Mueller, The Social Life of Primitive Man (St. Louis: Herder, 1941), pp. 38–42.

⁴⁷⁵ Cf. D. W. Brogan, The American Character (New York: Knopf, 1944), p. 146: “In the same way, the word ‘republic’ has an almost magical significance for Americans. Plutarch, as Mr. Wells once suggested, had a good deal to do with this; but whatever the origin of the belief, it is now part of the American credo that only citizens of a republic can be free. And no matter what romantic interest Americans may display in the human side of monarchy, it should never be forgotten that politically they regard it as a childish institution.”

⁴⁷⁶ Ernst Bruncken, Die amerikanische Volksseele (Gotha: Perthes, 1911).

⁴⁷⁷ Cf. Francis Lieber, On Civil Liberty and Self-Government (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1874), p. 257. In fact, the Founding Fathers were by no means all opposed to monarchy in principle: cf. on Jefferson, Richard Hofstadter, American Political Thought (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1948), p. 28.

⁴⁷⁸ Cf. for instance, parts of the abdication speech of Charles V, in William Thomas Walsh, Philip II (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1937), pp. 167–69. The present author is almost certain that his late father, a devoted subject of the last two Austrian emperors, would have applauded their assassination if they had ordered the deportation of the Ruthenian minority and their confinement in “relocation centres.” Some of them had actually sympathized with the Russians during World War I, but a monarch was at least supposed to uphold the constitution he had sworn to protect. Yet minorities in a democratic age and environment are always at the mercy of the majority, which can, by plebiscites, amendments, referenda, etc., legalize every betrayal of the constitution. The presumed “guardians of the constitution,” moreover, can always refer in “emergencies” to the “mandate of the people.” See the depressing report of Carey MacWilliams, “Moving the West-Coast Japanese,” Harper’s Magazine, September, 1942, pp. 363–66.

⁴⁷⁹ Cf. Josef Leo Seifert, Op. cit. Emphasis is placed in this work on the relation between theism and patriarchalism.

⁴⁸⁰ Cf. Giambattista Vico, Principi di scienza nuova d’intorno alla commune naturale delle nazioni, ed. G. Ferrara (Milan: Societá Tipografica dei Classici Italiani, 1844, “Istoria fondamentale del diritto romano”), pp. 555–60; E. K. Winter, “Paternale Staatstheorie,” Staatslexikon der Goerresgesellschaft, ed. Hermann Sacher (5th ed.; Freiburg: Herder, 1931), IX, col. 73–74.

⁴⁸¹ Cf. Georges Valois, Le père (Paris: Nouvelle Librairie Nationale, 1913), pp. 227–31. The very influential German political author Ernst Jünger insists that the key for a better future depends upon a new synthesis of authority and love. “The solution,” he says, “must be based on a new conception of the word father.” Cf. Heliopolis (Tübingen: Heliopolis-Verlag, 1949), p. 426.

⁴⁸² The “superman” is definitely a product of democratic imagination, and typologically an apotheosis of the “common man.” All modern tyrants are “supermen”; the egalitarian principle, on the other hand, fosters tyranny, just because it denies all hierarchy. Cf. Aurèle Kolnai, “Le culte de l’homme commun et la gloire des humbles,” Laval théologique et philosophique, II, No. 1 (1946), p. 115.

⁴⁸³ Dante is frequently accused of Averroistic leanings, and for this reason a warning has been sounded against his political theories. But Étienne Gilson has defended him warmly against these attacks: see É. Gilson, Dante et la Philosophie (Paris: J. Vrin, 1939), pp. 210–15.

⁴⁸⁴ Cf. Thomas E. Henessey, “The Fatherhood of the Priest,” The Thomist, X, No. 3 (July, 1947), PP. 271–306.

⁴⁸⁵ Cf. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theol., I, q. 3, a. 6 ad 1.

⁴⁸⁶ Cf. Ebisawa Arimichi, “The Relationship between Bushido Ethics and Christianity,” Shigaku Zasshi, March, 1939.

Of considerable importance for the whole subject matter (i.e., monarchy and Christianity) is Erik Peterson, Der Monotheismus als politisches Problem (Leipzig: Jakob Hegner, 1935), which moves in categories different from those we have adopted. Peterson decidedly rejects the notion of a Christian “political theology.”

⁴⁸⁷ Abel Bonnard, Le drame du present (Paris: Grasset, 1936), I (Les modérés), 35.

⁴⁸⁸ Cf. Vladimir Soloviev, La Russie et l’Église Universelle (2nd ed.; Paris, 1906), p. 304. “Paternity” is the leitmotiv of this famous book, which could not be printed in Russia. See p. 367.

⁴⁸⁹ Cf. St. Robert Bellarmine, De Romano pontifice, lib. i, cap. 2. The same idea has been expressed by St. Thomas in De regimine principum i. 1.

⁴⁹⁰ St. Robert Bellarmine, op. cit., lib. i, cap. 3. On the character of the royal office see also Reinhold Schneider, Macht und Gnade (Salzburg: Anton Pustet, 1949), pp. 22–29.

⁴⁹¹ Today, in fact, the homo æconomicus, the homo familiaris, the homo religiosus, the homo ludens, even the so highly cherished “natural man” are nothing but incoherent, isolated monstrous bipeds without true reality or real relationships.

Also there can be, too, a certain antagonism and rivalry between family and state. Cf. Wilhelm Stekel (an ex-Freudian), Sadism and Masochism: a Psychology of Hatred and Cruelty (New York: Horace Liveright, 1929), II, 69. A brilliant essay on democracy as a “fraternal” and anti-patriarchal, non-theistic and anti-familistic movement has been written by Jean Lacroix, “Paternité et démocratie,” Esprit, XV, No. 133 (May, 1947), especially pp. 748–50.—Also incorporated in J. Lacroix, Force et faiblesse de la famille (Paris: Edition du Seuil, 1948).

E. Faguet similarly demonstrated his knowledge of the incompatibility between democracy and the family spirit (Le culte de l’incompétence, pp. 141–43), and Geoffrey Gorer used the absence of a strong patriarchal tradition in the United States as the guiding idea in his book The American People (New York: W. W. Norton, 1948).

⁴⁹² Of the many works of these authors we would like to refer merely to three: R. Allers, The Successful Error: a Critical Study of Freudian Psychoanalysis (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1940), and “L’amour et l’instinct,” Études carmélitaines, XXI, Vol. I (April, 1946); Siegfried Behn, “Die Illusion einer Gegenwart,” Hochland, XXVIII, Vol. II (February, 1931), p. 397 sq. Yet in this connection the fact also must be mentioned that psychoanalysis has a Catholic defender in the person of Roland Dalbiez.

⁴⁹³ Cf. Tacitus De Germania xxxiv: “It is holier and more reverent to believe in than to know the acts of the gods.” Belief (faith) and pietas belonged closely together (our “piety” is again a derivation from the latter). Josef Bernhart in his German version of the Summa (Kröner edition) translates pietas very correctly with a long but intelligently coined word: Blutspflichtverbundenheit.

Pascal has written with deep insight on the relation between love and reason, delineating their common ground; cf. his “Discours sur les passions d’amour,” part of “Un fragment inédit de Pascal,” ed. Victor Cousin, Revue des deux mondes, Nouvelle série, XIII (1843), Sept. 15, p. 1005.

⁴⁹⁴ De Maistre, Quatre chapitres inédits sur la Russie, ed. Rodolphe de Maistre (Paris: Vaton Frères, 1859), p. 20. Arthur Koestler’s main idea in The Yogi and the Commissar (London: Jonathan Cape, 1945) is exactly the same: either we are ruled by brutal external forces, or we yield voluntarily to an inner voice. Religion is, naturally, affection and reason, “heart” and intellect.

⁴⁹⁵ Psychologically interesting is the Spanish nosotros, vosotros and the French nous autres, vous autres. How can we be “the others”? Is this an effort to remove the “I” from the “We”? [The forms cited probably owe their origin merely to a need for strengthening the unstressed nos.—ED.]

⁴⁹⁶ Cf. De Tocqueville’s observations on democratic self-worship in De la démocratie en Amérique (Œuvres complètes, II, 151–52). Cf. also E. von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, “Rückkehr zur Einzahl; eine Laienpredigt,” Neue Politik, August 19, 1948, p. 8.

⁴⁹⁷ Sir Richard Burton found traces of a still virulent “Sebastianismo” even in the interior of Brazil; cf. his translation of Camões (London, 1881), I, 363. Also Tomás García Figueras, “La leyenda del sebastianismo,” Revista de estudios políticos, VII, Año 4, No. 13, pp. 163–79; George Young, Portugal Young and Old (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1917), pp. 201 f.; Luis Chaves, “O sebastianismo: mistica de restauração,” O Instituto, XCVIII (1941), pp. 331–71; Anteiro de Figueiredo, Dom Sebastião rei de Portugal (1554–1578) (7th ed.; Lisbon & Paris. Editions Ailland et Bertrand, 1925).

⁴⁹⁸ An (ethnic) nationalist would focus his attention on the language of his fellow citizens. He would want to eliminate all foreign ethnic elements—by assimilation or exile—and to “liberate” all “folkic comrades” living in foreign countries. A racialist suffers from a biological mania. A patriot is enthusiastic about his country (“fatherland”), not his nation. A patriotic, but anti-nationalistic, programme was enunciated by St. Stephen, King of Hungary, who said to his son: “A kingdom of one language and one culture is frail and stupid.” (Unius linguae uniusque moris regnum fragile et imbecille est.)—Migne, Patr. Lat., CLI, col. 1240 f.

⁴⁹⁹ In 1909 only the Karagjorgjević of Serbia and the Petrović-Njegoš of Montenegro were genuine local dynasties. The Portuguese “Bragancas” were actually Coburgs; the “Romanovs,” Holstein-Gottorps; and the “Prussian” Hohenzollems were Suabians. There were no less than ten dynasties of German origin ruling outside of Germany and Austria. On the advantage of the alien as to objectivity cf. Georg Simmel, Soziologie (Leipzig: Duncker und Humblot, 1908), p. 687, and Alfred Schuetz, “The Stranger; an Essay in Social Psychology,” The American Journal of Sociology, XLIX, No. 6 (May, 1944), pp. 506–7

⁵⁰⁰ For the anti-democratic character and intentions of the Constitution of the United States cf. William E. H. Lecky, Democracy and Liberty (New York: Longmans, Green, 1896), pp. 66–67. It is well known that Alexander Hamilton regretted the strictly republican character of the United States. Efforts were made by N. Gorham and Von Steuben to induce Prince Henry of Prussia (a brother of Frederick II) to become a hereditary sovereign of the United States. The old Dutch constitution would have served as a pattern. But these efforts failed; cf. Chester V. Easum, Prince Henry of Prussia, Brother of Frederick the Great (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1942), p. 339.

⁵⁰¹ Cf. Donoso Cortés, Œuvres (Paris, 1858), II, 256–57.

⁵⁰² This much is apparent when we read an entry in his diary for January, 1799, to be found in The Complete Jefferson, ed. Saul K. Padover (New York: Duell, Sloane and Pearce, 1943), p. 1276.

In unguarded moments Jefferson even slipped into the jargon of anti-popular reactionaries—as, for instance, when he used the expression “the swinish multitudes”; cf. his letter to Mann Page, August 30, 1795, in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed Paul Leicester Ford (New York: Putnam, 1896), II, 24. Still, it should not be forgotten that American Left-wing organizations featured Jefferson very widely and that the American Communists held their meetings frequently under huge Jefferson portraits. The Jefferson-cult reached during World War II its climax. Lord Acton pointed out that Jefferson “subverted with his doctrines the republicanism of America, and consequently the Republic itself.” Cf. his “Political Causes of the American Republic,” in Acton, Op. cit., pp. 212–13. Still, in the Washington Edition of Jefferson’s Works we find only a single friendly reference to democracy, in a letter written to Dupont de Nemours in 1816 (Vol. VI, p. 589, Ford Edition, Vol. X, p. 22).

⁵⁰³ Cf. E. Kohn-Brahmstedt, “Social and Political Thought in France,” in Political Thought, ed. J. P. Mayer (London: Dent, 1939), p. 273.

⁵⁰⁴ The Works of Alexander Hamilton, ed. Henry Cabot Lodge (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1885), I, 391. Cf. J. T. Adams, Jeffersonian Principles and Hamiltonian Principles (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1932), Part II, p. 37.

⁵⁰⁵ Compare with S. Kierkegaard, Journals, No. 741 (p. 234).

⁵⁰⁶ Cf. C. L. von Haller, Restauration des Staatswissenschaften, VI, 553.

⁵⁰⁷ L’Égalité, p. 339.

⁵⁰⁸ Paul Federn, Zur Psychologie der Revolution: die vaterlose Gesellschaft (Vienna: Anzengruber Verlag, 1919), p. 27 f.

⁵⁰⁹ Cf. Guglielmo Ferrero, La democrazia in Italia; studi e precisioni (Milan: Rassegna Internazionale, 1925).

⁵¹⁰ Cf. Gyula Szekfü, Három nemzedék és ami utána következik (Budapest: Királyi Magyar Egyetemi Nyomda, 1934), p. 497. Paul Reiwald quotes Freud to the effect that the innate inequality of man results in the necessity for leaders: see his Vom Geist der Massen (Zürich: Pan-Verlag, 1946 [Internationale Bibliothek für Psychologie und Soziologie, I]), pp. 210–11. That monarchy is by no means a dead issue in Europe can be seen from the earnest description of the people’s longing for a king in Reinhold Schneider, Der Kronprinz: ein politisches Drama (Munich: Karl Alber, 1948), p. 76.

⁵¹¹ Including Portugal. The official President-Dictator of the Portuguese Republic was until his recent death General Carmona, who called Prime Minister Oliveira Salazar into the government (originally as a Minister of Finance) some time after his military coup d’état.

⁵¹² Cf. Wilfred Trotter, Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War (London: T. Fisher and Unwin, 1920), p. 116.

⁵¹³ Cf. Gilberto Freyre speaking of the Vargas dictatorship in his The Masters and the Slaves, trans. S. Putnam (New York: Knopf, 1946), p. xv: “. . . a dictatorship that is at once near-fascist in its ideology and Brazilian and paternalistic in appearance. The major effort that is being put forth by the apologists of the present dictator is in the direction of popularizing him as the ‘Father’ of the people, the ‘Father’ of the workers or the poor.”

Yet a genuine patriarchal mentality is almost inseparable from clemency. Montesquieu even insisted that clemency is the main characteristic which distinguishes a monarchy from a republic: cf. De l’esprit des lois, Book VI, Chapter xxi.

⁵¹⁴ Prior to the outbreak of anti-monarchical revolutions, popular hatred was always directed primarily against the (foreign-born) queen or empress. Such outbursts of mass jealousy happened with startling regularity; consider the animosities against Queen Henrietta Maria, Marie Antoinette, Maria of Hungary (wife and widow after Louis II), Queen Ena of Spain, the Empresses Zita of Austria and Alix of Russia.

⁵¹⁵ The other expression, otechestvo (fatherland), is now rarely used in Russia. On the interrelationship between feminality, Russianism, Orthodoxy and the monarchy cf. Dmitri Merezhkovski, Tsarstvo Antikhrista (Munich: Dreimasken-Verlag, 1919), especially pp. 233–234.

⁵¹⁶ Cf. Jacob Burckhardt on Cromwell, in “Historische Fragmente aus dem Nachlass,” Werke; Gesamtausgabe, ed. Emil Dürr (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsaustalt, 1929), VII, 401: “His power consists in two things: his own greatness and the lowliness of an enormous majority of his followers.”

⁵¹⁷ Compare with Tacitus, Annales (London: Heinemann, 1931 [“Loeb Classical Library”]), II, 612 (iii. 56). Here we see how Augustus shied away from every open acceptance of the royal dignity. Cæsar himself was a demo-militaristic dictator, an ideological epigone and relative of Marius, the great anti-aristocratic populist.

Treitschke was convinced that the Roman Cæsarate never became a genuine monarchy (Politik, pp. 196–97). Metternich saw in the Roman emperors nothing but “early Bonapartists” (Aus Metternichs nachgelassenen Papieren, III, 236–37).

⁵¹⁸ Yet this change of élites by no means always applies an improvement in their quality. Especially in democracies the political oligarchies are frequently of a very inferior fibre since they owe their position to their very mediocrity, their “personification” of the masses. Cf. the criticism of democratic politicians and their oligarchic society by Emile Faguet in his Le culte de l’incompétence (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1912), especially pp. 24–50.

⁵¹⁹ Cf. Rt. Hon. C. B. Anderley [Baron Norton], Europe Incapable of American Democracy (London: Stanford, 1867), p. 45: “Our best luck would then be if the wreck got into the pilotage of another Cromwell. In vain snatching at Democracy they may wreck our Aristocracy; but through anarchy and temporary dictatorship, it would return to some mutilated form of its former self.”

⁵²⁰ Cf. his La France nouvelle (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1876), pp. 45–46.

⁵²¹ America [New York], January 27, 1945. Compare above, Notes 475, 476. It seems that the United States is the only country where the democratic dogma has been wholeheartedly adopted by most Catholic intellectuals. Compare Thomas Woodlock, The Catholic Pattern (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1942), p. 178 sq.

The observation of Evelyn Waugh, that “many American prelates speak as though they believed that representative majority government were of divine institution,” can, under the circumstances, not be brushed aside as entirely irrelevant. (See his article “The American Epoch in the Catholic Church,” Life, International Edition, VII, No. 8 [Oct. 10, 1949], pp. 55–63). Obviously there must be a connection between this fact and his insinuation that “the lay American Catholic insists more emphatically on his ‘Americanism’ than do Protestants or atheists of, perhaps, longer American ancestry.” The latter remark has also been made by Dean Sperry of Harvard in Religion in America. One sees what havoc has perhaps been wrought with the universal accusation against the Catholic that he is not sufficiently provincial-minded, i.e., “patriotic.”

⁵²² Even Arthur Rosenberg, member of the Independent Socialists and official investigator, rejected it sharply. Cf. his Die Entstehung der deutschen Republik, 1871–1918 (Berlin: Rowohlt, 1930), pp. 66–67. Compare with Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, p. 343 n.

⁵²³ Cf. Miguel de Unamuno, The Life of Don Quijote and Sancho, trans. H. P. Earle (New York: Knopf, 1927), p. 293; Niebla (Buenos Aires: Espasa-Calpe, 1939 [“Colección Austral”]), p. 136.

⁵²⁴ Cf. O. Karrer, Schicksal und Würde des Menschen (Einsiedeln-Köln: Benziger, 1940), pp. 76–77. It is not out of the question that the frightening phenomena of mass psychology are of an “animal” nature, in the crudest sense of the term. Personality is paralyzed, reason is suspended, identity of thought and actions dominates the scene. Our souls are exclusive possessions, but our bodies—biologically all related—are of a collective nature.

⁵²⁵ Cf. Ernest Renan, La réforme intellectuelle et morale (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1884), p. 79.

⁵²⁶ Cf. Renan, op. cit., p. 49.

⁵²⁷ Compare with the revealing report by Joseph Frayman, “Careers of Bevin and Morrison Reveal Background Similarities” in The New York Times (March 10, 1951), p. 5, Col. 2–3. Isocrates remarked that monarchs are better rulers because they will choose as advisers “sagacious rather than popular men.” “Nicocles or the Cyprians” in Isocrates, trans. George Norlin (London: Heinemann, 1928 [“Loeb Classical Library”]), I, 88.

⁵²⁸ Cf. Nicholas Berdyaev, The End of Our Time, trans. D. Attwater (London: Sheed and Ward, 1932), p. 175.

⁵²⁹ This is a failing which had struck Guizot almost a hundred years ago: cf. his Nos mécomptes et espérances (Berlin: Schneider et Comp., 1855), p. 5; compare also with Albert Jay Nock, Memoirs of a Superfluous Man (New York: Harper, 1943), p. 88.

⁵³⁰ Grimmelshausen, Simplizius Simplizissimus, ed. E. Robertag (Berlin & Stuttgart: Spemann, n.d.), Book I, p. 50. Benjamin Constant—certainly no legitimist—saw very clearly the advantages of a royal upbringing. Cf. his “De l’esprit de conquête et de l’usurpation,” included in Adolphe (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1924 [?]), p. 230.

On the influence of thinkers and philosophers on monarchs cf. J. S. Mill, “On Representative Government,” in Utilitarianism, Liberty and Representative Government (London: J. M. Dent, 1926), p. 184.

⁵³¹ Rambaud, in his Histoire de la civilisation française (5th ed.; Paris: Armand Colin, 1893), I, 167, calls the coronation of the monarch “the eighth sacrament.”

⁵³² Cf. his Journals, entry of Oct. 13, 1835 (No. 29, p. 21).

Calvin himself was no democrat, but through the dialectics of his theology he has laid the foundations of democracy more effectively than Luther who, as a Reformer, was less radical than his colleague in Geneva.

⁵³³ Cf. also the letter of Leopold II to his sister, in A. Wolf, Maria Christina von Österreich (Vienna: Verlag G. Gerold, 1867), p. 84 f. Yet it would be a mistake to argue that the spirit of “enlightenment” found in these letters was something new. See also the testament of Maximilian II, Elector of Bavaria in Kurt Pfister, Kurfürst Maximilian II von Bayern und sein Jahrhundert (Munich: Franz Ehrenwirth, 1949), p. 399 f.

⁵³⁴ In Catholic countries the beggars, or old men from a paupers’ asylum, were afterwards invited to a dinner by the ruler, where the queen or empress and her ladies-in-waiting served the meal. Equally impressive was the highly egalitarian burial ceremony of the Habsburg emperors, for a description of which see Comte de Saint-Aulaire, François-Joseph (Paris: Arthème Fayard, 1945). PP. 526–27.

⁵³⁵ Cf. Pitirim Sorokin, Contemporary Sociological Theories (New York: Harper, 1938), pp. 297–81; also F. Felhorska and S. M. Studnicki, Plany i marzenia mlodziezy o przyszlości (Warsaw & Lwów: Naukowe Towarzystwo Pedagogiczne, 1933). Compare also Note 408, and see p. 367.

⁵³⁶ Cf. F. A. Woods, The Influence of Monarchs (New York: Macmillan, 1913), p. 257: “I have made the assertion that there is no doubt but that modern royalty as a whole has been decidedly superior to the average European in capacity; and we may say without danger of refutation that the royal breed, considered as a unit, is superior to any one family, be it that of noble or commoner. I have no wish to modify this extreme statement.” Cf. also F. A. Woods, Mental and Moral Heredity in Royalty (New York: Henry Holt, 1906); A. E. Wiggam, The Fruit of the Family Tree (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1924), p. 209 f.; Otto Ammon, Die Gesellschaftsordnung und ihre natürlichen Grundlagen (Jena, 1896), p. 36. Compare with Orestes Brownson in Brownson’s Works, ed. by his son, IX, 412, and the works of Lecomte du Nouys and his school.

⁵³⁷ This internationalism finds full expression in a genuinely monarchic bureaucracy. Alexander I of Russia, for instance, surrounded himself systematically with foreigners: Wintzingerode, Stackelberg, Vom Stein, Kotzebue, Capo d’Istria (a Greek), La Harpe, Pozzo di Borgo, Mme. de Krüdener, Mme. de Staël, Nesselrode, the Duc de Richelieu, Prince Czartoryski. One can well imagine the furious outcries of our modern “patriotic” mobs should any President follow in his footsteps. Even during Bismarck’s younger years the best recommendation for an ambitious young “Prussian” diplomat was considered to be the status of a son of a foreign minister or ambassador accredited in Berlin. In fact, Bismarck himself, while in St. Petersburg, was asked by Alexander II to enter his service (cf. Otto Fürst Bismarck, Gedanken und Erinnerungen, I, 4–5, 309).

⁵³⁸ Cf. Guglielmo Ferrero, Peace and War, trans. B. Pritchard (London: Macmillan, 1933), pp. 59–60; also Richard von Kühlmann, Thoughts on Germany, trans. E. Sutton (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1932), pp. 89–90, and Denis de Rougemont, L’amour et l’occident (Paris: Plon, 1939), pp. 268–69 (a graphic prophecy of the nature of “total war”).

Obviously the “generosity” of Francis Joseph was morally permissible only in a non-democratic, basically liberal world with a fair amount of self-government, where a transfer of sovereignty does not imply a complete change in our way of life or methodical extermination of all dissenters.

⁵³⁹ Cf. Hoffman Nickerson, The Armed Horde (New York: Putnam, 1940 and 1942); G. Ferrero, op. cit.; Ferdinand Foch, Principles of War, trans. H. Belloc (London: Chapman, Hall, 1918), p. 30; H. Nickerson, Arms and Policy, 1939–1944 (New York: Putnam, 1944); A. Toynbee, A Study of History (London: Oxford U. Press, 1939), IV, 160–300; Maj. Gen. J. F. C. Fuller, War and Western Civilization (London: Duckworth, 1932), pp. 18–29, Armament and History (New York: Scribner, 1945), pp. 105–7; B. Liddell Hart, The Revolution in Warfare (London: Faber and Faber, 1946), p. 41; Carl J. Friedrich, “The Role and the Position of the Common Man,” American Journal of Sociology, XLIX, No. 5 (March, 1944), p. 428. The Catholic Church always disliked the democratic notion of conscription, and only recently selective service has been called by a leading theologian a maxima iniuria civibus—a “very great injustice to the citizens” (cf. Msgr. Alfredo Ottaviani, Institutiones iuris publici et ecclesiastici, Rome, 1943, I, 151, Note 33).

How well disciplined soldiers were, and how humanely they behaved even as late as the mid-nineteenth century, may be seen in the little book Zwei Monate preussisch (Brünn: Redaktion der “Neuigkeiten,” 1866). The Abbé Raynal, on the other hand, wrote with great insight in spite of his republican convictions as long as 170 years ago: “Peace and security are necessary to the monarchies; the republics need restlessness and menace of an enemy.”—Cf. his Histoire philosophique et politique des établissements et du commerce dans les Indes (Geneva: J. L. Pellet, 1780), IX, 381. And it is worth noting that no less than fifteen Presidents of the United States out of thirty-two had had officer’s rank, or had seen active service in either the Army or the Navy of the United States. Nor is it the picture of the President of the Swiss Confederation which adorns public buildings in the Helvetic Republic, but always the General of the last mobilization period.

⁵⁴⁰ See Mémoires du Général de Caulaincourt, ed. Jean Hanoteau (Paris: Plon, 1933), II, 100–8.

⁵⁴¹ Comte de Hübner, Neuf ans, II, 428, Neun Jahre, II, 263.

⁵⁴² Cf. R. F. Eylert, Charakter-Züge und historische Fragmente aus dem Leben des Königs von Preussen Friedrich Wilhelm III (Magdeburg: Verlag der Hinrichshofenschen Buchhandlung, 1846), Part III, Section I, p. 210.

⁵⁴³ Cf. Dormer Creston, In Search of Two Characters: Some Intimate Aspects of Napoleon and His Son (New York: Scribner’s, 1946).

⁵⁴⁴ Cf. Peter Viereck, Metapolitics (New York: Knopf, 1941), pp. 40, 243; R. H. Gabriel, The Course of American Democratic Thought (New York: Ronald Press, 1940), p. 416; William A. Orton, The Liberal Tradition, pp. 172–73; H. Powys Greenwood, in Contemporary Review, No. 830 (February, 1935). p. 154.

⁵⁴⁵ A Moorish prince—descendant of Mohammed—turned Christian in Castilian captivity, married a Spanish princess, and thus became one of the ancestors of practically all European royalty and a large share of the European nobility.

⁵⁴⁶ Cf. Otto Forst de Battaglia, Das Geheimnis des Blutes (Vienna: Reinhold-Verlag, 1932); Ahnen-Tafel seiner kaiserlichen und königlichen Hoheit des durchlauchtigsten Erzherzogs Franz Ferdinand von Österreich Este (Vienna and Leipzig: Halm und Goldmann, 1910), pp. 13–16; Wissenschaftliche Genealogie (Bern: A. Francke, 1948 [Sammlung Dalp, Vol. 48]).

⁵⁴⁷ At the same time, from the elastic monarchical basis every evolutionary development is possible. Treitschke justly calls monarchy the Proteus among the forms of government. See his Politik, II, 12, 256–57.

⁵⁴⁸ Encyclical Diuturnum illud, in Acta Sanctae Sedis, XIV, 6–7. Cf. also the characterization of political power in Leo XIII’s encyclical Immortale Dei, in Denzinger, Enchiridion symbolorum (1900), p. 406. Compare also with Dionysius Areopagiticus Πρ Θιν Ονοματν ii, 8 (Migne, Patrologia Graeca III, Tomus Prior, Col. 671).

⁵⁴⁹ Cf. St. Robert Bellarmine, De officio principis, cap. vii; and Jacques Bossuet, Oeuvres de Bossuet (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1866), I, 299, 325 (“Politique tirée des propres paroles de l’Écriture Sainte,” Livre II, 3 and Livre III, 3).

⁵⁵⁰ Cf. Werner Sombart, Der Bourgeois (Munich: Duncker und Humblot, 1923), p. 262. Cf. also Franz von Baader, “Vierzig Sätze aus einer religiösen Erotik,” Gesammelte Schriften, ed. F. Hoffmann (Leipzig: Bethmann, 1853), iv, 186: “Only love makes one truly liberal, for only love does not separate right (rule) from duty (service), possession from being possessed, or allowing oneself to be possessed.” (Compare this with the thesis of Koestler and de Maistre, Note 494.) A similar idea has been developed by Sigmund von Radecki in his essay Über die Freiheit (Olten: Summa Verlag, 1950), p. 17.

Republican systems often develop a cold statism which in turn provokes the cry for the pseudo-patriarchal leader. Such was also the view of Simone Weil in her L’Enracinement (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), p. 120.

⁵⁵¹ Karl Mannheim had meditated about the probable results of the democratic masses facing these moral issues, once reserved to small “sophisticated” ’lites, and has painted a very pessimistic picture. Cf. his “Rational and Irrational Elements in Contemporary Society,” The L. T. Hobhouse Lectures (London: Oxford University Press, 1934), Lecture IV, p. 33.

⁵⁵² Alexander I’s peregrinations after 1825 as the staryets Fyodor Kuzmitch—long considered to be a fable—can now be accepted as historical fact: cf. Leo Kobylinski-Ellis, “Zar und Starez,” Hochland, XXXVII, No. 2 (November, 1939); Nikolai Sementowski-Kurilo, Alexander I; Rausch und Einkehr einer Seele (Zürich: Scientia A. G., 1939), pp. 376–401; Leon Lubimoff, “Le mystère d’un Tsar,” Candide, Nos. 792–800 (May 17–July 12, 1939). Even Metternich refused for a long time to believe in the demise of the Emperor in Taganrog (op. cit., IV, 252, 260). See also Reinhold Schneider’s historical novel Taganrog.

⁵⁵³ The fact that two Bourbons (Louis XVI of France as well as Charles III of Spain) are the godfathers of the nascent American republic is consciously known with full awareness by very few Americans. The most charitable association with the name of this dynasty is, in some minds, a purely alcoholic one; and Marie Antoinette, to whose heart the cause of American independence was very dear, enjoys a reputation for absolute stupidity and heartlessness. Cf. Mme. de Campan, Mémoires sur la vie privée de Marie Antoinette (Paris: Baudouis Frères, 1823), I, 234; also Philippe Sagnac, La formation de la société française moderne (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1946), II, 289 sq. Marie Antoinette’s advice to the poor to eat “cake” (brioches) if they had no bread is entirely unhistorical. Rousseau told the same story about an unidentifiable lady in 1740: see Rousseau’s “Confessions,” Oeuvres complètes (Lyon: Grabit, 1796), XX, 201 (Confessions, II, Book vi). A man of worldwide experience like Gouverneur Morris jubilantly greeted the restoration of the Bourbons, who had so enthusiastically supported American liberty. His dithyrambic speech, made in 1815, can be found in Elizabeth B. White, American Opinion of France (New York: Knopf, 1932), p. 21. See p. 368.

⁵⁵⁴ Cf. Lorenz von Stein, Die Geschichte der sozialen Bewegung in Frankreich, II, 51. To St. Ambrose the good monarch was a lover of liberty, frankness and uprightness: cf. Migne, Patr.Lat., XVI, Col. 1102. See also Georges Bernanos, La France contre les robots, pp. 58–59. If there “must” be despotism, it seems that the autocracy of a single person is preferable to a suppression by multitudes. This notion was also entertained by Mr. Justice Miller of the Supreme Court of the United States, who declared as early as 1874, in his decision on the case of the Loan Association v. Topeka: “It must be conceded that there are such rights in any free government beyond the control of the state. A government which recognized no such rights, which held the lives, the liberty and the property of its citizens subject at all times to the absolute disposition and unlimited control of even the most democratic depository of power, is after all but a despotism. It is true it is a despotism of the many, of the majority, if you choose to call it, but it is none the less a despotism. It may well be doubted, if a man is to hold all that he is accustomed to call his own, all in which he has placed his happiness and the security of which is essential to that happiness, under the unlimited dominion of others, whether it is not wiser that this power should be exercised by one man than by many.”—See Cases Argued and Adjudged by the Supreme Court of the United States of America, October Terms 1873 and 1874 (Washington, D.C.: W. H. and O. H. Morrison, 1875), XX, 662.

⁵⁵⁵ Cf. Francis Lieber, On Civil Liberty, p. 156; also de Tocqueville, De la démocratic en Amérique, Oeuvres, III, 516 f. Long before Claudianus had declared that “he is wrong who believes there is slavery under a good prince; never does liberty exist more serenely than under a conscientious king.”—Claudianus, trans. Maurice Platnauer (London: Heinemann, 1922 [“Loeb Classical Library”]), iii, 113–15; pp. 50–51. This view tallies with that of Aristotle who saw in the ideal monarch a man pre-eminent in virtue and in monarchy the best of all forms of government. Cf. his Nicomachian Ethics, VIII, 10 and his Politics, Gamma, 14–18.

⁵⁵⁶ Cf. Nicholas Berdyaev, The End of Our Time, p. 178: “Democracy is fanatical only at times of revolution. In its normal, peaceful state it is innocent of all excesses—but finds a thousand quiet ways of reducing human personalities to uniformity and stifling free-spiritedness. There was probably more real liberty of spirit in the days when the fires of the Spanish Inquisition were blazing than in the middle class of today.” A more moderate disillusionment in the claims of democracy can be found in Johannes Messner, Das Naturrecht (Innsbruck: Tyrolia, 1950), p. 521. For a Catholic view on an ideal form of government see Julius Costa-Rossetti, S.J., Philosophia Moralis seu Institutiones Ethicae et Iuris Naturae (Innsbruck: Rauch, 1886), p. 702. Costa-Rossetti favoured the monarchy with a corporative (ständische) representation.

⁵⁵⁷ Cf. Arthur G. Sedgwick, The Democratic Mistake (New York: Scribner, 1912 [Godkin Lectures at Harvard University, 1909]), p. 94.

⁵⁵⁸ Proudhon, “Solution du problème sociale,” Oeuvres complètes, VI, 75.

⁵⁵⁹ Cf. The Kraiser vs, Bismarck, trans. B. Miall (New York: Harper, 1921), pp. 153–55; Bismarck, Gesammelte Werke, ed. Petersdorff (Berlin: Deutsche Verlagsgesellschaft, 1923–35), XV, 485. Lasalle himself confessed that he would dispense immediately with his republicanism the moment monarchy would adopt a programme of social justice: cf. Ludwig Halmann, Das sociale Königthum: ein Ausspruch Lasalles und die sociale Praxis Kaiser Wilhelms; eine Schrift zu den Wahlen (Berlin, 1884), p. 7. Compare with Lorenz von Stein, Geschichte der sozialen Bewegung in Frankreich, III, 41: “Every monarchy will henceforth either become an empty shadow or a despotism, or collapse into a republic if it does not have the courage to become a monarchy of social reform.”

⁵⁶⁰ Proudhon, loc. cit.

⁵⁶¹ See C. L. von Haller, Restauration der Staatswissenschaften, p. 381 n.

⁵⁶² Cf. also William Graham Sumner, The Challenge of Facts, pp. 264, 271.

⁵⁶³ Thus, for instance, the deliveries of Marie Antoinette were public affairs, with both male and female spectators standing on chairs to get a better view. Pregnancies of queens, empresses and crown princesses are, even today, publicly announced, since the nation is a family in the wider sense of the term. Cf. Nesta H. Webster, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette (New York: Putnam, 1937), I, 167–68; Gertrud Aretz, Die elegante Frau: eine Sittengeschichte vom Rokoko bis zur Gegenwart (Leipzig und Zürich: Grethlein und Co., 1929), pp. 90–91. The Bulgarian Prime Minister had also every constitutional right to be present at a royal delivery: cf. Hans Roger Madol, Ferdinand von Bulgarien: der Traum von Byzanz (Berlin: Universitas-Deutsche Verlags A.G., 1931), P. 75.

⁵⁶⁴ In democracies this is by no means the case, and Treitschke is certainly right when he maintains that the masses cannot conceive of plans reaching into the remote future. “The esprit d’escalier is essentially democratic,” he wrote with conviction (Politik, II, 259).

⁵⁶⁵ Burckhardt, Briefe an Preen, p. 117 (letter, dated Nov. 21, 1878). Edmund Burke was more apprehensive of the internal effects of democracy, especially of the possibility that “property might be sacked and ravaged”—a prospect which materialized in the twentieth century only. Cf. R. J. S. Hoffman and P. Levack, Burke’s Politics (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1949), p. xxi. Yet abroad the suspicion of parliamentary England is nothing new. Cf. Bossuet talking about “la perfide Angleterre” in “Sermon sur la circoncision,” Oeuvres, II, 240; and Mallet du Pan in the Mercure Britannique, Jan. 28, 1792, as quoted by Sir Bernard Mallet in Mallet du Pan and the French Revolution (London: Longmans, Green, 1902), p. 129 note. At the end of the nineteenth century J. Holland Rose said warning words to his English countrymen in The Rise of Democracy (London: Blackie, 1897), pp. 247–48.

⁵⁶⁶ Cf. Lorenz von Stein, Geschichte der sozialen Bewegung, III, 215: “This administration, at whose apex the king stands, is a bureaucracy.” There is nothing basically wrong about a first-rate bureaucracy which is (a) efficient and competent, (b) small, (c) flexible, (d) generous and liberal. Elected bureaucracies are notoriously corrupt, inefficient and accommodating to majority wishes. Cf. Max Weber, “Politik als Beruf,” Gesammelte politische Schriften (Munich: Duncker und Humblot, 1921), pp. 396 sq. Cf. also Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (New York: Harper, 1942), pp. 256, 293–94, 341, etc. Wilfred Trotter, Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War (London: Macmillan, 1919), p. 116, points out that absence of any real qualifications is almost a requirement of a popular leader.

We only hope that it is not necessary to deal with the old nihilistic argument of the democratists maintaining that expert knowledge is “worthless” since there are so many expert opinions on one and the same subject. One can only hope that the defenders of the democratic myth will find out some day that a medical expert sitting in council with three others is a very different matter from a naïve, if well-meaning layman facing three doctors furiously contradicting each other. Even if the former has to listen to three divergent views he still might be able to co-ordinate these opinions or, at least, to extract some positive knowledge from them; yet the layman faced by the bitterly quarrelling physicians is lost since he has no knowledge to evaluate their views. All he can do is either to “fall” for one of the opinions, to make a fatal cocktail out of them or thoroughly confused by the lack of unanimity give up the reasoning process and to rely on his own “hunches” or “intuitions”—à la Hitler and Roosevelt.

⁵⁶⁷ S. Freud, “Meine Berührung mit Josef Popper-Lynkeus,” Gesammelte Schriften (Vienna: Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag, 1934), XII, 417.

On the inferior intellectual qualities of the big majorities cf. Dr. Arthur de Greeff, as cited by Emmanuel Mounier, Traité du caractère (Paris: Édition du Seuil, 1947), p. 640.

⁵⁶⁸ On the human quality fostered by the democratic process cf. Prévost-Paradol, La France nouvelle, p. 27. Sincere supporters of democracy like Lord Bryce and Ferrero shared the same pessimism.

Already Isocrates knew very well that a monarch might be poorly equipped by nature in an intellectual way, but that such shortcomings would easily be compensated by experience of long duration. Cf. Isocrates, “Nicocles or the Cyprians,” in Isocrates, I, 86. Nor is the realization of the liberal essence of monarchy something new. We find it eloquently expressed in Seneca’s “De beneficiis”; see Seneca’s Moral Essays (London: Heinemann, 1935 [“Loeb Classical Library”]), III, Part 2, xx, 2.

⁵⁶⁹ Cf. Georg Simmel, Soziologie, p. 516.

⁵⁷⁰ Cf. Pascal, Pensées, ed. Giraud (Paris: Crès, 1924), No. 320 (p. 180).

⁵⁷¹ Cf. Alfred Aubert, Un grand libéral—Prévost-Paradol (Paris: Fasquelle, 1931 [“Bibliothèque Charpentie”]), pp. 165–67.

⁵⁷² Cf. her letter to the ambassador in Warsaw, cited by Jan Kucharzewski in his “Remarks on the Attitude of the Western Powers to Poland’s Struggle for Independence,” Bulletin of the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences in America, IV (1945–46), pp. 36–37.

⁵⁷³ Cf. Pietro Silva, Io difendo la monarchia (3rd ed.; Rome: De Fonseca, 1946), p. xii. In face of the totalitarian dangers one must remember the words of Benjamin Constant: “The friends of the monarchy must realize that without constitutional liberties there cannot be a stable monarchy; and the friends of freedom must recognize that without a monarchical constitution there can be no assurance of continued liberties.”—Constant, Cours de politique constitutionnelle, ed. Edouard Laboulaye (Paris: Guillemin et Cie., 1861), I, xvi. The fact that the disappearance of the monarchs led straight to totalitarian dictatorship is now widely accepted in Central Europe. Cf. Ernst Jünger, Heliopolis, p. 90, and Erich Meissner, Confusion of Faces (London: Faber & Faber, 1946), pp. 109–110.

⁵⁷⁴ For the original Fascist programme of 1921 cf. F. Funck-Brentano, Op. cit., p. 135. Its five cardinal points were: (1) a republic, (2) separation of Church and State, (3) a national army, (4) progressive taxation for inherited wealth, and (5) development of co-operatives.

The original mentality of Fascism can well be gleaned from Achille Pasini’s Impero unico (Milan: Berlutti, 1924). Pasini dedicated this book to Mussolini, and explained that Fascism had so far refrained from abolishing the three liberal institutions, the Crown, the Senate and the Chamber—but that these institutions “will have to go.” By 1944 this programme had been carried out to the letter.

⁵⁷⁵ Compare also with Ray Allen Billington, The Protestant Crusade, 1800–1860 (New York: Macmillan, 1938), p. 17, and John C. Miller, Origins of the American Revolution, pp. 190–91, 373–74.

⁵⁷⁶ Nazi and Nazarene (London: Macmillan, 1940), p. 7. Such frank avowals are rare in a time when the tendency prevails, even among Catholics, to make the antagonism between their Church and democracy disappear by a clever legerdemain.

⁵⁷⁷ Compare with G. Ferrero, The Reconstruction of Europe, trans. T. Jaeckel (New York: Putnam, 1941), pp. 347–48.

A NOTE ON THE PROBLEM OF AUTHORITY

⁵⁷⁸ Hunter Guthrie, S.J., Introduction au problème de l’histoire de la Philosophie (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1927), p. 267.

⁵⁷⁹ The suspicion that this “insufficiency” of Thomism—New and Old—might possibly lie in our own defects and the paganization of our generation has been beautifully voiced by Theodor Haecker in his Schöpfer und Schöpfung (Leipzig: Hegner, 1934). PP. 17–19.

⁵⁸⁰ On the results of the one-sided emphasis on scholastic and late-scholastic philosophers in American Catholic colleges cf. William B. Hill, “Why So Few Writers?” in America, March 13, 1943, pp. 633–34. Mr. Hill says about the graduate of these institutions: “His tendency henceforward is to become an angry champion of faith and morals,” and doubts whether his Christianity is “really organic.”

⁵⁸¹ Cf. Theodore Maynard, Orestes Brownson, p. 168: “It is, however, notorious that life lays a trap for logicians. The more logically sound they are, the less psychologically sound they may be.” Compare with William F. Macomber, “Existentialism,” From the Housetops, I, No. 1, p. 38; and with F. C. Copleston, “Existentialism and Religion,” Dublin Review, Spring 1947, pp. 50–63.

⁵⁸² Dostoyevski, The Possessed, Part II, Chap, i, No. 3.

⁵⁸³ Cf. Harold R. McKinnon, “The Higher Law: Reaction has Permeated Our Legal Thinking,” The American Bar Association Journal, XXXIII, No. 2 (February, 1947), p. 106 f.

⁵⁸⁴ On some of the psychological aspects of our problem cf. “Studien über Autorität und Familie,” Schriften des Instituts für Sozialforschung, V, ed. Max Horkheimer (Paris: Felix Alcan, 1936).

⁵⁸⁵ Cf. Joseph de la Serviére, S.J., “Les idées politiques du Cardinal Bellarmine,” Revue des questions historiques, LXXXII (1907) and LXXXIII (1908). Cf. also James Brodrick, S.J., The Life and Work of Blessed Robert Francis Cardinal Bellarmine, S.J. (London: Burns, Oates and Washbourne, 1928), I, 230.

⁵⁸⁶ Cf. St. Robert Bellarmine, De ecclesiastica monarchia: “Because of the corruption of human nature we judge a monarchy blended from aristocracy and democracy better for men at this time.” Cf. also De summo pontifice, i, 3.

⁵⁸⁷ De summo pont., I, 2: “The first proposition is approved—that simple monarchy is better than simple aristocracy and democracy. If any simple form of government must of necessity be chosen, without doubt monarchy should be chosen.”

⁵⁸⁸ Cf. Dr. Friedrich J. Stahl, Der Protestantismus als politisches Prinzip (Berlin: Schultze, 1853), p. 29. Recently the attitude of certain Neo-Thomists has been less rigidly anti-Roussellian in matters of political theory than hitherto.

⁵⁸⁹ Cf. Jefferson, Works, Monticello ed. (Washington, 1904), XV, 426 (letter to James Madison, dated Monticello, Aug. 30, 1823); XVI, 118–19 (letter to Henry Lee, dated Monticello, May 8, 1825); XVI, 123 (letter to Dr. James Mease, dated Monticello, Sept. 26, 1825).

⁵⁹⁰ On a certain contradiction in the works of St. Thomas on that subject cf. Jacques Zeiller, “L’origine du pouvoir politique d’après St. Thomas d’Aquin,” Revue Thomiste, XVII (1910), pp. 470–77.

⁵⁹¹ See Chapter VI, pp. 222–226. For a “Neo-Protestant” view on this matter cf. Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, trans. E. C. Hoskins (London: Oxford University Press, 1933).

⁵⁹² Cf. Calvin’s Institutiones iv. 6. 9, iv. 20. 27; Comment, in libr. I Samuelis, cap. ii, 27–30; Praelationes in Jeremiam, cap. xxxviii.

⁵⁹³ Calvin was both an “oligarcho-democrat” and a fatalist (for theological reasons) who refused to distinguish between authority and power . . . a distinction logically not possible in a universe restlessly ordered, directed and permeated by God’s Will. Cf. Ernst Troeltsch, “Die Soziallehren der christlichen Kirchen,” Gesammelte Schriften (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1919), I, 609–11. Still, it must be admitted that the strongly anti-Calvinist stand of the autocratic Louis XIV resulted in a reaction among French Calvinists, who ended up in accepting the theory of popular sovereignty: cf. Frank Puaux, Les défenseurs de la souveraineté du peuple sous le règne de Louis XIV (Paris: Fischbacher, 1917). This volume also contains the text of important chapters of Pierre Jurieu’s Lettres pastorales adressées aux fidèles de France qui gémissent sous la captivité de Babylon, pp. 95–124. Jurieu, unlike Calvin, did not preach unconditional obedience to the ruler (ibid., p. 103). Was Jurieu influenced by the late scholastics? Such an influence is not out of the question, but would be difficult to prove.

⁵⁹⁴ Cf. D. Emil Brunner, Das Gebot und die Ordnungen (New York: Amerikanische Hilfskommission, n.d.), p. 648.

⁵⁹⁵ Cf. his “Philosophie der Geschichte,” Sämtliche Werke (Stuttgart: Fromm, 1928), II, 532.

⁵⁹⁶ Compare this thesis with Jefferson’s insistence, in his first inaugural address, on the “sacred principle” of majoritism: see his Works, ed. Washington (New York, 1859), VIII, 2. During the Spanish civil war it was curious to watch the furious debate between Franco’s adversaries and friends in the United States about the results of the elections of February, 1936. Actually neither the right nor the left in Spain was in the least interested in who polled more votes for a cause which was right independent of its “popularity.”

⁵⁹⁷ Cf. Willmoore Kendall, “John Locke and the Doctrine of Majority Rule,” Illinois Studies in the Social Sciences, XXVI (1941), No. 2, Chap. X, p. 132 f. This author, quite rightly, points out that the “latent premise” in Locke’s majoritism is the assumption that “right is what the majority wills; what the majority wills is right.” (Compare with the well-known phrase: “Forty million Frenchmen can’t be wrong!”)

⁵⁹⁸ See the interesting political novel of Herman Borchardt, The Conspiracy of the Carpenters (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1943), especially pp. 211–12. This novel is a brilliant attempt to describe fictionally the inner connection between democracy, tyranny, pseudo-liberalism and anti-Christianity.

⁵⁹⁹ Cf. Royer-Collard in Robert de Nesmes-Desmarets, Les doctrines politiques de Royer-Collard (Paris: Giard et Brières, 1908), p. 55: “If a power, whatever it be, act to the best interests of all, according to the rules of justice and reason, there is the legitimate power which everyone should obey.” Cf. also his remark quoted in M. de Barante, La vie politique de M. Royer-Collard: ses discours et ses écrits (Paris: Didier, 1861), II, 459: “. . . another sovereignty, the only one which merits the name, a sovereignty immutable and immortal like its author—I mean the sovereignty of reason, only true legislator of humanity.” Royer-Collard, a liberal Catholic royalist, thus saw the ruler taking his authority from reason emanating from God (“its author”). On Royer-Collard see also A. de Tocqueville’s letter to Freslon (July 8, 1858) in Memoirs, Letters and Remains, II, 411.

⁶⁰⁰ Even in our daily language we acknowledge a connection between command, reason and truth; we speak of “quoting authorities on a subject.” Cf. also Nicholas Berdyaev, The End of Our Time, p. III: “Power is only a duty and not a right; it is a just power not when it is claimed in its own name or in that of the claimant’s, but only when it is rightly claimed in the name of God alone, in the name of Truth.” Cf. also B. Mirkine-Guétzévitch, “Cor-poratisme et démocratie,” Revue de métaphysique et de morale, XLIII, No. 1 (January, 1936), p. 149, where this author quite rightly attacks Royer-Collard’s theory of the sovereignty of reason as undemocratic.

⁶⁰¹ A moving appeal to the relationship of law and love has been made in the famous defence speech of Sir Roger Casement; cf. Geoffrey de C. Parmiter, Roger Casement (London: Barker, 1936), p. 303.

⁶⁰² Cf. A. Luchaire, Manuel des institutions françaises (Paris: Hachette, 1892), p. 251: “But it must be remarked that here, as in all the assemblies of the Middle Ages, the principle of majority vote—which today seems to us the only rational one—is only rarely applied. In that period the votes were not counted, but weighed.”

⁶⁰³ Acta Sanctae Sedis, XIV (1896), p. 4. Cf. “J. H.,” “Pope Leo on the Origin of Civil Power,” The Irish Ecclesiastic Review, December, 1881, p. 704: “But we think the Encyclical deals a serious blow at the probability of the opinion [popular sovereignty], and indeed, in the face of the Pope’s language, we do not see how it can henceforward be maintained amongst theologians with any show of probability.”

⁶⁰⁴ Acta Apostolicae Sedis, II, Vol. II, No. 16 (August 31, 1910), p. 616. (The clause in italics is a quotation from a speech of Marc Sangnier in Rouen in 1907.) This papal observation reminds one of De Bonald’s view, expressed in Les vrais principes opposées aux erreurs du XIXe siéde, ou notions positives sur les points fondamentaux de la Philosophie, de la politique et de la religion (Avignon & Montpellier: Seguin, 1833), pp. 178–79; cf. also the somewhat contrary view on p. 180.

⁶⁰⁵ Cf. Ludovicus Billot, S.J., Tractatus de ecclesia Christi, sive continuano theologiae de verbo incarnato (4th ed.; Rome, 1921), IV, 483–504. The difficulty of this problem is characterized by the fact that the condemnation of the ultra-royalist Action française in 1926 met with the disapproval of Billot, who resigned as a cardinal. The question of the transfer of authority, and the debate over the inherent qualities of the forms of government, were neatly divided in his mind.—The footnote on p. 106 of Maritain’s Scholasticism and Politics, ed. M. Adler (New York: Macmillan, 1940), which deals with the stand of Pius X and Leo XIII in this matter, is not particularly helpful.

⁶⁰⁶ Cf. Rev. Michael Cronin, The Science of Ethics (Dublin: Gill, 1909), I, 501–3. This author insists that the Bellarmine-Suarez thesis is a contractual theory after all. (On monarchy, see pp. 589–91.)

⁶⁰⁷ Cf. Eugen Duehren [pseud. of Dr. Iwan Bloch], Le Marquis de Sade et son temps (Paris: A. Michalon, 1901), pp. 392–93. The “divine marquis,” the most radical democrat of all time, insisted that man, plants and animals have no hierarchic differences, and thus should be “equals.” As staunch republicans demanded the franchise for women, children and criminals, Proudhon ironically suggested (in a letter dated April 26, 1852) that horses and donkeys should also be permitted to vote. The concept “adult” or “mature person” is entirely arbitrary.

St. Thomas who is frequently cited as a defender of popular sovereignty has nevertheless insisted that political disorder “arises from the fact that somebody seizes power without the praeeminentia intellectus.” A leading Italian scholar has logically used this as an argument against a very prevalent thesis. Cf. A. Passerin d’Entrèves, Aquinas: Selected Political Writings, transl. J. G. Dawson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1948), pp. xvi–xvii.

⁶⁰⁸ Mein Kampf (Munich: Eher, 1939), p. 579. Ernst Jünger, who during World War II became the most outstanding literary opponent of Nazism, wrote in complete contradition: “The attack against authority begins by acclamation.”—Blätter und Steine (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1934), “Aphorismen,” No. 9.

⁶⁰⁹ Cf. G. Ferrero, Pouvoir (New York: Brentano, 1942), p. 185: “In reality democracy imposes itself today on the adolescent Swiss or American in the same way as monarchy formerly imposed itself on the younger generation—as a power pre-established by foregoing generations which is placed too high above them for them not to bow to it, whether they like it or not.”

This is roughly the situation characterized by Luigi Taparelli, S.J., as the fatti anteriorti, fatti non liberi. Cf. Opera del P. Luigi Taparelli. Saggio teoretico di dritto naturale appoggiato sul fatto (2a ediz. Livornese; Livorno: Vincenzo Mansi, 1851), Paragraph 551, Chapter 9, Part 2. If we understand Taparelli correctly—his style is not conducive to clarity—the essence of his theory of the origin of authority is not very far from ours. (Paragraphs 663–667, pp. 232–34.) His breach with Suarez is by no means complete (vide paragraphs 484–485) yet he certainly ranks among the most original Jesuitic political theorists of all ages.

⁶¹⁰ The Jews were about 0.9 per cent of the population of Germany before Hitler; the Negroes form about 55 per cent of the population of Mississippi.

⁶¹¹ We have, quite naturally, not dealt with the problem of a magistrate working for the common good but without power. We are not in paradise.

⁶¹² So most Catholic theologians. Yet a “futile gesture”—a just war obviously doomed to failure; a hopeless rebellion—could be made in order to demonstrate the “whereabouts” of justice, etc. Such an action might still constitute a moral victory benefiting the common good in a wider and deeper sense . . . and also in a more timeless way. Victrix causa diis placuit, sed vieta Catoni. The dii are here the blind forces of history, and Cato, moral man.

⁶¹³ Such a decision had to be faced by Count Klaus von Stauffenberg, Hitler’s would-be-assassin—a devout Catholic who wore a scapular of Our Lady. He had to grapple, moreover, with the problem of placing a time-bomb which might harm and kill less guilty officers—since the earlier loss of his right arm made it impossible for him to use a more direct weapon.

NOTES TO CHAPTER FIVE

⁶¹⁴ Cf. E. I. Watkin, Preface to No. 2 of Essays in Order (London: Sheed and Ward, 1931), pp. xli–xlii.

One of the first books on this subject is La physique de l’histoire ou Considération sur les principes élémentaires du tempérament et du caractère des peuples (The Hague, 1765). Yet it seems that the unknown author of this work considers the climatic factor to be of greater importance than the religious one. We have written on the influence of the purely geographic factor on the psychology of nations elsewhere. Cf. E. v. Kuehnelt-Leddihn, “Plainsman and Mountaineer,” Thought, XXI, 18 (March, 1946). Of course, often it becomes difficult to make a specific factor responsible for a specific national trait. Yet living for some time in a Catholic, Austrian, German-speaking community on the Swiss border in the close proximity of Protestant Latins we had ample opportunity to learn to differentiate between ethnic and religious characteristics; most so-called “Latin” traits were found among the Austrian Catholic Teutons, most “Germanic” characteristics among the Protestant Rhæto-Romans. Cf. E. v. Kuehnelt-Leddihn, “Where Three Countries Meet,” The American Geographic Review, XXXV, 2 (April, 1945), pp. 250–51.

A volume important for its freshness of approach and its intellectual courage—though from a scholarly point of view not quite satisfactory—is Frédéric Hoffet’s L’impérialisme Protestant; considérations sur le destin inégal des peuples protestants et catholiques dans le monde actuel (Paris: Flammarion, 1948). Here we have, for the first time, a concerted effort to compare methodically the characters of the Catholic and Protestant nations and regional groups. Unfortunately this work is full of factual errors, and it must be regretted that it is also marred by constant evidence of anti-Catholic bias. The circumstance that this French Protestant author speaks with great pride of the Protestant paternity of the modern world is rather surprising to a reader living in this century of blood, tears and self-destruction on a colossal scale. But, though one has to take exception to M. Hoffet’s explanation of the latent anarchism of Catholic nations, his main thesis is well-nigh unassailable.

⁶¹⁵ On Catholic good humour and hilarity cf. John O’Hara, Butterfield 8 (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1935), p. 267. Lack of mirth, according to St. Thomas (Summa, II–II, q. 169, a. 4—referring to Aristotle, Ethics, ii, 7; iv, 8) is positively sinful.

⁶¹⁶ Cf. Halliday Sutherland, Arches of the Year (New York: William Morrow, 1933), PP. 283–84 (a comparison between Protestant Lewis and Catholic South Uist in the Hebrides).

Obviously the Catholic way of life, discounting the Protestant tenet “Cleanliness is next to godliness,” would be less given to hygiene and/or cleanliness plus plumbing. Even in Switzerland the dividing line between the cleaner Protestants and the dirtier Catholics will strike the foreign observer. Cf. J. Christopher Herold, The Swiss Without a Halo (New York: Columbia University Press, 1948), p. 130. Very much to the point is also Ernst Wiechert’s description of the way the Lutheran Masurian Poles view the poor and sloppy Catholic Poles from across the border. Cf. E. Wiechert, Die Jerominskinder (Linz: Brückenverlag, 1948), II, 122–23.

Yet all this should not lead one to the belief that Catholicism looks at the human body in Manichæan terms. For a symposium on the Catholic attitude towards the body cf. Vom Wert des Leibes in Antike, Christentum und Anthropologie der Gegenwart, with contributions from J. Bernhart, J. Schröteler, J. Ternus, H. Muckermann and others (Salzburg: Anton Pustet, 1936).

⁶¹⁷ Cf. Wallace Notestein, The Scot in History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1946), pp. 85, 103, 116, 150–82.

The Irish cultural situation is sui generis. Apart from the stronger medieval undertones owing to the absence of the Renaissance and Baroque stages of evolution which formed the Catholic nations of the Continent (see p. 182), there is also the dual rôle of the Irish clergy as First and Second Estate. This is the natural result of the “decapitation” of Irish society by the English conquerors. (This particular trait, though, is closely duplicated in French Canada whose upper layers returned to France after 1763.)

⁶¹⁸ Cf. Ludwig Bergstraesser, “Der Protestantismus in Frankreich,” Hockland, XXVI (Oct., 1938). The Protestants of France number about 2.5 per cent of the total population, yet of the so-called “Two Hundred Families” controlling most of the wealth of France, seventy-six (i.e., more than one third) are Protestant. Compare also with Werner Wittich, “Die Regenten Frankreichs” Hochland, XXIII (January, 1926), p. 407 sq.; André Siegfried, “Le groupe Protestant cévenol,” in M. Boegner and A. Siegfried, Protestantisme français (Paris: Plon, 1945), pp. 38–39. The situation of the Viennese Protestants was similarly more elevated than that of their Catholic fellow citizens. Cf. Otto Friedländer, Letzter Glanz der Märchenstadt (Vienna: Ring Verlag, 1948), pp. 182–83.

⁶¹⁹ Cf. Dr. Karl Adam, The Spirit of Catholicism, trans. Dom J. McCann (New York: Macmillan, 1928), p. 174.

⁶²⁰ On the other hand we still have to cope with a number of misconceptions about Catholic asceticism. Catholicism has no anti-sexual doctrines; there is even sacramental significance to the sexual act in marriage. The relationship between sexuality and religiosity has been strongly stressed by the Catholic philosopher E. I. Watkin: see his The Bow in the Clouds, an Essay towards the Integration of Experience (New York: Macmillan, 1932), pp. 121–25. There is, in Catholicism, also much emphasis on the sacredness of the body; cf. for instance, José María Pemàn, Poesía (Valladolid, 1937), p. 191. Puritanical tendencies in the Catholic world are either the result of Jansenist undercurrents or of an imposed competition with Protestant neighbours. Such a phenomenon is strictly post-Reformation. The sins of the flesh, according to St. Thomas, are less grave than those of a spiritual or intellectual nature (Summa, I–II, q. 73, a. 5).

⁶²¹ Cf. G. P. Gooch: “Modern democracy is the child of the Reformation, not the Reformers. Of the latter, inconsistency is the chief characteristic.”—English Democratic Ideas in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1927), p. 7. Cf. also Ernst Troeltsch, Die Bedeutung des Protestantismus für die Entstehung der modernen Welt (Munich & Berlin: Oldenbourg, 1911). It is self-evident that a strong subjectivism in large masses fosters the tendency to lean in directions prescribed by the human law of gravity, and thus to come to terms with the “world.” Everett Dean Martin thought that Protestant subjectivism also produced very unexpected results. “For the multitude the right of private interpretation worked in the opposite direction and produced illiberality of mind. It fortified ignorance with the delusion of infallibility, circumscribed the outlook of many men with an unimaginative liberalism and rationalized the crowd’s will to power “(Liberty, p. 124).

⁶²² Cf. J. M. Gilchrist, “Christendom Must be Served: a Letter to My Liberal Protestant Friends,” Columbia, June, 1945, p. 3—where may be found a tabulation of the contrary orthodox and liberal Protestant reactions to Catholicism.

⁶²³ Yet the modern Protestant simply loves to travel in Catholic countries—France, Bavaria, Austria, Hungary, Spain, Belgium, the Rhineland, Ireland, Mexico, Italy, the Province of Quebec; not only because they are less spoiled by “progress,” but also because they offer (unless psychologically affected by neighbouring Protestant nations) a social ease and freedom unknown in the Protestant world. The conflict between such a sad and “problematic” Protestant who in a Catholic country experiences not only a hitherto unknown freedom and absence of controls but therefore also a new tragic sense of life, has been well described by E. M. Forster in Where Angels Fear to Tread and by D. H. Lawrence in Aaron’s Rod. See also the letters of Randolph Bourne to Carl Zigrosser, Mary Messer and Alyse Gregory in Twice a Year, No. 2 (Spring-Summer, 1939), and No. 5–6 (Spring-Summer, 1941).

⁶²⁴ We borrow these terms from Bernard Groethuysen’s Origines de l’esprit bourgeois en France (Paris: Gallimard, 1927), I (L’Église et la bourgeoisie), 49.

⁶²⁵ For a popular description of Geneva under Calvin, see Stefan Zweig. The Right to Heresy: Castellio against Calvin (New York: Viking, 1936). Of a scholarly character is F. W. Kampschulte’s Johann Calvin: seine Kirche und sein Staat in Gent (Leipzig: Duncker und Humblot, 1869 and 1899). On Calvin’s political views cf. Hans Baron, Calvins Staatsanschauung und das konfessionelle Zeitalter (Munich and Berlin: R. Oldenbourg, 1924).

The totalitarian aspects of Calvin’s state are brilliantly described in Kampschulte, op. cit., I, 444 sq. The rigorism of Geneva is also well attested by Calvin’s successor Théodore de Bèze, who accused the Papists of having an inefficient Inquisition, and a poorly functioning control of public morality (ibid., II, 361).

⁶²⁶ Cf. Gooch, Ginsberg, and others, The German Mind and Outlook (London, 1945), P. 4. Cf. also Ernst Troeltsch, “Die Soziallehren der christlichen Kirchen,” Gesammelte Werke, I, 609, 671, 702–3.

⁶²⁷ Manteuffel was perfectly right when he wrote to Bismarck: “The constitutional system which proclaims the rule of majorities I consider to be thoroughly Protestant.”—See O. Bismarck, Gedanken und Erinnerungen, I, 139.

⁶²⁸ Cf. St. Robert Bellarmine, “De membris ecclesiæ militantis, I: De clericis,” in Disputationes Roberti Bellarmini Politiani, S. J. (Naples: J. Giulianus, 1857), lib. i, cap. vii (II, 157). Cf. also Franciscus Suarez, S.J., Defensio fidei catholiæ adversus Anglicanæ sectæ errores (Naples: Ex Typis Fibrenianis, 1872), iii. 3.7 (pp. 195–96).

⁶²⁹ Cf. also Tanquerey, Synopsis theologiæ dogmaticæ ad mentem S. Thomæ Aquinæ hodiernis moribus accomodata (Rome, Tournai and Paris: Desclée, 1922), I, 556 sq. The Church herself is called by Pope Pius X, in his encyclical Vehementer (Feb. 11, 1906), a society vi et natura sua inequalis (“unequal by necessity and by its nature”).

An excellent condemnation of egalitarianism from a philosophical point of view is Gabriel Marcel’s “Considérations sur l’égalité,” in Études carmélitaines, XXIV, Vol. II, pp. 161–71. Gabriel Marcel’s Catholic and existentialist views are well corroborated by the non-Catholic Richard M. Weaver, in his brilliant little book Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), especially pp. 40–48.

⁶³⁰ Cf. Montesquieu, De l’esprit des his, xxiv, 5.

⁶³¹ Both De Tocqueville and James Fenimore Cooper commented on the familiarity between masters and servants in France as compared to Britain or America. See De Tocqueville, De la démocratic en Amérique, Book III, Chapter v; James F. Cooper, The American Democrat (New York: Knopf, 1931) P. 83; also Gleanings in Europe, ed. R. Spiller (New York: Oxford University Press, 1928), I, 127.

⁶³² “Social” democracy was especially strong in the Church. Under Francis Joseph Austria had a Prince-Archbishop of Olmütz (Olomouc) with the name of Kohn. Cf. also H. A. Macartney, Hungary (London: Ernest Benn, 1934), p. 160. Yet not only the Church herself but all “clerical” governments and régimes were socially far more democratic than the self-professed democracies. Cf. Disraëli’s Waldershare in his Endymion. Indeed, there should be little doubt that democracy in the social sense is more present in the Catholic than in the Protestant world. Class consciousness is far stronger in England than, for instance, in Italy; stronger in Switzerland (with the most exclusive aristocracy in Christendom) than in France; stronger in the United States than in Belgium or Bavaria. A Social Register could not even be imagined in Hungary or Transylvania. Ilya Ehrenburg, by no means sympathetic towards Spain, pointed out that no grandee sitting on the same park bench with a beggar could possibly refuse to taste from his convent soup, if offered. Compare also with H. F. Brownson, Equality and Democracy (Detroit: Brownson, 1897), pp. 22–27; Grace Hegger Lewis, “My New Spanish Family,” Vogue (American edition), July 15, 1947, p. 42 sq.; Victor Hehn, Italien: Ansichten und Streiflichter (Berlin: Borntraeger, 1905), pp. 86–87. Yet it is also interesting to note that in Protestant Britain, where the class differences are more marked than in the Catholic nations, the sympathies of the workers and the “proletariat” for the aristocracy and the “plutocrats” are greater than for the middle classes. Cf. F. Zweig, Labour, Life and Poverty (London: Victor Gollancz, 1948), p. 89.

⁶³³ The cult of death probably reached its zenith in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when it showed in some regions of Europe a morbid intensity. Cf. Johan Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages, trans. Hopeman (London: Arnold, 1924), pp. 53–54, 124 sq. A vivid description of a Basque charnel-house is to be found in Victor Hugo’s Letters to his Wife and Others, trans. N. H. Dole (Boston: Estes and Lauriat, n.d.), p. 118 sq. Cf. also the Spanish saying: Italia para nacer, Francia para vivir, España para morir (“Italy to be born in, France to live in, Spain to die in”). Cf. Élie Faure, “L’âme espagnole,” La Grande Revue, XXXIII, No. 12 (Dec, 1929), p. 184: “A whole people desperate to die; the only one which has really gone to the extreme of Catholicism—death. It is quite absurd—and sublime nevertheless. For this reason, under Philip II, a third of the population lived in monasteries and convents. Nearly all great Spaniards of the two great literary centuries are priests or soldiers.” On p. 186 he concludes: “The history of Spain is a perpetual aspiration towards death.” This Spanish thanatocentrism is also well described by the famous Italian journalist Indro Montanelli in his article, “A spasso per Madrid i condannati a morte,” Il nuovo Corriere della Sera, January, 1948.—Yet the fact also remains that America has a death problem which troubles her subconsciously. We can gather that, not only from Evelyn Waugh’s witty satire The Loved One (Boston: Little, Brown, 1947), but also from the remarks of other observers. Cf., for instance, J. A. Joris, Strangers Should Not Whisper (New York: L. B. Fischer, 1945), p. 19.

⁶³⁴ Cf. Montaigne, Essais, ed. J. Plattard (Paris: Roches, 1931), Book I, chap, xx (p. 117): “Qui a apris à mourir, il a desapris à servir. Le sçavoir mourir nous afranchit de toute subjection et contrainte.”

⁶³⁵ Cf. A. Peers, Spain (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1929), p. 22 note.

⁶³⁶ Cf. F. C. C. Egerton, Salazar, Rebuilder of Portugal (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1943). For a Catholic defence of begging cf. the great Prussian romantic statesman J. von Radowitz, Gesammelte Schriften (Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1854), IV, 38–39.

⁶³⁷ Cf., for instance, the great praise bestowed upon the peasant by Theodor Haecker in Was ist der Mensch? (Leipzig: Hegner, 1933), pp. 36–38, and the same author’s Tag-und Nachtbücher, 1939–1945, p. 250. For the statistical distribution of the German peasantry among the two religions cf. Karl Sell, Katholizismus und Protestantismus (Leipzig: Quelle und Meyer, 1908), p. 273.

⁶³⁸ On class sentiment in American politics cf. D. W. Brogan, Government of the People (New York: Harper, 1933), p. 336 and 325 note. On the demophile aspects of the Catholic countries cf. Gustave Thibon, What Ails Mankind? trans. Willard Hill (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1947), p. 34; W. Somerset Maugham, Creatures of Circumstances (London and Toronto: Heinemann, 1947), p. 138; F. Zweig, Labour, Life and Poverty, p. 189.

⁶³⁹ See above, Note 595; also Karl Larenz, “Staat und Religion bei Hegel,” Reichsidee und Staatsgedanke: Festschrift für Julius Binder (Berlin: Junker und Dünnhaupt, 1930), pp. 261–62.

⁶⁴⁰ These efforts were often animated by the best will and the greatest intellectual honesty, but they very often ended in fantastic perversities. One has, in this connection, only to remember the enthusiasm of certain French Catholics for the “nationalizations” after the Second World War, an enthusiasm originally offered to an entirely different cause—the cause of social justice, which is hardly served by the establishment of an omnipotent state.

⁶⁴¹ This is well expressed by the agnostic hero of André Maurois’ Les discours du docteur O’Grady (Paris: Grasset, 1923).

⁶⁴² Cf. Jan Ciechanowski, Defeat in Victory, pp. 382–83.

⁶⁴³ This is true from a theological point of view. Yet because of the Manichæan dualism so characteristic of the Eastern Church, she is quite capable of entering into the most astounding political “arrangements.”

⁶⁴⁴ Cf. Martin Luther, Werke, kritische Gesammtausgabe: Tíschreden (Weimar: Böhlau, 1921), VI, 143 (No. 6718); also “Predigten über etzliche Kapitel des Evangelisten Matthäi,” Gesammelte Werke (Erlangen, 1850), XLIV, 156, 157.

⁶⁴⁵ Cf. Étienne Gilson, Christianity and Philosophy, trans. R. MacDonald (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1939), p. 22. Gilson also admits that the acumen of human reason, according to St. Thomas, “has suffered much less from original sin than the rectitude of will.”

Yet the contrary and more contemporary Catholic concept we find represented by Metternich, who believed that the people was “good, but childish” (Aus Metternichs nachgelassenen Papieren, III, 338, 452).

⁶⁴⁶ According to St. Thomas the virtutes intellectuales are higher than the virtutes morales: cf. Summa, I–II, q. 66, a. 3; I–II, q. 109, a. 2, ad 3. Compare also with II–II, q. 154, a. 3 ad 3, and above, Note 620.

⁶⁴⁷ A position immortally stated (in his “Essay on Criticism”) by a not too exemplary Catholic, Alexander Pope:

A little learning is a dangerous thing.
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers up again.

⁶⁴⁸ For a picture of a liberal South American society (Brazil) cf. Gilberto Freyre, The Masters and the Slaves, trans. S. Putnam (New York: Knopf, 1946), pp. xiv–xv. Cf. also Lewis Hanke, “Free Speech in Sixteenth Century Spanish America,” The Hispanic-American Historical Review, XXVI, No. 2 (May, 1946), pp. 135–49. A Catholic appraisal of the positive values of liberalism can be found in E. I. Watkin, A Philosophy of Form (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1935), pp. 173–74, 178.

⁶⁴⁹ Compare with the following passage in James Joyce’s “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” The Portable James Joyce (New York: Viking, 1949), P. 514:

—Then, said Cranly, you do not intend to become a protestant?

—I said that I had lost the faith, Stephen answered, but not that I had lost self-respect. What kind of liberation would that be to forsake an absurdity which is logical and coherent and to embrace a faith which is illogical and incoherent?

⁶⁵⁰ Juan de Mariana, S.J., in “Discrimen regis et tyranni,” De rege et regis institutione, i. 5, defended tyrannicide, but was opposed by other theologians of his order. St. Thomas prohibits tyrannicide, but permits and even advises rebellion. Fernando d’Antonio came to the conclusion that St. Thomas implicitly permits tyrannicide, a view which we also support: see his “Il tirannicidio nel pensiero dell’ Acquinate,” Annali de scienze polìtiche, XII, Fase. 1–2 (March–June, 1939), p. 83 sq. Cf. also St. Thomas, Summa, II–II. q. 42, a. 2; Sententice, xliv, q. 2, a. z; Exp. pol. Aristot., 54, lecd. 1, d. One of the conspirators in the July, 1944, attempt to overthrow the Hitler government, Major Ludwig von Loenrod, inquired from a priest whether his religion permits tyrannicide. The answer was in the affirmative. Subsequently not only the conspiring officer, but also his adviser was hanged. Cf. Allen Welsh Dulles, Germany’s Underground (New York: Macmillan, 1947), p. 115.

⁶⁵¹ Count Klaus von Stauffenberg, Hitler’s would-be assassin, came from a Catholic family. So did Count Arco-Valley, the assassin of Kurt Eisner, the Leftist Bavarian leader. Count Arco was also arrested by the police in March, 1933, for planning an assassination of Hitler (see the New York Herald Tribune, March 14, 1933). The list of assassins with a Catholic or Greek Orthodox background in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is a most impressive one. The tradition of the facinus memorabile of Ravaillac and Clément has indeed no parallel in the Protestant world. Of the American presidential assassins (Booth, Guiteau, Czotgosz), only the last mentioned had a Catholic background (Guiteau was of Huguenot stock). But J. Schrank, who made an attempt on the life of President Theodore Roosevelt in 1912, belonged to a Catholic family, and so did Joseph Zangara, the would-be assassin of President F. D. Roosevelt who killed Mayor Cermak of Chicago. Among Jewish political assassins should be mentioned Judas M. Stern, Kannegiesser, Dora Kaplan, Schwarzbard, Herschel Grynszpan—with the exception of the two last mentioned, all anti-Communists.

⁶⁵² It is significant that in Austria-Hungary, with a population of fifty millions, only one non-military execution took place between the years 1903 and 1918—while during the same period hundreds of people were hanged in much more “progressive” Britain. As a matter of fact, until 1831 every British thief who had appropriated an object to a value exceeding two pounds sterling was summarily sentenced to the gallows. On the statistics for Austria, see Theodor Rittler, “Die Todesstrafe und das 20. Jahrhundert,” Wort und Wahrheit, III, No. 2 (February, 1948), 93–105.

⁶⁵³ Cf. Miguel de Unamuno, La vida de Don Quijote y de Sancho (Madrid: Renacimiento, 1914), pp. 212–13; The Life of Don Quijote and Sancho, trans. H. P. Earle (New York: Knopf, 1927), p. 293. At the end of his El sentimiento trágico de la vida he piously wishes for his readers that God will spare them peace.

⁶⁵⁴ Ramón de Valle-Inclán, La guerra carlista: los cruzados de la causa (Buenos Aires: Espasa-Calpe, 1944 [Edición Austral]), p. 100. It is fairly obvious that this extremism “ties in” with the thanatocentrism we have already mentioned. Cf. M. de Unamuno, Vérités arbitraires (Paris: Sagittaire, n.d.), p. 186: “Unhappy those European countries where one lives only thinking of life! Unhappy those countries where one does not think continually of death, and where the guiding rule of life is not the thought that we shall all some day lose it.”

⁶⁵⁵ “Italian,” i.e., “official,” Catholicism was for the Spaniard often not radical enough. José Pemartin does not exaggerate when he says: “Hence we Spaniards have a right to be more Papist than the pope, and in fact have been on many glorious occasions.”—“España corno pensamiento,” Acción española, XVIII (March, 1937), p. 375.

⁶⁵⁶ Cf. Léon Bloy, Mon journal (Paris: Mercure de France, 1924), I (1896–1899), 154 (under date of March 6, 1899): “Their [the Protestants’] tolerance, which is besides illusory, is nothing but an unheard-of want of an absolute, a demoniac defiance of substance.”

⁶⁵⁷ Cf. Compton Mackenzie in a preface to Jane Lane’s King James the Last (London: Dakers, 1942), pp. vii–viii: “The English suspect a man who cannot contrive a compromise, whether it be with Almighty God or with his fellow mortals. To an Englishman, compromise savours of his so-much-revered fair play, and he could never support any action or subscribe to any opinion which suggested that half a loaf was worse than no bread. His own national Church is the most ingenious of compromises.” This contrasts beautifully with the Spanish revolutionary song from 1821:

Muera quien quiere
Moderación
Y viva siempre
Y siempre viva
Y viva siempre
La exaltatión

—“Death to whoever wants moderation, and long live, long live, long live extremism.”—In Melchor de Almagro San Martín’s foreword to Mariano José de Larra [“Figaro”], Artículos completos (Madrid: Aguilar, 1944), p. xxv. To Alexander Herzen,Protestantism was the personification of the “golden middle way”; see p. 73.

⁶⁵⁸ Cf. Dr. Erich Kühn’s book, Schafft anständige Kerle! (Berlin: T. Weicher, 1939), which sold more than 100,000 copies. See also F. S. Campbell, The Menace of the Herd, p. 285. On the “regularity” of British life viewed with Italian eyes, see Giorgio Sansa, “Gli inglesi a casa loro non possono fare i matti,” Il nuovo Corriere della Sera, January 13, 1948, p. 3.

⁶⁵⁹ See above, Note 395. See also P. James Hoban, The Thomistic Concept of Person and Some of its Social Implications (Washington, D.C.; Catholic University, 1939 [Catholic University Philosophical Studies, No. 43]).

⁶⁶⁰ Of course, there are also a lot of American Catholics who walk straight into the trap and repeat public opinion without reflecting for a minute: “It’s true—after all, everybody knows only too well . . .” etc., etc. They melancholically admit a non-existing state of affairs, but they get the shock of their lives once they venture into the anarchical Catholic world, whose Catholicity then they often will be inclined to doubt.

⁶⁶¹ Herman Melville was keenly conscious of these matters when he wrote: “Thus, freedom is more social than political. . . . It is not who rules the state, but who rules me. Better be secure under one king, than exposed to violence from twenty millions of monarchs, though oneself be one of them.”—From his Mardi—and a Voyage Thither (Boston: Maynard and Co., n.d.), II, 183. He also cautioned his fellow Americans on this page against the concept of a “free” America faced by “slave-nations.” On Herman Melville’s notions on democracy cf. Geoffrey Stone, Melville (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1949), an authoritative Catholic interpretation of this great American thinker and writer.

⁶⁶² Count Hermann Keyserling, America Set Free (London and New York: Harper, 1929), p. 211. That author, on the other hand, had a full appreciation for the possible synthesis of Catholicism and liberty. “Even the freest spirit,” he wrote, “has nothing to fear from the dogmas [of the Church].”—Cf. his Das Reisetagebuch eines Philosophen (Darmstadt: Otto Reichl Verlag, 1923), II, 528.

⁶⁶³ Cf. his “Studies in Classic American Literature, I: The Spirit of Place,” The Shock of Recognition, ed. E. Wilson (Garden City: Doubleday, 1943), p. 907 f. Compare with Everett Dean Martin’s view: “Coming to America when they did, our Colonial ancestors who gave the country its traditions of culture and liberty, missed the liberalizing influences of the Renaissance. . . . Have not the American people sailed away from the medievalism rather than thought the way out of it? It seems to me that as a people the Americans of the preceding generations renounced the tutelage and traditions of medieval Europe, but were not greatly influenced by the philosophy of life which supplanted the medieval and is the basis of whatever is distinctly modern in the culture of the Western World “(Liberty, pp. 79, 81).

⁶⁶⁴ “Individualism and American Life,” Essays in Honor of John Dewey (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1929), p. 398.

⁶⁶⁵ The American Character (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1944), pp. 32–34.

⁶⁶⁶ See his Aperçu des États-Unis au commencement du XIXe siècle (Paris: Michaud & Delaunay, 1814), p. 164.

⁶⁶⁷ Thomas Jefferson’s Living Thoughts, ed. John Dewey (New York: Longmans, Green, 1940), p. III. Compare also James Fenimore Cooper, Gleanings in Europe, I, 354–56.

⁶⁶⁸ Cf. Willem Adriaan Bonger, Race Criminality, trans. M. M. Hordyk (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943), p. 56. Yet it must not be forgotten that some of these statistics have to be analyzed more carefully; they give a final picture only if we correlate religion and class. The social maladjustment of the lower layers naturally fosters a higher criminality. In this connection it is interesting to note that the highly nazified parts of Germany had a lower criminality than the anti-Nazi regions! Among the criminals in the United States the Catholic element is conspicuously represented; but here again the class aspect must be taken into consideration—as well as the increased criminality in a competitive society. We must not forget that the crime rate of Italian immigrants and second-generation Italians in the Argentine or in Brazil is considerably lower than in the United States.

⁶⁶⁹ Cf. the excellent description of the Polish character by Count Helmuth von Moltke, Gesammelte Schriften und Denkwürdigkeiten (Berlin: E. S. Mittler, 1892), I (Zur Lebensgeschichte), 169–70. In the same volume cf. also the description of the Spanish character.

⁶⁷⁰ Frederick II of Prussia considered Catholics to be an inferior type of citizens for monarchies as well as for republics. Cf. Oeuvres de Frédéric le Grand (Berlin: R. Decker, 1846), I, 208–9.

⁶⁷¹ Some pertinent remarks on this subject can be found in Américo Castro’s “On the relations between the Americas,” Points of View (published by the Pan-American Union), No. 1 (December, 1940). While Switzerland is a country of “don’ts” and prohibitions, Austria has traditionally been the country “where everything forbidden is allowed.” (The real psychological attraction of nazism in Austria prior to 1938 was its revolutionary character—and revolution implies violence and illegality.) A country like Austria is in a certain sense “ungovernable.” Metternich confessed: “I have governed Europe at times, but Austria never.”—See E. L. Woodward, Three Studies in European Conservatism: Metternich, Guizot, the Catholic Church in the Nineteenth Century (London: Constable, 1929), p. 113. See also: Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, “Réflexions sur le caractère nationale autrichien,” Revue de Psychologie des Peuples [Le Havre] V, 3 (Fall 1950), pp. 269–298.

Donoso Cortés pointed out quite rightly that Catholic libertarianism rested on the twin pillars of the supremacy of conscience and the Freedom of the Will. Cf. his allusions in his article entitled “Las Reformas de Pio IX,” originally published in El Faro, Nov. 17, 1847, reprinted in Obras Completas de Donoso Cortés, ed. Dr. Don Juan Juretschke (Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos 1946), pp. 86–87.

⁶⁷² Carlo Sforza, L’âme italienne (Paris, 1934), p. 181. Compare with Nathaniel Hawthorne’s astonishment about the individualistic character of worship in Catholic churches: see his “French and Italian Note Books,” Works (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1888), I, 95–96. Cf. also Henri Chevré, A ceux quí reviennent (Paris: Téqui, 1919), p. 35, and S. de Madariaga, Anarquía ojerarquía (Madrid: Aguilar, 1935), pp. 185–93.

As much as the Dutch Catholic may seem a “disciplinarian” to the Central or South-European Catholic, he still seems to be an anarchist to his Protestant countryman. Cf. P. J. Meertens, “Le caractère néerlandais,” Revue de Psychologie des Peuples [Le Havre], V, 1 (Spring 1950), p. 45. Typical is also the personal reaction of Chateaubriand towards France after his return from Protestant England. (Cf. Chateaubriand, Mémoires d’Outre-Tombe, II, i, 13.) For a cultural comparison between the Greek-Oriental (Pravoslav) and the Protestant outlook turn to Saltykov-Shtshedrin’s short story “Mal’chik v shtanakh i mal’chik byez shtanov,” in N. v. Bubnoff, Russisches Lesebuch (Heidelberg: Julius Groos, 1922), p. 167 sq.

⁶⁷³ Among the numerous biographies (Secrétain, Tharaud, Halévy, etc.), the best is undoubtedly Romain Rolland’s Péguy (Paris: A. Michel, 1944). Péguy was the “perfect Catholic individualist” and it is, perhaps, not without significance that Karl Barth sees in originality a Catholic and non-Protestant trait. Cf. his remark in Die protestantische Theologie im 19. Jahrhundert (Zollikon: Evangelischer Verlag, 1947), p. 99.

⁶⁷⁴ Indispensable for a full understanding of this interesting problem is Frank Tannenbaum, Slave and Citizen: the Negro in the Americas (NewYork: Knopf, 1947). The religious aspect of the question is almost fully developed.

⁶⁷⁵ Cf. Oscar Levy, The Revival of Aristocracy (London: Probsthain, 1906), p. 79. On the typical Spanish attitude of “obeying the King’s orders without carrying them out” (se obedece pero no cumple), cf. Salvador de. Madariaga, Herntin Cortes (New York: Macmillan, 1941), p. 40, and Graf Hermann Keyserling, Südamerikanische Meditationen (Stuttgart und Berlin: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1932), p. 268. On the difference between obedience and loyalty cf. Gabriel Marcel, “Obéissance et fidélité,” Homo Viator (Paris: Editions Montaigne, chez Aubier, 1944). The Order of Maria Theresa, the highest Austrian military distinction was, significantly enough, only given for acts of bravery before the enemy without military orders or even in defiance of such orders.

George Ticknor (op. cit., I, 185–204) not only felt the freedom nowhere so strongly as in Spain, but also remarked enthusiastically on the complete indifference of Spaniards towards royal or any other governmental laws, by-laws and orders (p. 192). The Holy Inquisition, which still functioned at that time (1816) was a target of jokes (p. 193). The same spirit seems to have prevailed even during the latest civil war. If we can believe the Communist author, Jesús Hernández, the Anarchist jails must have been the most delightful resorts; on the Aragón front the men of the F.A.I, played highly traitorous football games with the “fascists” of the opposite trenches. Such laxity, according to Comrade Hernández, caused the downfall of Spanish “democracy.”—Cf. Jesús Hernández, Negro y rojo: los anarquistas en la revolucoón española contemporanea (Mexico City, 1946), pp. 273–78.

On Russian anarchism cf. Jules Legras, L’âme russe (Paris, 1934), p. 264.

⁶⁷⁶ In certain Tyrolean regiments of the old Imperial and Royal Army, the commissioned officers were not appointed but freely elected, up to and including the rank of captain.

Naturally, the greater progress of technology and industry in Protestant countries has been a prime factor in accentuating the uniformity and conformism of Protestant nations. This process is of long standing. Thus we know that all the factories of the large Austrian monarchy taken together had in the early 18th century a smaller output than those of the Dutch city of Leyden. Cf. Ernst Michel, Sozialgeschichte der industriellen Arbeiterwelt (Frankfurt am Main: Josef Knecht, 1947), p. 33. Yet uniformity and conformity always imply obedience—so also in the matter of traffic regulations. In the Eternal City there are (as of 1948) only three traffic lights and about two traffic policemen. Driving in Rome is therefore a nerve-racking experience. Again, when the city of Buenos Aires (three million inhabitants) tried to put in a few traffic lights, the irate public immediately tore them down. Cf. Philip Hamburger, “Winds from the Pampas,” The New Yorker, December 4, 1948, p. 57.

⁶⁷⁷ Cf. the description of the Spanish Foreign Legion by Arturo Barea in his The Forging of a Rebel, trans. Use Barea (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1946). The death cult, encouraged by Spanish officers, was always very strong in that military organization. (The regimental song of the Tercio starts with the words Soy novio de la muerte.) The theme of death-worship was also well brought out in the French film La bandera, made with the active co-operation of the Tercio in 1934.

⁶⁷⁸ Valéry, Variété (Paris, 1947), p. 13. Yet the “duty” the Catholic is more fully aware of is that of obedience to his conscience. The Italians, well led, can be excellent soldiers. They were highly valued by their Austrian officers in the first half of the nineteenth century. Cf. “Aus der Selbstbiographie des F. M. L. Hugo Frh. von Weckbecker,” Von Maria Theresia zu Franz Joseph; zwei Lebensbilder aus dem alten österreich (Berlin: Verlag für Kulturpolitik, 1929), p. 239.

⁶⁷⁹ Ricardo León, “Rojo y Gualda,” Colección de obras completas (Madrid: Hernando, 1934), XXIV, 53. The specifically Christian concept of honour has been well defined by Franz Werfel in his Jacobowsky and the Colonel (New York: Viking, 1944), pp. 78–79. (This passage was omitted in the stage version.)

⁶⁸⁰ Cf. Joseph Bernhart, The Vatican as World Power, trans. G. N. Shuster (New York: Longmans, Green, 1939), p. 443. “A structure of harmonious proportions, simple and majestic alike, the Curia compels even its enemies to pay it respect. But it is not what its adulators would make of it, an ideal coordination of antagonistic forms of government. It is rather the purest incarnation of absolutism, being bolstered up not only by divine rights, as was the old idea of the monarchy, but by the consciousness of representing God’s kingdom on earth.”

⁶⁸¹ Cf. Eduard Zeller, Das theologische System Zwinglis (Tübingen: L. F. Fues, 1853), pp. 163–64.

⁶⁸² Cf Francis S. Campbell, The Menace of the Herd, pp. 301–2, note.

⁶⁸³ For instance, the Ryan-Boland thesis, permitting the restriction of the religious activities of non-Catholics in Catholic countries, has strong illiberal implications. For a balanced Catholic refutation cf. James N. Vaughan, “On Modern Intolerance,” Commonweal, May 9, 1941.

⁶⁸⁴ Cf. St. Augustine, letter to Deogratias (Migne, Patr. Lat., 33, col. 373), and his Retractiones, ii. 31; Karl Adam, Das Wesen des Katholizismus (Düsseldorf: Schwann, 1934), pp. 208–10, quoting Juan de Lugo, De fide disput. xix, 7, 10; xx, 107, 194; F. von Hügel, Essays and Addresses on the Philosophy of Religion (London: Dent, 1931), pp. 234–35; O. Karrer, Religions of Mankind, trans. E. I. Watkins (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1936), p. 229 f.

⁶⁸⁵ The present exaggerated reverence for higher ecclesiastics (including the popes), so prevalent in some countries, has been severely castigated by E. I. Watkin in The Catholic Centre (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1939 and 1945), pp. 155–56. The high, priestly position of the layman has also been emphasized by Fr. Mathias Laros in “Laie und Lehramt in der Kirche,” Hochland, XXXVII, No. 2 (November, 1939), p. 45 f., and by E. Gilson in Christianity and Philosophy, trans. R. MacDonald (London: Sheed and Ward, 1939), p. 107. On the violent criticism of the papacy by priests and monks during the Renaissance cf. Jacob Burckhardt, Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien (Leipzig: Kröner, 1926), p. 411. It must also be borne in mind that papal views on the prerogatives of the Holy See over the secular power have profoundly changed. Already Suarez (De legibus, iii. 8. 10) and St. Robert Bellarmine (De romano pont., v. 6) have insisted that the pope has no secular ruling power. The statements of Leo XIII and Boniface VIII on this subject are almost diametrically opposed. And even seemingly “clerical” cultures—as for instance the socio-political pattern of the Province de Québec—rest on the existence of a politically powerless clergy. Though the hierarchy of French Canada has been traditionally Conservative, the masses always voted Liberal. Sir Wilfrid Laurier, the devoutly Catholic leader of French Canada and Canadian Premier for many years, always manfully resisted the demands of the bishops.—Last but not least, it should not be forgotten that a layman (even a married layman) could theoretically be elected Pope. Cardinals who were laymen were no rarity even in modern times.

⁶⁸⁶ Cf. O. Karrer, Von der Freiheit des Christenmenschen in der katholischen Kirche (Einsiedeln and Cologne: Benziger, 1941), p. 76.

⁶⁸⁷ Ibid., p. 75. Compare with Richard Egenter, Von der Freiheit der Kinder Gottes (Freiburg i.B.: Herder, 1949), especially p. 4; August Zechmeister, Das Herz und das Kommende (Vienna: Amandus Verlag, 1946), pp. 12, 32–33.

The repressive laws of modern Sweden against Catholics can be found in a summing up in Time, LIV, No. i (July 4, 1949). Some of them are being changed now.

On the tolerance of non-Catholics by Catholic governments cf. also Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, “Katholische Toleranz?” Wort und Wahrheit, IV, No. 5 (May, 1949), 342–53 and the approving review of this article by J. Courtney Murray, S.J., in his paper “On Religious Freedom,” Theological Studies, X, No. 3 (September, 1949), 413–16.

Additional material on the question of the salvation of non-Catholics and non-Christians can be found in Louis Capéran, Le problème du salut des in-fidèles (Paris: Beauchesne, 1912; Toulouse: Grand Séminaire, 1934), and P. Elysée de la Nativité, “L’expérience d’Ibn Arabî est-elle surnaturelle?” Études carmélitaines, XVI, Vol. II (October, 1931), pp. 163–64.

⁶⁸⁸ On the primacy of conscience cf. Karl Adam, Das Wesen des Katholizismus, pp. 245–246, and his “Una Sancta “in katholischer Sicht (Düsseldorf: Patmos-Verlag, 1948), pp. 60–61; Auguste Belanger, “Une loi injuste oblige-t-elle en conscience?” in Éstudes, XXXIX (1902), vol. 92, pp. 465–94, 630–56; St. Robert Bellarmine, De Romano pontifice, ii.29 and iv.20: “When we say that conscience is superior to all human judges, we wish to say nothing else than that he whose own conscience is clear should not fear damnation by God”; F. J. Bürck, Die Lehre vom Gewissen nach dem hl. Antonin (Mainz, 1909), p. 26; Victor Cathrein, S.J., Moralphilosophie (2d ed.; Freiburg: Herder, 1893), I, 365; Romano Guardini, Conscience, trans. A. Lane (London: Sheed and Ward, 1932), p. 38; W. R. Inge, “Nationalism and National Character,” The Quarterly Review, CCXXVII, No. 549 (July, 1941), p. 134 (quoting Pope Innocent III); Mathias Laros, “Autorität und Gewissen,” Hochland, XXXVI, No. 4 (January, 1939); St. Alphonsus of Liguori, Tractatus primus de conscientia, v. 4, in Opera moralia S. Alph. M. de Ligorio (editio nova; Rome: Typogr. Vaticanæ, 1910), I, 4; H. Noldin, De principiis theologice moralis (Innsbruck: Rauch-Pustet, 1910), p. 240, §210 (on the merits of following an erroneous conscience); Max Pribilla, “Bedeutung und Bildung der Gewissens,” Stimmen der Zeit, CII (1922), pp. 204–7, 216–17; “Katholisches und modernes Denken,” Stimmen der Zeit, CV (1923), p. 255 f. (especially p. 267); “Katholisches Autoritätswesen und moderne Denkfreiheit,” Stimmen der Zeit, CIV (1922–1923), p. 96 f.; “Nochmals: Katholizismus und moderne Denkfreiheit,” Ibid., p. 430 f. (the last three articles contain a debate with Dr. August Messer, an unorthodox Neo-Kantian, who finally admitted that the difference between the Catholic and the Kantian thesis was not as complete as he thought; we are greatly indebted to Pribilla, to whom we owe some of the following data on St. Thomas and Torquemada); Suarez, Defensio fidei, iv. 6.17–18; St. Thomas Aquinas; “De veritate,” Opera omnia (Rome, 1570), VIII, 406 (q. 17); ibid., Ill, 21–22 (on the obligation to follow an erroneous conscience); Summa, I–II, q. 19, a. 5, 6; Sententice, II, Dist. 39, q. 3, a. 2, IV, dist. 9, a. 3; De malo, q. 2, a. 2 ad 8; Quodlibet, q. 8, a. 13, 15; q. 9, a. 15, Torquemada (Turrecremata), Summa de ecclesia Domini, ii. 106; see also the significant canon of Pope Urban II in Corpus iuris canonici (2nd ed.; Leipzig: Richter-Friedberg, 1879), col. 839 sq. and St. Augustine, “Epistola 185,” in Migne, Patr. Lat. XXXII.

The change from the intransigeance of the latter half of the Middle Ages and the earlier days of the Reformation to the more modern (and simultaneously more ancient) concepts can well be shown not only from the attitude of the recently converted Queen Christina of Sweden, but also from the address of Abbé Colbert to Louis XIV after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes—an address written by Racine himself. Cf. Lettres choisies de Christine, reine de Suède, ed. M.L. (Villefranche: Hardi, Filocrate, 1760), II, 113–38; J. Racine, CF.uvres complètes (Paris: Garnier Frères, n.d.), p. 457. The excommunication of the supporters of the suspended Father Leonard Feeney of Cambridge, Mass., in the spring of 1949, drew general attention in the United States. The heresy this circle was accused of was precisely the teaching that the non-Catholic cannot be saved. This thesis has been expounded by Raymond Karam in an article entitled “Reply to a Liberal,” From the Housetops, III, No. 3 (Spring, 1949). The excommunication, practically expressed in the refusal to administer the Sacraments, was rigorously enforced. See the news item “Couple in Boston Heresy Case Say Church Refuses to Wed Them,” The New York Herald Tribune, June 1, 1949.

⁶⁸⁹ Laski, Parliamentary Government in England, p. 8.

⁶⁹⁰ On British anti-intellectualism cf. Hermann Keyserling, Das Spektrum Europas, pp. 23–30. Cf. also the Paris Temps, October 13, 1919: “In every place and circumstance, British representatives adapt their attitudes to the immediate possibilities which a remarkable realism allows them to discern. Thus they often contradict themselves, and our French spirit, fond of logic, seeks in vain the worked-out system which explains their variable undertakings.” It would lead us too far to discuss here the inner connection between pragmatism and anti-rationalism, which are only seemingly mutually exclusive. Cf. also Émile Boutmy, Essai d’une Psychologie politique du peuple anglais au XIXe siècle (Paris: Armand Colin, 1901), p. 27. “The cold penetrating spirit of a Royer-Collard was satisfied with this formula: ‘I scorn a fact.’ The inflamed genius of a Burke does not hide from us his disgust with abstractions; he says, ‘I even hate the sound of the words which express them.’” Trotski, Jewish by his background, lived in a Greek Orthodox environment which had many aspects in common with Judaic orthodoxy. He confessed: “The feeling of the pre-eminence of the general over the particular, the law over the fact, the theory over the personal experience, originated in me at an early date and was strengthened with the years.”—Moya Zhizn’ (Berlin: Granit, 1930), I, no. Catholic “rationalism” is to many a Protestant a hidden plant; yet W. E. H. Lecky admitted that the Jesuits counted among the members of their society some of the most “rationalistic intellects “in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Cf. his History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe (New York: D. Appleton, 1884), II, 149–50.

⁶⁹¹ On the character of myths cf. Louis Rougier, La mystique démocratique (Paris: Flammarion, 1929), pp. 17–18. The prevalence of myths in the United States was noted by Sartre: cf. J. L. Brown, “Chief Prophet of the Existentialists,” The New York Times Magazine, February 2, 1947, p. 52. The strength of political myths in his country was well known to Herman Melville, as can be seen from Mardi—and a Voyage Thither (Boston: Maynard and Co., n.d.), II, 179–84.

⁶⁹² Cf. W. F. Sands and J. M. Lally, Our Jungle Diplomacy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944), pp. 156–57.—Compare also with Ilya Ehrenburg, Ispaniya (Moscow: Federatsija, 1932), p. 13.

⁶⁹³ The extreme liberalism of certain sectors of American Protestantism is well represented by Professor Henry N. Wieman of the Divinity School of the University of Chicago. Cf. his Is There a God? (Chicago: Willett, Clark and Co., 1932). This liberalism is not unconnected with a certain neoProtestant subjectivism which, according to Rudolf Otto, Das Heilige (Breslau, 1917), p. 10, had been smuggled into Protestantism by Schleiermacher. Yet there is also an older subjectivism which we find in Calvin’s writings; cf. his Institutiones, i. 7 (Paragraph 5).

Yet there are differences between the various Protestant groups, differences not only of a “denominational,” but also of a geographic nature. George Morrell is of the opinion that Continental Protestant theologians produce original and extremist views which are, later on, moderated, weakened and reduced by British and American theologians: cf. his paper in Christianity and the Contemporary Scene, ed. Miller and Shires (New York: Morehouse Goreham, 1943), p. 17. After all, even Prussia, Holstein and Hamburg belonged to the Holy Roman Empire until 1806. Protestantism in its purest and clearest modern form can, probably, be found only in Anglo-Saxonry. A public Corpus Christi procession can well be imagined in Berlin, with its 10 per cent, of Catholics, but not in Boston (at least not on anything like the same scale), with its 75 per cent. The Catholic roots of Protestantism have in Europe a historical and architectural “visibility” which they lack in the United States. Page 359 of the Somervell condensation of A. J. Toynbee’s Study of History could hardly have been written by an American non-Catholic.

⁶⁹⁴ It must be admitted that rationality demands a greater intellectual effort than irrationality. This effort cannot be demanded from everybody, and thus the demand for rationality is in itself “undemocratic”—no less so than intellectual qualifications for the franchise. Paul Lagarde was conscious of this antithesis between democracy and cultivation. Cf. Walter Bagehot, Works, II, 397 (“Letters on the French Coup d’État,” No. 3): “I fear you will laugh when I tell you what I conceive to be about the most essential mental quality for a free people whose liberty is to be progressive, permanent, and on a large scale: it is much stupidity.”

⁶⁹⁵ Although the Catholics in the dispersion (i.e., in the demo-Protestant orbit) are frequently willing to sacrifice before the secular gods, their religious exclusiveness is still considered to be fundamentally “alien” and “undemocratic.” In the United States the issue has been highlighted by Pope Leo XIII’s condemnation of “Americanism,” that is, inter-faith collaboration on a religious basis. Yet to what extent misunderstandings and even intrigues played an important ròle in this condemnation can be gleaned from Abbé Félix Klein, Souvenirs, IV, “Une hérésie fantome: L’Américanisme “(Paris: Plon, 1948).

⁶⁹⁶ Cf. Ephraim Douglas Adams, Power Ideals in American Society (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1913). According to this author these ideals are: nationalism, anti-slavery, predestination and “the religion of democracy.” Cf. also R. H. Gabriel, The Course of American Democratic Thought (New York: Ronalds Press, 1940), p. 416; Carlton J. H. Hayes, Essays on Nationalism (New York: Macmillan, 1926), pp. 44 ff., 66 f., 78; Nicholas Berdyaev, Conslantine Leontyev, trans. G. Reavey (London: Bles, 1940), p. 161.

⁶⁹⁷ Sir Norman Angell in Why Freedom Matters (London, 1940); quoted by Robert Graves and Alan Hodge in The Reader over Your Shoulder (New York: Macmillan, 1944), p. 213.

⁶⁹⁸ Cf. Note 248. The harder struggle of Protestant nations against illiteracy is natural if we keep in mind that a good average education for the masses without educational extremes (élites and illiterates) is a healthy condition for a democracy. In Protestant bibliolatry we have an old psychological invitation to a modicum of learning; yet the “Three R’s” are also indispensable to a commercial or business civilization.

⁶⁹⁹ Cf. Basil Fuller, Canada Today and Tomorrow (London: Stanley Paul, 1935), P. 123; A. J. Toynbee, A Study of History, ed. Somervell, p. 286.

⁷⁰⁰ Yet it must be admitted that we are all faced by an alternative, that we have to reach the painful decision whether we prefer freedom, ease and a certain amount of inefficiency, or whether we stand for order, tidiness and discipline regardless of costs, yes, even at the price of liberty. Wilhelm Röpke, in his Civitas Humana (Erlenbach: Eugen Rentsch, 1947), pp. 181–82, is fully conscious of this alternative, but still believes that countries like Britain, the Netherlands and Switzerland have succeeded in reaching a happy compromise. (The Netherlands have 39 per cent, Switzerland 42 per cent of Catholics.) Still, there is little doubt that the masses of the solidly Catholic nations have decided in favour of the first alternative.—On the mixture of anarchism and authoritarianism in Spain in the early nineteenth century see C. F. Hennigsen, Campaña de doce meses en Navarro y las provincias vascongadas con el General Zumalacdrregui, trans. R. Oyarzun (San Sebastián: Editorial Española, 1939), p. 3. (The English text, originally published in 1836, is unfortunately unavailable to me.) Of priceless value is Madame d’Aulnoy, Voyage d’Espagne (Paris: Klincksieck, 1926). The accounts of her trip in 1679 are amusing as well as frightening and do not fail to enrich the reader interested in the psychology of nations.

⁷⁰¹ Cf. Miguel de Unamuno ‘s comparison between the monk and the Anarchist in El sentiminento trágico de la vida, pp. 241–42.

⁷⁰² Luigi Rusticucci, Tragedia e supplizio di Sacco e Vanzetti (Naples: G. Rocco, 1928). This little volume also contains extracts from the Tevere, the Corriere della Sera and the Vatican’s Osservatore Romano.

⁷⁰³ Cf. Dimitri Myerezhkovski’s The Blossom of the Bourgeoisie; also Cardinal Manning’s journal, as quoted by Shane Leslie, “Manning, America and Democracy,” The Dublin Review, July–August–September, 1919, p. 1. Dean W. R. Inge, in his Protestantism (London: Ernest Benn, 1927), p. 76, wrote: “Catholicism dislikes the middle class, which in religion is democratic and independent.” Compare with Christopher Dawson, Enquiries into Religion and Culture (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1931), pp. 28–31. All this tallies to a certain extent with Frédéric Hoffet’s opinion that Catholicism is by no means a religion for the lower social layers, but rather one for the spiritual and social élites (L’imp érialisme Protestant, p. 13).

⁷⁰⁴ Cf. Richard Benz, Geist und Reich um die Bestimmung des Deutschen (Jena: Diederichs, 1933), pp. 169–70.

Hoffet is convinced that the Germans will never qualify for a democratic régime (op. cit., pp. 169–70). Yet, French democrat though he is, he has no illusions about the future of French democracy either. The Fourth Republic, to him, is merely a constitutional interlude (op. cit., pp. 202–4).

⁷⁰⁵ Cf. Georges Bernanos, Lettre aux Anglais (Rio de Janeiro: Atlantica Editora, 1942), pp. 210–12. Compare this with the scathing analysis of the French character by William James, which ends with this rather accurate political analysis: “But, on the other hand, Protestantism would seem to have a good deal to do with the fundamental cohesiveness of society in the countries of German blood. For what may be called the revolutionary party there has developed through insensible grades of rationalism out of the old, orthodox conceptions, religious and social. The process has been a continuous modification of positive belief, and the extremes, even if they had no respect for each other and no desire for mutual accommodation (which I think at the bottom they have), would yet be kept from cutting each other’s throats by the intermediate links.”—Letter to Henry P. Bowditch, Cambridge, April 8, 1871; in The Letters of William James, ed. by his son Henry James (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1920), I, 161–62.

⁷⁰⁶ Cf. the characteristic little story referred to by Major Geoffrey McNeill-Moss in The Epic of the Alcazar (London: Rich and Cowan, 1937), pp. 141–42.

⁷⁰⁷ Cf. Nicholas Berdyaev, Slavery and Freedom, trans. R.M. French (New York: Scribner, 1944), especially pp. 176–85.

⁷⁰⁸ Cf. Waldemar Gurian, Der Bolschewismus—Einführung in Geschichte und Lehre (Freiburg: Herder, 1931), pp. 187–91.

⁷⁰⁹ Cf. E. von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, “An Anatomy of Racial Intolerance,” The American Catholic Sociological Review, VII, No. 1, pp. 24–32.

⁷¹⁰ Cf. Catherine Bowen, A Free Artist: the Story of Anton Rubinstein and his Brother (New York: Random House, 1939). This book gives a good picture of the social status of the baptized Jew in Imperial Russia. At Rubinstein’s first great public concert, Emperor Nicholas I rushed out onto the stage and embraced the artist. Cf. Prince Evgeny Trubetzkoy, Iz Proshlago (Vienna: Rus’, n.d.), pp. 52–60.

⁷¹¹ Cf. Ernesto Ximénez Caballero’s article in Anti-Europa, Numero dedicato al razzismo (March, 1933): “What has been and is the Spanish genius? Precisely this: it is anti-racist. . . . For Spain the Jewish problem never was, is not, nor will be, a problem of race, but rather a problem of faith.” Cf. also Donald Pierson, Negroes in Brazil: a Study of Race Contact at Bahía (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942), pp. 193–94. According to this author the Catholics are “communitarian” (and thus “inclusive”) whereas the Protestants, as individualists, are self-conscious: “Distinguishing characteristics are identified with a group [and] automatically increase group-consciousness. . . . The Catholic conceptions tend to lay emphasis upon the community, upon the totality of individuals. For it is through his participation in the community that the individual in the Catholic view gains recognition as a person.” This explanation is undoubtedly a tour de force. It is precisely the Catholic’s (subconscious) notion of the “hidden soul,” and his individualistic refusal to place human beings in neatly divided pigeonholes, which account for his underdeveloped or lacking racialism.

⁷¹² Cf. Franciscus de Vitoia, De potestate ecclesæ, ii.5; in: Genito, Relecciones del Maestro Fray Francisco de Victoria (Madrid, 1934), II, 117. Quoted by Jacques Maritain in “The Person and the Common Good,” Review of Politics, VIII, No. 4 (October, 1946). Cf. also St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa, I–II, q. 21, a. 4 ad 3.

⁷¹³ Cf. Dean W. R. Inge, Protestantism, p. 35: “The idea of equality so dear to the Latin races has no place in Calvinism.” An interesting optical delusion, yet—viewed from the vantage point of Calvinistic predestination—not without good reason. Cf. also Sir Henry S. Maine, Popular Government: Four Essays (London: John Murray, 1885), p. 20.

⁷¹⁴ “European Protestantism tomorrow,” The Christian Century, January 19, 1944, p. 75. Italics ours.

⁷¹⁵ Entry of July 6, 1836; Life, Letters and Journals, II, 30. And, indeed, it is most important to re-evaluate the “reactionary spirit” of the Central Europe monarchies. The son of Thomas G. Masaryk, for instance, was a captain in an Imperial and Royal Hussar regiment while his father conspired in Britain and America against his sovereign. The younger Masaryk—who later committed suicide or was murdered—once confessed to Indro Montanelli that the liberal and magnanimous attitude of the Habsburg monarchy could never be seriously questioned. Cf. I. Montanelli, “La sua ‘insomnia’ si chiama Gottwald,” Il nuovo Corriere della Sera, March 11, 1948, p. 1. And when Péguy, as a French officer, was killed in action, the Berlin periodical Die Aktion published, during the winter of 1914–15, a special Péguy number (IV, No. 42–43) with the picture of the French poet and thinker on the cover. Mutatis mutandis, nothing of that sort could ever have happened in either Britain or the United States.

⁷¹⁶ Cf. Maurice de Wulf, Philosophy and Civilization in the Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1922), pp. 220–41. (The title of this chapter, “Individualism and Social Industry,” is obviously a misprint: it should be “Social Philosophy.”) Cf. also E. Lewis, “Organic Tendencies in Mediæval Political Thought,” American Political Science Review, XXXII, No. 5 (Oct., 1938), p. 849 sq.

To what extent Catholic individualism (“personalism”) can go can be seen from the stand taken by Franciscus de Vitoria, who insisted that a single person could wage a war (against a whole state, if necessary). Cf. F. de Vitoria, “On the Indians and the Laws of War Made by the Spaniards on the Barbarians,” ed. J. Scott Brown, The Classics of International Law, ed. Ernest Nys (Washington, n.d.), p. 167.

⁷¹⁷ We think here primarily of the tragedy of Maximilian of Mexico, a liberal and a Mason, whose defeat gave birth to a series of dictatorships, but neither to democracy nor to liberty. Emperor Pedro II, the “Lincoln of Brazil,” lost his throne because he liberated the slaves. The efforts of the United States to create “more democracy” among her Southern neighbours were necessarily doomed to failure, regardless whether these noble endeavours were backed up by machine guns. All this is vividly illustrated by a conversation between Ambassador W. H. Page and Sir Edward Grey in 1913, recorded by Page himself. Here we get a full picture of Wilsonian Pan-democratism in action against Mexico:

[Grey] “Suppose you have to intervene, what then?”

[Page] “Make ’em vote and live by their decisions.”

[Grey] “But suppose they will not so live?”

[Page] “We’ll go in again and make ‘em vote again.”

[Grey] “And keep this up two hundred years?” asked he.

[Page] “Yes,” said I. “The United States will be here two hundred years, and it can continue to shoot men for that little space till they learn to vote and to rule themselves.”

—See Burton J. Hendrick, The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, Page and Co., 1925), I, 188.

⁷¹⁸ Charles de Gaulle, Le fil de l’épée (Paris: Editions Berger-Levrault, 1932). The volume is dedicated an Maréchal Pétain.

⁷¹⁹ Cf. Ross J. S. Hoffman, “The Spanish Question in World Politics,” Thought, XXII, No. 84 (March, 1947), pp. 26–27.

⁷²⁰ Cf. Salvador de Madariaga, España: ensayo de historia contemporanea (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1942), p. 10. A brilliant analysis of Russian anarchism resulting dialectically in tyranny has been written by Edward Crankshaw, “Russia in Europe: the Conflict of Values,” International Affairs, XXII, No. 4 (October, 1946), pp. 501–10. What this author has to say about the Russian mentality is applicable to the whole Catholic and Greek Orthodox world. Compare Joseph de Maistre, Quatre chapitres sur la Russie, p. 21: “If you could bury a Russian desire under a fortress it would blow it up”; and Henry Adams in H. D. Cater, Henry Adams and His Friends, p. 553: “A lunatic Muscovite bent on wrecking the world, as well as himself, can go far” (Letter to Anna C. M. Lodge, dated Paris, Aug. 14, 1904). See also Élie Paure, “L’âme espagnole,” p. 195: “The Inquisition appears to have been a necessary evil; it was the hair-shirt of this undisciplined people.”

⁷²¹ America’s lack of such an “end” has been stressed by Léon Ferrerò in his Amérìque, miroir grossissant de l’Europe (Paris: Rieder, 1939), pp. 92–93. We cannot fully agree with the late son of Guglielmo Ferrerò in this analysis; there is very definitely such a thing as American messianism.

⁷²² Extraordinary efforts have been made to prove that the political tradition of the United States has definite affinities with Thomism and even with the late Jesuit scholastics. Although this affinity has often been exaggerated by patriotic Catholic authors, the main thesis is not without its merits. The question remains why that seed has not thrived on the other side of the Ocean, nor in Quebec nor south of the Rio Grande. The reason probably lies in the involved intellectualist character of the arguments used by this school. These arguments are rationalizations remote from the living reality of Catholic cultural patterns.

⁷²³ The Irish political experiment is yet too young to be conclusive. There are very strong Protestant overtones in Irish culture, and monarchical undertones which should not be overlooked. Cf. Seán O’Faoláin, King of the Beggars: the Life of Daniel O’Connell (New York, 1938), pp. 14, 107.

⁷²⁴ There has been in Austria and Germany an active suppression of monarchist movements—not only by the Russians but also by the British and the Americans. Allied authorities have arrested Austrian legitimists who previously had been in Nazi concentration camps. Efforts were also made by the United States to write into the Austrian treaty a stipulation forbidding a monarchic restoration; this action, naturally, had the warm support of the U.S.S.R. This attitude is in the best democratic, anti-liberal tradition. (Cf. Note 717.)

⁷²⁵ Even under the present military dictatorship in Spain the fundamental Catholic respect for the principles of liberalism cannot be entirely suppressed or obscured. The freedom of speech is complete and the censorship over books is almost non-existent. During the winter 1049–50 T. Plivier’s Stalingrad is one of the best-sellers. Authors like Thomas Mann, Elliot Roosevelt, Bruce Bliven have no difficulties in getting published. The books of émigrés (like those of Antonio Machado or S. de Madariaga) are either printed in Spain or imported from abroad. And to what extent libertarian concepts can be found even in the ideology of the “Falange” is shown by an the article by one of the co-founders of that organization—García Valdccasas in Revista de estudios paliticos, II, No. 5 (January, 1942), p. 5 sq.—entitled “Los Estados totalitarios y el Estado español.” At the height of the German victories this “fascist” rejected the whole concept of democratic totalitarianism and insisted on the maintenance of a form of government serving “la libertad, la integridad y la dignìdad del hombre.” José Primo de Rivera, chief founder of the “Falange,” energetically protested against the insinuation that his supporters wanted to deify the state. Cf. his speech in the Cortés on December 19, 1934, in his Obras completas (Barcelona: Ediciones Fé, 1939), II, 9. See also p. 368.

⁷²⁶ Bitter is the complaint of Simón Bolivar about the (South) Americans: “There is no faith in America, neither in men nor in nations. Their treaties are papers; their constitutions are books; their elections battles; their liberty anarchy; their life a torture.”—Count Hermann Keyserling, Südamerikanische Meditationen, p. 43. For these and many other reasons we should not be surprised at seeing Catholics who look longingly “beyond the walls.” Jacques Maritain, a convert with a Calvinist background, has enthusiastically praised the democratic achievements of “French rationalists, American Puritains and atheistic Russian Communists.”—Christianity and Democracy, trans. Doris C. Anson (New York: Scribner, 1944), p. 38.

⁷²⁷ The encyclical Quanta Cura of Pius IX (1864) anathematizes the thesis that “the will of the people, manifested ‘publicly’ as it is called, whether by a vote or in any other way, constitutes a supreme law independent of all divine and human law.” This is not a condemnation of parliamentarism; but the formulation “and human law” seems to permit an interpretation which implies condemnation of the plebiscitarian change of an established authority.

⁷²⁸ For this purpose a real understanding of the Continent is an absolute necessity. Such an understanding has to rest on a certain affection) and sympathy—so frequently lacking among Anglo-Saxons. In this connection one is painfully reminded of Stanley Baldwin (Lord Baldwin of Bewdley), who confessed after his resignation: “That was the first thing I said, on packing up my traps and leaving Downing Street: Now I need never speak to another foreigner again.”—Cf. Douglas Woodruff, “Talking at Random,” The Tablet, CXC, No. 5613 (December 20, 1947), p. 394.

⁷²⁹ A phrase used by peasants in the early sixteenth century. Cf. Battolarné de las Casas, Historia de las Indias, Book III, in Colección de documentos inéditos para la historia de España (Madrid: Miguel Ginesta, 1876), LXV, 401.

NOTES TO CHAPTER SIX

⁷³⁰ Cf. Fred Gladstone Bratton, The Legacy of the Liberal Spirit (New York: Scribner, 1943), p. 76: “The eleventh-century Cathari appear to have been not only a form of mediæval Protestantism but a harbinger of twentieth-century liberalism.” Such extreme statements are true only if we see in the Shakers typical Protestants or in Marshal Stalin a twentieth-century liberal.

⁷³¹ Cf. Dr. Richard Scholz, “Marsilius von Padua und die Idee der Demokratie,” Zeitschrift für Politik, I (Nov., 1907), p. 89.

⁷³² Cf. Johann Roffens, Sacri sacerdotii defensio (Cologne, 1525): “Take away Wiclif, Hus, Wessel, Gorchius, you, Luther, would remain very lean and emaciated.” Cf. also George Ticknor’s diary for June 15, 1836 (Life, Letters and Journals, I, 510), describing the Collegium Clementinum in Prague: “I was shown too a curious book for the service of the church, with the music belonging to it, splendidly illustrated, in which, on St. John’s day, is a special service in honor of John Huss, as if he were one of the saints of the Church, which, in fact, he was considered in the sixteenth century. In the margin are three well-finished miniatures—the upper one, Wickliffe striking fire with a steel and flint, and endeavouring in vain to blow it to a flame; the middle one, Huss, lighting a candle at the spark; and below, Luther bearing a blazing torch.” Ticknor also refers to a sixteenth-century book mentioning divus Johannes Huss.

⁷³³ Cf. Dr. Johann Loserth, Wyclif undHus, trans. Rev. M. J. Evans (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1894), p. 71. This Austrian author leaves the question open, quoting also Ludwig von Sagan’s Tractatus de longevo schismate, cap. xxvii. But Aeneas Sylvius (Pope Pius II) in his Historìa Bohemìca (Helmes-tadii: Sustermann, 1699), cap. xxxv, accused Faulfisch of having imported Wycliffe’s books; cf. also cap. xlix: “Of whom a certain man of noble birth, from a family which is called ‘putrid fish,’ studying literature at the city of Oxford in England, offended with the books of John Wycliffe.”

⁷³⁴ On Peter Payne cf. James Baker, A Forgotten Great Englishman; the Life and Work of Peter Payne the Wicliffite (London: The Religious Tract Society, 1894); František Palacký, Dětjìny národu českého w Cechach a w Morawe (3rd ed.; Prague: Tempsky, 1877), III, iii, 221–23; Ioannes Cochlaeus Historiae Hussitarum libri duodecim (Mainz, 1549), viii; F. M. Bartoš, “Literárni činnost M. Jana Rokycana, M. Jana Přybrama, M. Petra Payna,” Sbírka pramenů k poznání literárniho hivota československého, III (1928), No. 9, p. 96 f.

⁷³⁵ Cf. Loserth, op. cit., p. 77: “It was the works of Wiclif which first called forth that deep religious movement in Bohemia.” (Loserth’s italics.)

⁷³⁶ On the Beghards (Picards) cf. also František Palacký, op cit., 13–14, 20. (Citing also Dobrowský, “Geschichte der Böhmischen Pikarden und Adamiten” Acts of the Royal Bohemian Acad, of Sciences, 1768; Johann Loserth, op. cit., pp. 71–72; Magister Laurentius de Brezina (Brezowa?), De gestis et variis accidentibus regni Boemiae, 1414–22, in Kaiserl. Akademie der Wissenschaften, Historische Kommission, Fontes rerum Austriacarum (Vienna, 1856). Laurentius de Brezina identifies—curiously enough—the Beghards with the Adamites.

⁷³⁷ A “Third Empire” is mentioned in the Bible (Dan. 2: 39), which is of bronze. It is followed by a “Fourth Empire.” Cf. also Julius Petersen, Die Sehnsucht nach dem Dritten Reich in deutscher Sage und Dichtung (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1934). (Not satisfactory.)

⁷³⁸ Cf. René Fülöp-Miller, Führer, Schwärmer und Rebellen (Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1934), p. 66.

⁷³⁹ Cf for instance, Heinrich Denifle and Albert Maria Weiss, Luther und Luthertum in der ersten Entwicklung (Mainz: Kirchheim & Co., 1909), II, 148–49, 437 f.

⁷⁴⁰ Cf Jaroslav Goll, “Jak soudil Luther o Husovi,” Časopis Musea Královstvi Ċeského, LIV (1880), No. 1, pp. 60–80; F. M. Bartoš, Husitství a cízìna (Prague: Čin, 1931), p.164. Cf. also ix, 233 f. (“Z činnosti německých husitů”).

⁷⁴¹ Bartoš, loc. cit.

⁷⁴² Cf. Theodor Brieger, Zwei bisher unbekannte Entwürfe des Wormser Edikts gegen Luther (Leipzig, 1910), p. 19.

⁷⁴³ Cf. Luther’s letter to Spalatin, January, 1520, in Dr. Martin Luthers Briefe, Sendschreiben und Bedenken, ed. Wilhelm M. L. de Wette (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1825), p. 390, no. 190.

⁷⁴⁴ Ibid., p. 389, no. 189 (Luther to Spalatin, Jan. 10, 1520).

⁷⁴⁵ Cf. Jan Herben, Huss and His Followers (London: G. Bles, 1926), pp. 196–97.

⁷⁴⁶ Quoted by Dr. Carl Schmidt, “Über die Sekten zu Strassburg im Mittelalter,” Zeitschrift für historische Theologie, II (Leipzig, 1840), pp. 71–72. Copied from a text by Wolff Köpphel, written in 1524.

⁷⁴⁷ M. Luther, “Von der neuen Eckischen Bullen und Lügen” (1520), Werke, Weimar edition (Weimar, 1888), VI, 591.

⁷⁴⁸ Cf. Heinrich Boehmer, Der junge Luther (2nd ed.; Leipzig: Koehler und Amelang, 1939), pp. 256–57, 263–64.

⁷⁴⁹ Cf. his Tischreden, No. 881; Sämmtliche Werke, Erlangen edition, LVIII, 316: “Hussites, Waldensians and Papists misuse the Gospel.” This anti-Hussite statement is rare in its unfriendliness towards Hussite ideas. Compare also with Luther’s sermon “Am Tage des heiligen Warleichnams Christi,” op. cit. (Erlangen, 1828), XV, 347.

⁷⁵⁰ Cf. M. Luther, “Grund und Ursach aller Artickel D. Martin Luther, szo durch Romische Bulle unrechtlich vordampt syn” (1521), Werke (Weimar, 1897), VII, 431: “Not merely some, but all the articles of Johann Huss condemned at Constance are quite consistent with Christian teaching”; VI, 455: “I will make of Johann Huss no saint nor yet a martyr, as some Bohemians do, though I realize that he was unjustly treated.” (This pamphlet also contains a condemnation of the views of the Pighartten on the Eucharist.)

⁷⁵¹ Briefwechsel Martin Luthers (Weimar, 1930), I, 419–20.

⁷⁵² Ibid., 514.

⁷⁵³ Ibid., II, 42.

⁷⁵⁴ Ibid., I, 422. According to Hartmann Grisar, Luther was perusing Hus’ De ecclesia in February, 1520. He had already seen some of Hus’ writings in his monastery library, but he had not been impressed by them and had put them aside. Cf. H. Grisar, S.J., Luther, trans. E. M. Lamond (London: Kegan Paul, 1915), III, 143; I, 106.

⁷⁵⁵ M. Luther, Werke, Erlangen edition (Erlangen, 1847), XLI, 306–7. Compare also his “Glosse auf das vermeintliche Kaiserliche Edikt” (ca. 1531), Werke (Weimar, 1910), XXX, Part 3, p. 387. It is interesting to compare the phrase “Sanct Iohannes Huss” in this passage with the remark contained in Note 750 above.

⁷⁵⁶ Cf. Real-Encyklopädie für protestantische Theologie und Kirche, ed. Herzog and Besser (Stuttgart & Hamburg, 1856), VI, 337. The actual basis of this legend—consisting of a letter of Hus, an exclamation of Hieronymus, and some artificial addenda—can be gleaned from Documenta magìstri Iohannis Hus, ed. F. Palacký (Prague, 1869), p. 40 (Epist. 17), and Adolf Hauffen’s paper in “Neu Fischart-Studien,” 7. Ergänzungsheft zu Euphorion (Leipzig, 1908), pp. 164–65. Hus, writing from his jail in Constance, foresaw the coming of eagles and other birds with sharp sight—but not of an indigestible swan.

⁷⁵⁷ “Operations in Psalmos,” Werke (Weimar, 1892), V, 451–52.

⁷⁵⁸ Cf. Luther, “Tischreden,” No. 1345 (104), Werke, Erlangen edition (Erlangen, 1854), LIX, 246. Compare with “Tischreden,” No. 3522, Werke, Weimar edition (Weimar, 1914), III, p. 375.

⁷⁵⁹ M. Luther, “Tischreden,” No. 882 (104), Werke, Erlangen edition (Erlangen, 1853), LVIII, 316.

759a Cf. James Gairdner, Lollardy and the Reformation in England (London: Macmillan, 1908), I, 314, 366–67.

⁷⁶⁰ Cf. Karl Loewenstein, Political Reconstruction (New York: Macmillan, 1946), p. 155. For a well balanced view on Prussia cf. S. D. Stirk, The Prussian Spirit (London: Faber and Faber, 1941).

⁷⁶¹ Cf. Pierre J. Huss, Heil and Farewell (London: Herbert Jenkins, 1943), pp. 168–69; also Henri Perrin, Journal d’un prêtre ouvrier en Allemagne (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1945), pp. 67–68.

⁷⁶² Cf. Howard K. Smith, Last Train from Berlin (New York: Knopf, 1942), pp. 277 and 280; Arvid Fredborg in the London Daily Express, September 28, 1943.

⁷⁶³ Many of the salient pastoral letters of the German bishops were published in The (London) Tablet (e.g., May 27, 1944, etc.). Fairly comprehensive is Mgr. Johann Neuhäusler, Kreuz und Hakenkreuz (Munich: Kösel, 1946). Compare also with Ambassador Dodd’s Diary, ed. W. E. and M. Dodd (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1941), pp. 265–66.

⁷⁶⁴ See the Philadelphia Record, April 30, 1946.

⁷⁶⁵ See Barth’s letter in Évangile et liberté, February, 1940; Reinhold Niebuhr, Christianity and Power Politics (New York: Scribner, 1940), pp. 49–51; Dean W. R. Inge, “Nationalism and National Character,” The Quarterly Review, CCLXXVII, No. 549 (July, 1941), p. 133; Erich Fromm, The Fear of Freedom (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1942); Werner Hegemann, Entlarvte Geschichte (Amsterdam: Querido, 1933), p. 70; William M. McGovern, From Luther to Hitler (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1941), pp. 30–35; Franz Neumann, Behemoth (New York: Oxford University Press, 1942), pp. 85 sq.; Karl Otten, A Combine of Aggression: Masses, Élite and Dictatorship, p. 296; Peter F. Wiener, German with Tears (London: Cresset Press, 1942), pp. 64–65, and Martin Luther: Hitler’s Spiritual Ancestor (London: Hutchinson, n.d.); G. P. Gooch and others, The German Mind and Outlook, p. 4; and Paul J. Reiter, Martin Luther: hans Tid, hans Personlighedog Forudsaettningerne for hans reformatorisk Vaerk: en psykiatrisk-historisk Studie (Copenhagen: Westermanns Førlag, 1946), II, 148–59.

Yet the present author would like to make it known that he does not share the Denifle-Hartmann thesis on Luther, but believes that the Reformer had—as a French Jesuit admitted—une experience religieuse authentique. Luther was not, as so many of our fellow-Catholics rashly assume, simply a malicious neurotic. For a balanced and more constructive Catholic analysis of Luther cf. Johannes Hessen, Luther in katholischer Sicht (Bonn, 1947); also Yves Congar, O.P., “Luther vu par les Catholiques” in Vers l’Unite Chrétienne, No. 21 (March, 1950), pp. 3–6.

⁷⁶⁶ Wilhelm Kraft, Christ versus Hitler? (New York: The Lutheran Press, 1937), pp. 32 and 75. The question mark is on the cover, but not on the title page.

The Protestant character of National Socialism has also been freely acknowledged by Pastor Georg Casalis in his article “L’Église évangélique en Allemagne,” Temps Modernes, V, Nos. 46–47 (Aug.-Sept., 1949), p. 389: “In spite of Hitler’s, and above all, of Goebbels’ Catholic background, the movement was Protestant in character.”

⁷⁶⁷ Cf. Ernst Troeltsch, Die Bedeutung des Protestantismus für die Entstehung der modernen Welt (Munich and Berlin: Oldenbourg, 1911), p. 31.

⁷⁶⁸ He wrote: “Besides, in respect to God, whether in things pertaining to salvation or damnation, he [man] does not have free will, but is a subject and a slave, either to God’s will or Satan’s.”—Werke (Weimar, 1908), XVIII, 638.

⁷⁶⁹ Cf. Eugene Choisy, L’état chrétien calviniste à Genève au temps de Théodore, de Bèze (Geneva: Eggimann, 1902), p. 568. To the contrary cf. Friedrich Gogarten, editor and commentator, in Luther: vom unfreien Willen (Berlin: Kaiser, 1924), pp. 336–37, 369.

⁷⁷⁰ Cf. Karl Adam, “To Move Toward Christian Unity,” The Commonweal, LIV, No. 18 (Aug. 10, 1951), p. 423.

⁷⁷¹ Cf. Note 663.

For a good description of the puritanical spirit in Protestantism see Edmund Gosse, Father and Son (London: Heinemann, 1949 [Penguin Books, No. 700]) Especially p. 227.

⁷⁷² Cf. Joseph de Maistre, Les soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg (Paris: Garnier, n.d.), II, 228.

⁷⁷³ See above, pp. 195–97. Cf. also J. T. M. Zetter, Das alte Luthertum und der neue Protestantismus (Regensburg: G. J. Manz, 1850).

⁷⁷⁴ Cf. F. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944), p. 162. Compare with Bruno Malitz, Die Leibesübungen in der nationalsozialistischen Idee (Munich: F. Eher, 1932), p. 28: “National Socialist sport strengthens the body, liberal sport ruins it!”

⁷⁷⁵ Cf. M. Luther, “Predigten über etzliche Kapitel des Evangelisten Matthäi,” Werke, Erlangen edition, XLIV, 156–57; Tischreden, Weimar edition (Weimar, 1921), VI, 143 (No. 6718).

⁷⁷⁶ Cf. Emil Brunner, Das Gebot und die Ordnungen, p. 449. This is also the reason why we have no “authoritative” or “definitive” work on the political theory of the Reformers. There is even no Lutheran equivalent to Hans Baron’s Calvins Staatsanschauung und das konfessionelle Zeitalter (Munich and Berlin: Oldenbourg, 1924). Besides those mentioned below cf. Hans Erichsen, Der Staatsbegriff bei Luther (Hamburg, 1926), and J. W. Allen, “Luther’s Political Conceptions,” Tudor Studies, ed. R. V. Seton-Watson (London: Longmans, Green, 1924).

⁷⁷⁷ Nor did Tyndale produce a coherent political philosophy, though he favoured an all-powerful state. Cf. S. L. Greenslide, The Work of William Tindale (London: Blackie, 1938), pp. 197–201.

⁷⁷⁸ Cf., for instance, Friedrich Gogarten, Politische Ethik (Jena: Diederichs, 1932), p. 217. Cf. M. Luther, “De servo arbitrio,” Werke (Weimar, 1908), XVIII, 761–62.

⁷⁷⁹ Cf. H. von Treitschke, Historische und politische Aufsätze (Leipzig, 1886), II, 413.

⁷⁸⁰ Werke, Erlangen edition, XIV, 263.

⁷⁸¹ Werke, Weimar edition (Weimar, 1908), XVIII, 303. (Written in 1525.)

⁷⁸² Werke, Weimar edition (Weimar, 1897), XIX, 632.

⁷⁸³ Werke, Erlangen edition, XXIII, 89. (Written in 1523.)

⁷⁸⁴ Tischreden, Weimar edition (Weimar, 1912), I, 79 (No. 171).

⁷⁸⁵ Werke, Weimar edition (Weimar, 1903), XXIX, 612–13. There are several contradictions in this chapter which make the rest unclear.

⁷⁸⁶ Werke, Erlangen edition, XXXIII, 389.

⁷⁸⁷ “Ein Sendbrief von dem harten Büchlein wider die Bauern” (1525), Werke, Erlangen edition, XXIV, 309.

⁷⁸⁸ “Am Tage der Opferung Christi in dem Tempel” (Kirchenpostille), Werke, Erlangen edition, IV, 258–59. Cf. also “Von Kaufshandlung und Wucher” (1524), Werke, Weimar edition (Weimar, 1899), XI, 302.

⁷⁸⁹ Letter to Johann Rühel (March 30, 1525); Werke, Erlangen edition, LIII, 305.

⁷⁹⁰ “Tischreden,” No. 2341, Werke, Erlangen edition, LXI, 309.

⁷⁹¹ “Von weltlicher Oberkeit, wie weit man ihr Gehorsam schuldig sei” (1523), Erlangen edition, XX, 89–90.

⁷⁹² Tischreden, Weimar edition, VI, 285 (No. 6944).

⁷⁹³ Letter to Spalatin, March 5, 1519; Briefwechsel, Weimar edition (Weimar, 1930), I, 356.

⁷⁹⁴ Cf. Werke, Erlangen edition, XXXI, p. 116.

⁷⁹⁵ Werke, Weinwr edition, VII, 238.

⁷⁹⁶ Recently an interesting effort was made to shift some of the blame to Melanchthon, the “schoolmaster of Germany.” Cf. Franz Hildebrandt, Melanchthon, Alien or Ally? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1946).

⁷⁹⁷ Cf. “Verantwortung des aufgelegten Aufruhrs, von Herzog Georg, sammt einen Trostbrief an die Christen, von ihm aus Leipzig unschuldig verjagt” (1533), Werke, Erlangen edition, XXXI, 236 f.

⁷⁹⁸ “Widier die mordischen und räubischen rotten der bauren,” Werke, Weimar edition (Weimar, 1908), XVIII, 361.

⁷⁹⁹ “Ein Sendbrief von dem harten Büchlein wider die Bauern,” Werke, Weimar edition (Weimar, 1908), XVIII, 389.

⁸⁰⁰ Cf. Benedictus de Spinoza, Tractatus theologico-politicus (Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1942), cap. xvi, p. 208.

⁸⁰¹ Tischreden, Weimar edition (Weimar, 1912), I, 179.

⁸⁰² cf. “Von Weltlicher Oberkeit, wie weit man ihr Gehorsam schuldig sei,” Werke, Erlangen edition, XX, 104–5.

⁸⁰³ Cf. Tischreden, Weimar edition, III, 440; II, 196 (Nos. 3594 and 1733).

⁸⁰⁴ Tischreden, Weimar edition (Weimar, 1919), V, 8–9 (No. 2507).

⁸⁰⁵ Tischreden, Weimar edition (Weimar, 1916), IV, 606 (No. 4997).

⁸⁰⁶ cf Tischreden, Weimar edition (Weimar 1914), III, 432 (No. 3585).

⁸⁰⁷ Cf. Heinrich Boehmer, Der junge Luther, p. 308.

⁸⁰⁸ Cf. I. Esdras 9. 10; also II Esdras (Neh.) 13. 23–30. Compare also Herbert Schöffler, “Abendland und Altes Testament,” Kölner anglistische Arbeiten (Bochum, 1937), on Jewish-Protestant cultural interrelationships.

⁸⁰⁹ Cf. his Marcion (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1921). Cf. also the reply by Engelbert Krebs, Urkirche und Judentum (Berlin: Philo-Verlag, 1926).

⁸¹⁰ Cf. James Parkes, The Jew in the Mediaeval Community (London: Soncino Press, 1938), 103–4 (summing up the papal attitude); Ricarda Huch, Römisches Reich Deutscher Nation (Berlin & Zurich: Atlantis Verlag, 1934), p. 195; Cecil Roth, “The Popes and the Jews,” The Church Quarterly Review, CXXIII, no. 245 (1936), p. 75; F. Gregorovius, Der Ghetto und die Juden in Rom (Berlin: Schocken, 1935); Emmanuel Rodocanacchi, Le Saint-Siège et les Juifs; le ghetto à Rome (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1891); Solomon Grayzel, The Church and the Jews in the Thirteenth Century (Phila.: Dropsie College, 1933).

⁸¹¹ Cf. the paper of J. M. [erroneously “H. S.”] Oesterreicher, “The Jewish Question,” The Dublin Review, No. 439 (April, 1946), pp. 139–41. Father Oesterreicher holds that Luther was convinced of the pope’s identity with Antichrist. Since the conversion of the Jews, according to tradition and scriptural exagesis, would coincide with the Day of Judgment, the Reformer thus hoped for a tangible confirmation of his thesis. The failure of his “proof” turned him against the Jews.

⁸¹² Das Jhesus Christus eyn geborner Jude sey, first published at Wittenberg in 1523.

⁸¹³ Other works not quoted: Wider die Sabbather (1538), Vermahnung gegen die Juden (1546). The latter is probably the last piece of the Reformer’s writing published during his life time.

⁸¹⁴ An obliquely Nazi book by a young Lutheran theologian is Erich Vogelsang’s Luthers Kampf gegen die Juden (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1933).

⁸¹⁵ Werke, Erlangen ed., XXXII, 259.

⁸¹⁶ Werke, Weimar ed. (Weimar, 1920), LIII, 523 f.

⁸¹⁷ Ibid., 526.

⁸¹⁸ Walter Linden, Luthers Kampfschriften gegen das Judentum (Berlin: Klinkhardt und Biermann, 1935), p. 45.

⁸¹⁹ Karl Kindt, “Luthers Kampf gegen das Judentum,” Die neue Literatur, February, 1939, p. 77.

⁸²⁰ Tischreden, Weimar ed., III, 441 (No. 3597).

⁸²¹ Cf. René Capitant, “Hobbes et l’état totalitaire,” Archives de Philosophie du droit et de sociologie juridique, VI (1936), No. 1–2, p. 74. This author points out quite rightly that Luther was “Hobbesian,” but that Hobbes was autocratic, not totalitarian. On Luther’s political theories cf. also Kurt Matthes, Luther und die Obrigkeit (Munich: Ernst Reinhardt, 1937).

⁸²² Cf. Luther’s attacks against the idea of personal solitude. (Werke: Tischreden, Weimar ed., II, 50, No. 1329, and IV, 622, No. 5028). The Cathari, significantly, had to make the solemn promise neither to travel, nor even to eat alone. Cf. Edmond Broeckx, La catharisme: études sur les doctrines, la vie religieuse et morale avant la Croisade (Louvain: Hoogstraten, 1916), p. 112. Sir Ernest Barker in his book The National Character and the Factors in its Formation (London and New York: Harper, 1927), p. 206, insists on the desire for loneliness as a typical Puritanic trait; yet this yearning for solitude hardly cancels the eminently communitarian character of Puritanism.

⁸²³ Cf. Franz Neumann, Behemoth, p. 121; Martin Gumpert, Hölle im Paradies (Stockholm: Bermann-Fischer, 1939), p. 38. Compare with Max Jordan, Beyond All Fronts (Milwaukee: Bruce Publishing Company, 1944), p. 323. For a different, but not opposing, view cf. Wilhelm Röpke, Die deutsche Frage (Erlenback and Zurich: Eugen Rentsch Verlag, 1945), pp. 147–48. See also p. 368.

⁸²⁴ Cf. Alfred Rosenberg; “Pilgrims to Rome; the Betrayal of Luther,” Friends of Europe Publications, No. 66 (London, 1938), pp. 1–24.

The conscious-subconscious identifications of race and religion are not rare, and we find them not only in Germany, but also in the United States and in Britain. Cf. the brilliant passage in R. W. Chambers, Thomas More (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1936), p. 389.

On the problem of a “religious culture” viewed from a Protestant angle cf. Paul Tillich, The Protestant Era, trans, J. L. Adams (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1948), pp. 5 sq., 295, 298.

⁸²⁵ The “greater tolerance” of Protestant cultures is also quite mythological. The burning of witches continued in the American colonies (not to mention Scotland) long after this practice was given up in Catholic Europe. Non-Catholics can be cabinet members in Brazil, but Swedish ministers of state have to be Lutherans. France had several Protestant presidents and prime ministers. Italy had a Protestant foreign minister of part Jewish extraction (Sidney Sonnino); Rome had a Jewish mayor. It would be difficult to imagine a Catholic Secretary of State of part Japanese extraction in the U.S., or a Catholic mayor in Belfast or Edinburgh. The most tolerant Protestants were those of Germany. Saxony was over ninety per cent Protestant, but had a Catholic dynasty.

⁸²⁶ The Protestant Boy Scouts of Hungary accepted the invitation of the Swedish Scouts at the Jamboree of Gödöllö (1933) to share in their worship. The Hungarians left during the service, declaring that they had never suspected the Swedes of being papists. Almost all the externals of the Catholic Mass are preserved in Sweden’s Lutheran ritual.

⁸²⁷ On the total human dependence on God cf. A. C. MacGiffert, Protestant Thought Before Kant (New York: Scribner, 1929), p. 24.

827a Cf. Max Scheler, Vom Ewigen im Menschen (Leipzig: Der Neue Geist), I. “Religiöse Erneuerung,” p. 130.

⁸²⁸ Cf. Émile Doumergue, “Calvin et l’entente de Wilson à Calvin,” Revue de métaphysique et de morale, XXV (Sept.-Dec., 1918), p. 825: “Thus Calvin, John Knox, the English Puritans and their glorious revolution, the American Puritans and their Bill of Rights, the Declaration of ’89 in France, Wilson . . . the links are splendid and the chain is unbreakable.”

⁸²⁹ Cf. Ernst Troeltsch, who in “Die Soziallehren der christlichen Kirchen,” Gesammelte Werke (3d ed.; Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1923), I, 702–3, admits that “both [Calvinism and Anabaptism] have more prepared modern democracy and provided it a spiritual backbone than created it. And besides, the first step took place against the genuine character of Calvinism.”

⁸³⁰ H. T. Buckle saw a connection between the Jansenists, the Fronde and the French Revolution. Cf. his History of Civilization in England (New York: Appleton, 1880), I, 614. On the Calvinistic background of the French Revolution cf. René de Laboulaye, “Calvin et la maconnerie,” Revue des questions historiques [Paris], January, 1939, pp. 11–15; C. A. Bernouilli, “La réforme de Luther et les problèmes de la culture présente,” Revue de méta-physique et de morale, XXV, 533 f; C. L. von Haller, quoted by W. H. von Sonntag, “Die Staatsauffassung Carl Ludwig von Hallers, ihre metaphysische Grundlegung und ihre politische Formung,” List-Studien, No. 2 (Jena: G. Fischer, 1929), p. 30. In this connection it is worth while to remember that the French Calviniste of the late seventeenth century tended to believe in the sovereignty of the people. Cf. Note 593.

⁸³¹ See Note 828; G. P. Gooch, English Democratic Ideas in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1927), pp. 312–13; Charles Reade, “Lafayette, Washington et les Protestants de France,” in Société de l’histoire du protestantisme français, Bulletin historique et littéraire, LII (1893), p. 225 sq.; Bernard Faÿ, L’esprit révolutionnaire en France et aux États-Unis à la fin du XVIIIe siede (Paris: Champion, 1925). Metternich himself was convinced of the American influence on the French revolutionaries. Cf. his secret memorandum for Alexander I (Nachg. Papiere, III. 407).

⁸³² On the Calvinist-Girondist connections cf. A. Lods, “Le dernier chapelain de l’ambassade de Suède à Paris: Charles-Christian Gambs,” Bulletin historique et littéraire, LI (1892), p. 151; G. de Felice, Histoire des Protestants de France (Paris: Cherbuliez, 1856), pp. 569, 573, 577, 603–4; Edmund Burke, “Remarks on the Policy of the Allies,” Works (3rd ed.; London: Little, Brown, 1869), IV, 452. Benjamin Constant protested against the anti-Protestant riots in Nîmes in 1815, which resulted from the pro-revolutionary attitude of the Calvinists: cf. Benjamin Constant, Collection complète des ouvrages publiés sur le gouvernement représentatif, etc. (Paris: Plancher, 1819), III, 237–64. Cf. also Joseph Chambon, Der französische Protestantismus: sein Weg bis zur französischen Revolution (Munich: C. Kaiser Verlag, 1937), p. 208.

⁸³³ Cf. Crane Brinton, The Jacobins (New York: Macmillan, 1930), p. 153; Joseph de Maistre, Quatre chapitres, pp. 18, 63–64.

⁸³⁴ Cf. Ulrich Bernstein, “Hegel’s Lutheran Background,” The Review of Religion, III (1939), No. 3, p. 276 sq.

⁸³⁵ Cf. M. Luther, “Dass eine christliche Versammlung oder Gemein(d)e Recht und Macht habe, alle Lehre zu ertheilen und Lehrer zu berufen, ein-und abzusetzen, Grund und Ursach aus der Schrift” (1523), Werke, Weimar ed. (Weimar, 1900), XI, 414 sq.

⁸³⁶ Cf. Søren Kierkegaard, The Present Age, pp. 28–30, 61–62.

⁸³⁷ Cf. Søren Kierkegaard, Journals, Nos. 29, 1310, 1399, 1406.

⁸³⁸ Cf. G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. Sibree (London & N.Y.: Colonial Press, 1900), p. 453.

⁸³⁹ Interview in the Petit Journal, No. 25729 (June 26, 1933).

⁸⁴⁰ Cf. Hans J. Wolff, Die neue Regierungsform des deutschen Reiches (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1933 [“Recht und Staat in Geschichte und Gegenwart,” no. 104]), pp. 28, 35.

⁸⁴¹ Dr. F. Fick, Deutsche Demokratie (Munich: J. F. Lehmann, 1918), pp. 4, 5.

⁸⁴² Wilhelm Wiskott, Die Volksherrschaft als nationales Ziel; ein deutsches Volksprogramm (Berlin: Karl Curtius, 1920), p. 10.

⁸⁴³ Ibid., p. 15.

⁸⁴⁴ Cf. Georges de Lagarde, Recherches sur l’esprit politique de la Réforme (Paris: Picarde, 1926), p. 425, and Heinrich Boehmer, Briefe und kleine Schriften (1868), II, p. 427. The “liberty” the Reformers spoke about was not personal freedom, but the “liberty of the Scriptures from papist corruption.”

⁸⁴⁵ This is true of Calvin’s practical views. In theology he was at least as pessimistic and authoritarian. Cf. Institutiones, II, cap. ii, par. 12 (on the rectitude of human will), IV, cap. i, par. 4 (on salvation outside the Church).

⁸⁴⁶ See above, Note 625.

⁸⁴⁷ Cf. C. Mercier, “Calvin et la démocratie,” Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique, XXX, No. 1 (January, 1934), p. 5 f. Conclusions: pp. 50–53.

⁸⁴⁸ Heinrich Boehmer, Luther and the Reformation in the Light of Modern Research, trans. E. S. G. Potter (N.Y.: Dial Press, 1930), pp. 318–19.

⁸⁴⁹ Ibid., pp. 326–27.

⁸⁵⁰ Cf. Ernst Troeltsch, Die Soziallehren der christlichen Kirchen, pp. 609, 611; Emil Brunner, Das Gebot und die Ordnungen, pp. 649–50. See also Calvin, Institutiones, IV, xx, 25 (“A bad king is an ire de Dieu who must be venerated just like a good king”); IV, xx, 3 (“Resistance against tyrants is permissible only in a legal form”); IV, xx, 27 (“He [the king of Babylon] possessed the kingdom, which possession alone showed that he was placed on the throne by the order of God”). Compare this with Note 793 above. Cf. also Calvin, Praelationes in Jercmiam, cap. xviii, and Comment. S. Pauli Epist. ad Rom., xiii.

⁸⁵¹ Cf. Calvin, Comment, in I. Libri Samuelis, cap. ii, 27–30. Cf. also A. Kuypers, Het Calvinisme (Amsterdam & Pretoria: Hoveckker, 1899 [?] [Stone Lectures (Princeton)]).

⁸⁵² Cf. Ernst Troeltsch, Soziallehren, p. 671 sq. On the relationship between Calvin and Rousseau cf. A. J. M. Cornelissen, Calvijn en Rousseau (Nijmegen & Utrecht: Dekker, 1931). On the democratic tendencies in sixteenth-century French Calvinism cf. Laboulaye, Calvine et la maconnerie, p. 11. As to the differences between Genevan and extra-Geneva Calvinism cf. F. von Bezold, “Staat und Gesellschaft des Reformationszeitalters,” Kultur der Gegenwart, II, Vol. I, p. 81.

⁸⁵³ Cf. Dr. Hellmuth Erbe, Die Hugenotten in Deutschland (Essen: Essener Verlagsanstalt, 1938); Erman et Réclam, Mémoires pour servir a l’histoire des réfugiés françois dans les états du Rai (Berlin, 1782–99); Jean Louis Armand de Quatrefages de Bréau, The Prussian Race Ethnologically Considered, trans. Isabella Innes (London: Virtue and Co., 1872); Chambeau, Die Auswirkung der Abwanderung der Hugenotten aus Frankreich auf Frankreich und auch auf Deutschland und die Deutschen (Berlin: Hugenotten Verein, 1938). About four million inhabitants of Prussia can claim part Huguenot ancestry. No wonder that Grillparzer considered Berlin to be essentially “French and Jewish.”

⁸⁵⁴ Cf. Choisy, L’État calviniste à Genève, p. 490: “The Calvinist spirit was a spirit of solidarity, and constantly engendered devotion to one’s native land, concern for the defence of common convictions, the sentiment of social duty.” Compare with Georg Jaeger, “Die politischen Ideen Luthers und ihr Einfluss auf die innere Entwicklung Preussens,” Preussische Jahrbücher, CXIII (1903), p. 275.

⁸⁵⁵ Cf. D. W. Brogan, France under the Republic (N.Y.: Harper, 1940), p. 556: “Britain had regarded the unification of Germany under Prussia (once it was achieved) with approval; it spread Protestant civilization over a wider area and was in tune with the spirit of the age.” But when the Franco-Prussian War broke out even the American Congress applauded the “good news.” Cf. Othon Guerlac, “Le suicide de Prévost-Paradol à Washington et l’opinion américaine,” Revue de littérature comparée, VIII (1928), No. 1, p. 116. This tallies well with the jubilation in Paris when the news of Austria’s defeat at Sadowa arrived. Cf. F. Grimm, “Du Testament de Richelieu à Jacques Bainville,” Le Mois Suisse, III, No. 23 (February, 1941), p. 64.

⁸⁵⁶ Theodor Fontane, himself of Huguenot descent, tells us that during the middle of the eighteenth century about half of Berlin was French. A similar situation prevailed in Magdeburg.

⁸⁶⁷ See the well documented paper by Jan Kucharzewski, “Delusions of the West and First Warnings,” Bulletin of the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences in America, II, No. 4 (July, 1944), pp. 1014–1076.

⁸⁵⁸ Cf. The Letters of William James, I, 161–62 (letter to Henry Bowditch, April 8, 1871): “In England, America and Germany, a regular advance is possible . . . but in France, nothing of that sort; no one feels secure against what he considers evil, by any guarantee of force; and if his opponents get uppermost, he thinks all is forever lost. . . . The want of true sympathy in the French character, their love of external mechanical order, their satisfaction in police regulation, their everlasting cry of ‘traitor,’ all point to it.” James concluded quite shrewdly that religion must be at the bottom of these attitudes. He lauded the peaceful co-operation of religion, rationalism and the “revolutionary party “in Protestant countries.” But in France Belief and Denial are separated by a chasm. The step once made, écrasez l’infame is the only watchword on either side. How any order is possible except by a Caesar to hold the balance, it is hard to see.”—James, quite logically, hoped for a unification of Germany under Prussia as a “great, practical stride towards civilization” (see his letter to his mother, dated Dresden, June 12, 1867; op. cit., I, 95 and Note 705).

⁸⁵⁹ Cf. Søren Kierkegaard, Journals, No. 511 (p. 138).

⁸⁶⁰ Cf. E. M. Butler, The Tyranny of Greece over Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1935), pp. 3–4.

⁸⁶¹ Cf. Hermann Keyserling, Das Spektrum Europas, pp. 122–23, 136.

⁸⁶² A brilliant analysis of German extremism can be found in Baron F. von Hügel’s “The German Soul and the Great War,” The Quest, VI, No. 3 (April, 1915). The story of Margarete Peter related on p. 23 f. reminds one strongly of John Jay Chapman’s act in Edmund Wilson, The Triple Thinkers (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1938), pp. 168–69. Yet Chapman had a very orthodox Protestant background.

⁸⁶³ Cf. H. Keyserling, Das Spektrum Europas, p. 227.

⁸⁶⁴ Cf. Fernand Baldensperger, “L’initiation américane de Georges Clémenceau,” Revue de littérature comparée, VIII, No. 1 (Jan.-Mar., 1928), p. 147.

⁸⁶⁵ A fairly good analysis of the non-Protestant character of Germany is to be found in Frédéric Hoffet, L’impérialisme Protestant. Hoffet, himself a Protestant, takes Germany off the list of Protestant nations.

⁸⁶⁶ Cf. Harold R. McKinnon, “The Higher Law” (see above, Note 583). Compare with Justice O. W. Holmes, Jr.: “I loathe war . . . but I do think that man at present is a predatory animal. I think that the sacredness of human life is a purely municipal idea of no validity outside the jurisdiction. I believe that force, mitigated so far as may be by good manners, is the ultima ratio. . . . It seems to me that every society rests on the death of men.”—Holmes-Pollock Letters (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1941), II, 36 and 41. See p. 368.

⁸⁶⁷ This fatality was deplored by such acute observers as F. A. Voigt, Unto Cæsar (New York: Putnam, 1938), pp. 126–27, and Peter Viereck, Metapolitics, pp. 54–55, 212–13. Brüning wanted to restore the monarchy as a last resort to stem the Nazi tide, but failed: cf. John W. Wheeler-Bennett, Hindenburg, the Wooden Titan (London: Macmillan, 1936), pp. 353–68. (We have verified these accounts.) Thus it is also not surprising that Professor Wilhelm Röpke, Europe’s leading neo-liberal, in a memorandum to the Allies recommended a monarchical restoration in Germany. Cf. W. Röpke, Die deutsche Frage, p. 227. And Jacques Bainville, the French historian, clearly foresaw the rise of a wild nationalistic movement within the framework of a defeated Germany turned into a republic. Cf. L’Action française, Sept. 29, 1914.

⁸⁶⁸ Cf. Allen Welsh Dulles, Germany’s Underground, pp. 115–16. Compare also with James Stern, The Hidden Damage (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1947), pp. 167–77.

⁸⁶⁹ Cf. Letters of Franklin K. Lane, ed. A. W. Lane and L. H. Hall (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1922), p. 297: “Theoretically, the President said, German Austria should go to Germany, as all were of one language and one race, but this would mean the establishment of a great central Roman Catholic nation which would be under the control of the papacy, and would be particularly objectionable to Italy.” The final argument cannot be taken seriously.

⁸⁷⁰ The German Protestant area is almost entirely encircled by Catholic territory. There are only about forty-five miles in North Sleswig and on the Dutch border near Emden where German Protestants border on Protestants of other nations.

⁸⁷¹ Cf. Joseph de Maistre, Quatre chapitres, p. 20.

NOTES TO CHAPTER SEVEN

⁸⁷² Lettre aux Anglais, p. 225.

⁸⁷³ Ernest Renan, La réforme, intellectuelle et morale (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1884), p. 114. Disraeli uttered a similar warning to those who confused British and Continental liberalism: see his Endymion (London, 1920), p. 7. Cf. also the preface of James H. Nichols to the American edition of J. Burckhardt’s Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen—Force and Freedom (New York: Pantheon, 1943), pp. 7–8.

⁸⁷⁴ Both Guicciardini and Savonarola were rather sceptical as to the ability of the parliaments to preserve the personal liberties. Cf. Bede Jarrett, Social Theories of the Middle Ages (Boston: Little, Brown, 1926), pp. 27–28.

⁸⁷⁵ Cf. Reinhard Höhn, Die Wandlung im staatsrechtlichen Denken (Hamburg, 1934) and Gottfried Neesse, Führergewalt (Tübingen, 1940), both quoted by Franz Neumann, Behemoth, p. 469. Compare with Max Irlinger, Die Rechte des Führers und Reichskanzlers als Staatsoberhaupt des Deutschen Reiches (Dissertation; Innsbruck, 1939), p. 71.

These considerations have to be understood in the light of Göring’s remark: “Hitler is the German people and the German people is Hitler” (Karl Otten, Combine of Aggression, p. 313).

⁸⁷⁶ As quoted in Hermann Rauschning, Hitler Speaks (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1939), p. 230; compare with Note 839. Compare also with Edgar J. Jung, Sinndeutung der deutschen Revolution, p. 95 sq. and Gerhard Kroll, Was ist der Staat? (Munich: Schnell und Steiner, 1950), pp. 89–90. For a full understanding of the nationalistic aspects of the French Revolution, see Crane Brinton, The Jacobins, especially pp. 145, 147, 153.

⁸⁷⁷ Cf. Benito Mussolini in his Gespräche mit Emil Ludwig (Berlin, Vienna and Leipzig: Zsolnay, 1932), p. 74: “Can’t a republican be quite as much a nationalist as a monarchist—and perhaps even more so?” (Italics ours.)

The non-monarchical nationalist Führer of Germany was foreseen by the prophetic Louis Veuillot who wrote in his “Parfum de Rome” [Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Lethielleux, 1926), IX, 357]: “Allemagne! Allemagne! a qui le ciel avait tout donné! Quand tu verras reparaître un fantôme d’empereur qui ne sera ni l’élu de tes princes, ni l’oint du Christ, et qui ne tiendra pas la glaive pour prptéger la justice et défendre le vieux droit, mais qui se dira l’empereur du peuple et la glaive du droit nouveau, alors ce sera l’heure de la grande expiation.”

⁸⁷⁸ On the non-aristocratic aspects of racialism cf. Leopold Schwarzschild, “Six Delusions about Germany,” The New York Times Magazine, Oct. 1, 1944. About the opposition of the Prussian Junkers to Bismarck’s unification plans, cf. Prince Hubertus zu Löwenstein, The Germans in History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1945), pp. 221, 287, 302. See Note 190.

⁸⁷⁹ In Italy also according to G. Ferrero, the French Revolution reaped its full victory only in 1922. See G. Ferrero, The Reconstruction of Europe (New York: Putnam, 1941), p. 323. Cf. also Edgar A. Mowrer, Germany Puts the Clock Back (New York: W. W. Morrow, 1933); Helmut Kuhn, Freedom Forgotten and Remembered (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1943), P. 215.

⁸⁸⁰ Cf. Gustav Stolper, This Age of Fable (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1942), p. 328: “The position of Hitlerism in public discussions has been largely fixed by the fact that the bulk of anti-Hitler literature, particularly in the early phases of the régime, was written by Marxist authors of various denominations. As their political thinking was tied down to the Procrustean bed of primitive social philosophy, all they had to do was to fit the phenomenon of Hitlerism into their ready-made scheme.” Stolper, an economist of Austrian extraction, also dealt with the myth of the Nazi movement as “a conspiracy of wealthy manufacturers.” Yet not only the Marxists, but also the American Neo-Roussellians, who refused to believe in the stupidity of the large masses, had to lean, for better or worse, on the “conspiratorial theory” which, quite undemo-cratically, implies that all elections are purely a matter of publicity and “hard cash.”

⁸⁸¹ Cf. Helmut Kuhn, “The Common Man on Trial,” Review of Politics, VI, No. 1 (Jan., 1944), pp. 21–23. Nothing is more pathetic than to read the (unsigned) article published in the ultra-conservative weekly Der Ring (ed. Heinrich von Gleichen) on Jan. 6, 1933, entitled “Der Sieg der preussischen Konservativen über die Hitler-Bewegung.” A few weeks later “parliamentarism” and “democracy” triumphed again, and the biggest party, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, nominated the Chancellor.

The demo-nazi spirit of our friend, the “anti-feudal” Common Man, is also adroitly expressed in the pamphlet of Dr. Friedrich Schönemann, “Amerika und der Nationalsozialismus,” Schriften der deutschen Hochschule für Politik (Berlin: Junker und Dünnhaupt, 1934), No. 4. It is not surprising that this Nazi author sings hymns of praise for Jefferson and damns Alexander Hamilton (pp. 28–29). And, in relation to German National Socialism, he says proudly (p. 31): “There is no better and more beautiful word than the expression Democracy for our new government of the people, for this whole system of a popular community.”

⁸⁸² Cf. Rudolf Nadolny (former German Ambassador in Ankara and delegate to the League of Nations), Germanisierung oder Slawisierung? (Berlin: Otto Stollberg Verlag, 1928), pp. 203–204.

⁸⁸³ In the memorandum which Thomas Masaryk handed to Sir Edward Grey in April, 1915, he remarked that “Bohemia will, of course, be constitutional and democratic—as befits the nation of Hus, Chelčicky and Comenius.” (At the same time he proposed a Romanov prince on Bohemia’s throne.) The three Czechs mentioned were all non-Catholics. Masaryk as well as his son, Jan, later Foreign Minister, had left the Church. Vojta Beneš, senator and brother of President Benes, took the same step. President Hodža was Protestant, and so was František Palacký. The ministers Hurbàn, Osuský, Kozák, Vavrečka were all non-Catholics. Yet more than four-fifths of Bohemia and Moravia are Catholic.

⁸⁸⁴ Robert Hohlbaum, a National Socialist poet, wrote in his Deutschland; ein Sonettenzyklus (Reichenberg, 1925) a poem in praise of Hus as a German. Justus Frey, although conscious of Hus’ Czech sentiments, nevertheless produced a poem fanatically praising the victim of the Council of Constance. Cf. “Huss und Hieronymus,” Gesammelte Gedichte von Justus Frey, ed. by his son (Prague, 1899), p. 201. It is interesting to compare the last lines of this German-Bohemian anti-clerical nationalist’s verse with the opening rhymes of the Horst Wessel Lied. Frey’s verse reads:

Die Fahnen hoch! Die Trommeln laut gerührt! | Banners high! Beat the drums loudly
Es ist sein Geist, der in die Schlacht euch führt! | It is his spirit which leads you in battle!
Brav, kühne Jugend, brav! Nur dran und drauf, | Be brave, bold youth, be brave! Only go forward!
Nichts hemmt ein mutig Herz im Siegeslauf! | Nothing restrains a courageous heart in its victorious march!
The Horst Wessel Lied: |
Die Fahne hoch! Die Reihen dicht geschlossen | Banners high! Ranks closed,
S. A. marschiert mit ruhig festem Schritt, | The Storm Troopers march with firm, calm stride,
Kam’raden, die Rotfront und Reaktion erschossen, | Comrades, whom the Red Front and reaction has shot
Marschiern im Geist in unsern Reihen mit. | March along in spirit in our ranks.

More about the influence of Hussitism on Germans, and especially on modern German literature, can be gleaned from Professor Arnošt Kraus’ “Husitství v německé literature devatnáctého století,” Nákladem ceské akademie věd a uměni, Cast 3 (1929). According to Professor Kraus (p. 296) the quoted poem was written in 1853, but first published in 1871. There were other German authors who dealt with Czech or Hussite themes, such as K. E. Ebert (Vlasta and Brestislaw), Moritz Hartmann (Kelch und Schwert), and the demo-nationalist Alfred Meissner, who wrote a volume of poems around Žižka. Meissner, besides Freiligrath, was the most important poet of the ’48 movement. About him cf. Dr. J. F. Ježek, Bratři a demokraté: několik studii o německé literature s hlediska humanity a demokracie (Prague: Nákladem Vlastním, 1923), p. 109 f.

⁸⁸⁵ Cf. Benito Mussolini, John Hus (New York: Albert and Charles Boni, 1929), originally published in Italian under the title Giovanni Hus, il veridico (Rome, 1913). This volume contains numerous errors, geographical as well as historical. Mussolini saw in Taboritism a socio-political rather than a religious movement (p. 150). German “Hussism” is said to have prepared the way for Luther and Protestantism (p. 149). The closing words are: “Thus the history of the progressive liberation of the human race from the shackles of dogmatic belief knows no interruption as it proceeds from century to century” (p. 151). (This does not tally very well with the Duce’s later motto, Mussolini ha sempre ragione—“Mussolini is always right.”) The same New York house published, in 1928, Mussolini’s novel The Cardinal’s Mistress, trans. Hiram Motherwell, which was written during his journalistic period in Trent. The Italian Book Co., New York, issued in 1939 another edition of the first-named work under the title John Huss, the Veracious.

⁸⁸⁶ On Fascist and Mussohnian anti-clericalism cf. Daniel Binchy, Church and State in Fascist Italy (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1941), p. 134. Still, before his death Mussolini returned to the faith of his early childhood, as can be seen from his last letter addressed to his wife. Cf. Gino di Sanctis, “La vedova dell ’impero,” L’Europeo, III, No. 48 (November 30, 1947), p. 9.

Interesting is also Giuseppe Gangale’s Rivoluzione protestante (Turin, 1925), in which the idea was expressed that Fascism could harmonize only with Protestantism.

⁸⁸⁷ On the nationalism of Hus cf. Jan Herben, Huss and his Followers (London: G. Bles, 1926), pp. 51, 115, 118–19. Also Václav Flajšhans, Mistr Jan receny Hus z Husince (Prague: Nákl. Josef R. Vilimek, n.d.), pp. 305–6.

It is interesting to note that the present communist Czech régime is making frantic efforts to revive and emphasize the cult of Hus and the Taborites. This cult is no less anti-Western than it is anti-Catholic. The very organizers of this government-ordered and government-inspired worship of the Taborites are the Czech National Socialists rather than the Communists. Cf. C. M. Hora, “Mittelalter geistert an der Moldau: in den Spuren von Johannes Hus,” Die österreichische Furche, V, No. 36 (Sept. 3, 1949), pp. 1–2.

⁸⁸⁸ The question of the real character of the Hussite wars is, from the point of view of our thesis, of a lesser importance; but we believe that the argumentation of Josef Pekaf and his documentary evidence are sounder and more conclusive than those of F. M. Bartoš, Flajšhans and others. Cf. especially Josef Pekař, Žižka a jého doba (Prague: Vesmir, 1927), I, 181–83; IV, 194–95. Still, we see that even Engels was deeply influenced by the picture of Hussitism as drawn by Palacký and the other demo-nationalists when he prophesied that every genuinely nationalistic movement in Bohemia was bound to be “proletarian” no less than traditionally Hussite (hussitisch-reminiszenzlerisch). Cf. Engels’ letter, dated March 7, 1856 in Karl Marx. Friedrich Engels. Kritsche Gesamtausgabe, Edit. D. Rjazanow. Under the Auspices of the Marx-Engels-Institute in Moscow (Berlin, 1930), III, Vol. 2, p. 122.

Professor Kvačala of Pressburg, on the other hand, was very critical of Pekař, as can be seen from his paper in Jahrbücher für Kultur und Geschichte der Slawen (Breslau: Osteuropa Institut, 1932), VIII, Heft 2, p. 134. The French authors Prof. Ernest Denis, in Hus et la guerre des Hussites (Paris: E. Leroux, 1878) and Louis Leger, in Nouvelles etudes des Slaves (Paris: E. Leroux, 1886) both believe in the liberal-democratic theory of Palacky. Thomas G. Masaryk himself was a thorough supporter of the aforementioned thesis, as testified by his Jan Hus: na’se obrozeni a nase reformdce (Prague, 1925), especially pp. 154–55 Dr. Hugo Hassinger in Die Tschechoslovakei (Vienna: Rikola-Verlag, 1926), p. 233, represents the same point of view. Certain details enumerated by Leger (pp. 179–81), such as the “invocation of the ancient Czechs,” the egalitarianism within the army, and Žižka’s eulogy of the Czech language, remind one of the proclivities of the Germanic epigones of Hussitism. An extreme leftist view of Hussitism and Taboritism was taken by the Marxist Karl Kautsky, Communism in Central Europe at the Time of the Reformation, trans. J. L. and E. G. Mullike (London: Fisher and Unwin, 1897). The thesis of Pekař, on the other hand, finds support in Dr. Friedrich von Bezold’s Zur Geschichte des Husitenthums; eine culturhistorische Studie (Munich: Ackermann, 1874), pp. 70–96.

⁸⁸⁹ On the influence of Marsiglio on Taboritism cf. Josef Pekař, op. cit., IV, 194–95.

⁸⁹⁰ Cf. Note 736. Josef L. Seifert, Die Weltrevolutionäre, p. 63, mentions the Pickards (Picards) as proclaiming the advent of the Third Empire (Drittes Reich) in southern Bohemia. We have found no confirmation of this particular statement, though the general influence of the Pickards (Beghards) on the Hussites is undeniable. Cf. Laurentii a Mosheim, De Beghardis et Beguinibus com-mentarius (Leipzig: Libraria Weidmannia, 1790). Josef Pekař deals with the Pickards mostly in Vols. I and IV of his Žižka a jého doba. Cf. also Leopold Krummel, Utraquisten und Taboriten (Gotha: Perthes, 1871), pp. 53–54. Cochlaeus, Histories Hussitarum libri duodecim (Mainz, 1549), p. 148, believed in the Pickard background of the Adamites, a Taborite sub-sect. Luther is a witness to the fact that Pickards and Waldensians were popularly connected with the “Bohemians”; cf. his “Vorrede zu der Schrift: Rechenschaft des Glaubens, der Dienst und Ceremonien der Brüder in Böhmen und Mähren, welche von etlichen Pickarten und von etlichen Waldenser genennet werden “(A.D. 1533), in Werke, Erlangen ed. (Erlangen, 1834), LXIII, 319 f.

⁸⁹¹ His name is somewhat enigmatic. It may mean “the one-eyed,” but Karel Titz in an essay “O pûvodu jmena Žižka,” Spisy filosofiché fakulty Masarykovy Universiteta v Brnĕ, c. 8 (1928) believes that Žižka is a corruption of Zikmunt (Sigismund). It is possible that Žižka, born in southernmost Bohemia near the Austrian boundary and not very far from Husinec (Hus’ birthplace), was of German origin. This is also Seifert’s view.

⁸⁹² Cf. Louis Leger, Nouvelles études des Slaves, pp. 152–59. Valuable material can also be found in Dr. Paul Tóth-Szabó, A cseh-huszita mozgalmak és uralom története Magyarországon (Budapest: Hornyánskzy, 1917), especially pp. 48–50. These descriptions do not support the claims of Alois Hajn, Mistr Jan Hus a jého vyznam v dobé prítomné (Prague: Nákladem Svazu Národního Osvobození, 1925), nor those of Bernhard Czerwenka, Geschichte der Evangelischen Kirche in Böhmen (Bielefeld & Leipzig: Velhagen und Klasing, 1869), especially I, 168.

⁸⁹³ Cf. Rudolf Urbánek, “Žižka v památkach a úctě lidu českého,” Spisy filosofické fakulty Masarykovy Universiteta v Brně, No. 10.

⁸⁹⁴ This expression is from Emanuel Rádi, Der Kampf zwischen Tschechen und Deutschen (Reichenberg, 1928), pp. 82–83. The original Czech edition was Válka Čechů s Němci (Prague: Cin, 1928). Cf. also Eduard Winter, Tausend Jahre Geisteskampf im Sudetenraum; das religiöse Ringen zweier Völker (Salzburg & Leipzig: Otto Müller, 1938), p. 379; Hans Krebs, Wir Sudetendeutsche (Berlin: Runge, 1937), pp. 147–48. Cf. also the reaction of the Nazi Hermann Wolf to the “supra-nationalism” of Emperor Francis Joseph, who “dared” to address a Czech physician in a German-Bohemian town in Czech: see H. Wolf, “Das Rätsel Böhmen,” in H. C. Kaergel, Ein Sudetendeutscher ergibt sich nicht (Karlsbad, 1939), p. 129.

⁸⁹⁵ The first American author to draw attention to the important rôle of Jahn as a forerunner of National Socialism is Peter Viereck, in his Metapolitics (New York: Knopf, 1941). See also Viereck’s Conservatism Revisited: the Revolt against Revolt (New York: Scribner, 1949), pp. 67–68. Yet one would have liked to see Viereck stressing not only Jahn’s ideology, as expressed in the writings of the “Turnvater,” but also the psychological impact of mass calisthenics in a collectivistic age.

On Jahn’s influence on Bismarck see Bismarck, Gedanken und Erinnerungen (1898), I, 1; also Carl Euler, Friedrich Ludwig Jahn (Berlin, 1881), and Dr. Michael Antonowytsch, “Friedrich Ludwig Jahn; ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Anfänge des deutschen Nationalismus,” Historische Studien, Vol. CCXXX.

Tyrš was fully conscious of his debt to Jahn; cf. Jules Chopin, “Un philosophe de l’énergie nationale: Miroslav Tyrš,” La Revue hebdomadaire, June 25, 1932, p. 453.

⁸⁹⁶ Cf. Karl Domorázek, Dr. Miroslav Tyrš, the Father of the Sokol Union (Prague: Československy Cizinecky Uřad, 1920), p. 3.

⁸⁹⁷ In Domorázek, op. cit., p. 4. We have been unable to obtain the original text of Tyrš.

⁸⁹⁸ Ibid., p. 6.

⁸⁹⁹ Cf. T. G. Masaryk, Otázka sociální; základy Marzismu sociologické a filosofiché (Prague: Jan Laichter, 1898), p. 499 sq.

⁹⁰⁰ Cf. The Evolution of Socialism in Czechoslovakia (Prague: Executive Committee of the Czechoslovak Social Democratic Workers’ Party, 1924), p. 3: “And today many workmen in Bohemia arrive at socialism by way of religious meditation; for they see in socialism a continuation of the old communistic communities of the Taborites.”

⁹⁰¹ But it was soon pick edup again by its German competitor. Between 1919 and 1926 the N.S.S.C. called itself “Czechoslovak Socialist Party,” thereafter, “National Socialist Czechoslovak Party.” This appellative became rather embarrassing after the phenomenal rise of the German Nazis, whereupon foreign journalists were instructed to refer to it as the “People’s Socialist Party.” Cf. the article by W. H. Graham in Czechoslovakia, ed. Robert J. Kerner (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1940).

⁹⁰² Cf. Ceskoslovenská Vlastivěda, ed. Emil Capek (Prague: Sfinx, 1931), Part V (“The State”), p. 479 (article “Politický vyvoj a strany v C.S.R.”). According to this paper, the ideology of the N.S.S.Č. is based on the religious-social tendencies of the Hussite period.”

⁹⁰³ The Political Parties of Czechoslovakia (2nd ed.; Prague: Orbis, 1936 “Czechoslovak Sources and Documents,” No. 9]). Tabulation at the end of the book.

⁹⁰⁴ Cf. Masarykův ottův naučny (Prague, 1925), I, 1129. Also cf. the article by Karel Slaviček in the Ottův slovník naučny nové doby (Prague, 1936), IV, 437, as well as the sketch in an earlier edition, Ottův slovník naucny (Prague, 1909), XXVIII, 984–85; and a shorter outline in the Slovník národnohospodárský, sociální a politický (Prague, 1933), Part III, pp. 515–16.

⁹⁰⁵ The Making of a State, ed. Wickham Steed (London: Allen and Unwin, 1927), p. 439. He was seconded by his editor in this accusation. Cf. H. Wickham Steed, “A Programme for Peace,” The Edinburgh Review, 1916; republished by the Bohemian National Alliance, p. 18.

As to the close alliance between early Czech anti-Germanism and anti-Judaism see Herman Münch, “Panslawismus und Alldeutschtum,” Neues Abendland [Augsburg], V. 7 (July, 1950), pp. 272–76. The riots of the Czech mob in Prague on December 1, 1897 were conducted amidsts the shouts: “Down with the Germans! Down with the Jews!”.

About the real position of the Jews in the Middle Ages in the German-speaking countries see Guido Kisch’s monumental work, The Jews in Mediœval Germany (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1949.) See also Note 810.

⁹⁰⁶ On Georg von Schönerer cf. Professor Botzenhart, “Georg Ritter von Schönerer, ein Vorkämpfer des völkisch-sozialen Gedankens in der Ostmark,” Göttinger Akademische Reden, No. 8 (1939). Cf. also Herwig, Georg Schönerer und die Entwicklung des Alldeutschtums in der Ostmark (Vienna, 1912–13). Schönerer is mentioned several times in Hitler’s Mein Kampf.

Valuable insights into the ideological aspects of the German national movement in Austria can be gained from Karl Braunias’ paper “Österreich als Völkerreich,” in Josef Nadler and Heinrich von Srbik, Österreich: Erbe und Sendung im deutschen Raum (Salzburg: Anton Pustet, 1936), pp. 250–55. Especially important are his descriptions of the ideological bridges between German nationalism on one hand and democracy and socialism on the other. For the pre-Nazi aspects of German socialism (“Social Democracy”), cf. Wilhelm Röpke, Civitas Humana, p. 268, and Die deutsche Frage, p. 203. The very slogan Blut und Boden (blood and soil) stems from the socialist author August Winnig. Cf. his Das Reich als Republik 1918–1928 (Stuttgart & Berlin: Cotta, 1928), p. 3.

On the socialistic tendencies of the earlier nationalist movements in Austria (1860–1880) cf. also Dr. Paul Molisch, Die deutschen Hochschulen in Österreich und die politisch-nationale Entwicklung nach dem Jahre 1848 (Munich: Drei Masken Verlag, 1922), pp. 143–44. Nationalism—anti-Semitism—democracy—socialism, truly formed a closed circle.

⁹⁰⁷ Cf. Theodor Heuss (today President of Western Germany), Hitlers Weg (Stuttgart: Union Deutsche Verlagsgesellschaft, 1932), pp. 22–23. Here Naumann is mentioned as a “forerunner.” Cf. also Adolf Damaschke, Was ist National-Sozial? Eine Antwort (Berlin-Schöneberg, 1900). (Yet the difference between sozial and sozialistisch should always be kept in mind.)

⁹⁰⁸ Cf. Josef Pfitzner, Das Sudetendeutschtum (Cologne: Hermann Scharffstein, 1938), pp. 23–24. (Pfitzner was executed by the Czechs in Prague in 1945.) The emphasis on the synthesis between the national and the socialistic element in nazism can also be found in the views of Friedrich Meinecke, the veteran German historian.

⁹⁰⁹ Karel Engliš, Le “socialisme allemand”; programme du parti allegmand des Sudètes (Prague: Orbis, 1938 [“Sources et documents tchécoslovaques,” No. 46]), p. 59.

⁹¹⁰ Cf. Rudolf Jung, Der nationale Sozialismus: seine Grundlagen, sein Werdegang und seine Ziele (2nd ed.; Munich: Deutscher Volksverlag Dr. Boepple, 1922), p. 78. (The first edition, published in Aussig in 1919, was unfortunately not available to us.)

⁹¹¹ Cf. Dr. Karl Siegmar Baron von Galéra, Sudetendeutschlands Heimkehr ins Reich (Leipzig, 1939), pp. 75–80. Neither Stein (judging by his first name), nor Burschofsky, nor Galéra are of German origin. Galéra’s title is doubtful.

⁹¹² Galéra, op. cit., p. 75. Cf. also Hans Krebs, Kampf um Böhmen (Berlin: Volk und Reich, 1936), p. 38.

⁹¹³ Cf. Galéra, op. cit., p. 76; H. Krebs, op. cit., p. 38.

⁹¹⁴ Cf. Krebs, p. 39.

⁹¹⁵ Cf. Krebs, p. 39, and, on the “Reichenberg Appeal,” p. 200.

⁹¹⁶ In A. Ciller, Vorläufer des Nationalsozialismus (Vienna: Ertl, 1932), p. 135. The reader is warned that the difficulties in translating such terms as freiheitlich or national (not to mention sozial) are considerable. The exact equivalents are not available in English. Ciller also mentions as other early organizers A. Cihula, Proch and Kroy—probably none of them with a Teutonic background.

The term “freiheitlich” comes near to “liberal” and when we take the exact character of Central-European “liberalism” into consideration then the murdered Dr. Gerlich’s article in Der Gerade Weg (1932), insisting that National Socialism is essentially decayed “liberalism,” tells us the truth. His statistics on the disappearance of “liberal” and democratic votes which have been switched to the Nazis, are most enlightening. Cf. Dr. Johann Steiner, Prophetien wider das Dritte Reich. Aus den Schriften des Dr. F. Gerlich und des Paters Ingbert Naab OFM (Munich: Schnell und Steiner, 1946), pp. 301–322.

Of course, Dr. Armin Mohler is also right when he says the ideology of National Socialism is sometimes so vague that it is difficult to draw its exact profile. Even “conservative-revolutionary” traits can be found in it. Cf. Die konservative Revolution in Deutschland 1918–1932 (Stuttgart: Friedrich Vorwerk, 1950), p. 67.

⁹¹⁷ Krebs, pp. 39 and 82. Cf. also Hans Knirsch, Aus der Geschichte der deutschen nationalsozialistischen Arbeiterbewegung Altösterreichs und der Tschechoslowakei (Aussig, 1932).

⁹¹⁸ Cf. Gustav Adolf von Metnitz, Die deutsche Nationalbewegung 1871–1933 (Berlin: Juncker und Dünnhaupt, 1939), p. 130. The reason for Jung’s transfer was his agitation on behalf of a nationalistic organization of railroad employees.

⁹¹⁹ He later became the leader of the National Socialists of Rump Austria. After the outrages of 1934 there was a rift between him and Hitler. Cf. his pamphlet Unser Endziel! Eine Flugschrift für deutschen Nationalsozialismus (Leipzig and Vienna, 1918). This seems to have been written in mid-October of that year (1918). Another group in Austria—the Nazi schismatics under the leadership of a certain Schulz—had separated from Hitler’s control at an earlier date. A biography whose purpose was to extol the merits of Dr. Riehl for the Nazi cause was Alexander Schilling-Schletter’s Dr. Walter Riehl und die Geschichte des Nationalsozialismus; mit einem Anhang: Hitler in Oesterreich (Leipzig: Forum-Verlag, 1933). The tone of this volume indicates that efforts must have been made in certain Nazi circles to minimize Dr. Riehl’s rôle in early National Socialism. Of special value in this book is the insistence of this Nazi apologist on the fact that Dr. Riehl had been profoundly influenced by the non-Jewish Social Democrats (Engelbert Pernerstorfer among them), and that nazism was a synthesis of both—nationalism and socialism. Riehl’s dream was “a socialism free of Romish and Jewish influence” (cf. pp. 9, 76). Riehl broke entirely with National Socialism in later years, and still lives as a private citizen in Austria.

⁹²⁰ Krebs, op. cit., p. 83.

⁹²¹ Gefreiter. Hitler’s rank was Private First Class, not Corporal. The British translation, “Lance Corporal,” was misinterpreted by American writers. Hitler’s superior, Captain Wiedemann, saw to it that the later “Führer,” who was so extraordinarily disliked by his fellow soldiers, never received the rank of a “non-com.” Hindenburg repeatedly referred to Hitler as der böhmische Gefreite; cf. Konrad Heiden, Geburt des Dritten Reiches: die Geschichte des Nationalsozialismus bis Herbst 1933 (Zürich: Europa-Verlag, 1934). p. 78.

⁹²² See A. Ciller, Vorläufer des Nationalsozialismus, p. 83.

⁹²³ Cf. St. Aulaire, op. cit., p. 421 sq. The philo-Semitic attitude of the Habsburgs is also attested by S. Dubnow in his Algemajne Geshichte fün yidischn Folk; die alte Tsajtn bis tsü hajntigen Tsajt; die najste Geshichte fun yidishn Folk (Berlin and Warsaw: Kultur Lige, 1928), III, 64. (In Yiddisch.) There is also a Russian edition: S. M. Dubnov, Noveyshaya istoriya yevreyskago naroda (Berlin: Izdatelstvo “Granit,” 1928). On the friendliness of the Hohenzollerns to the Jews see Dr. Wilhelm Bockelmann, Von Marx zu Hitler (Munich: Franz Eher, 1932), p. 89 sq.

⁹²⁴ A courageous German writer, Fritz Reck-Malleczewen, made Jan van Leyden (Hitler very thinly camouflaged) the “hero” of a biography: Bockelson; Geschichte eines Massenwahnes (Berlin: Schützen-Verlag, 1937). Yet Reck-Malleczewen was “found out” and he died heroically in a concentration camp.

⁹²⁵ A reproduction of it may be found in Krebs, op. cit. (no page number). Another facsimile shows a further appeal, adorned with a modified swastika.

⁹²⁶ On Konrad Henlein, gymnastics teacher and ex-Catholic, cf. Elizabeth Wiskemann, Czechs and Germans (London: Oxford University Press, 1938), pp. 200–1. Also G. E. R. Gedye, Fallen Bastions (London: Victor Gollancz, 1939). pp. 393–94.

⁹²⁷ Cf. Walter Schneefuss, Deutsch-Böhmisches Schicksal und Weg der Sudetendeutschen (Leipzig: Wilhelm Solmann, 1938), p. 53.

⁹²⁸ On Hans Krebs cf. Karl Vietz, “Ein Leben für die Freiheit,” in H. C. Kaergel, Ein Sudetendeutscher, p. 145. Hans Krebs was executed by the Czechs in February, 1947. Parts of his remarkable defence speech can be gleaned from Die Furche, I, No. 12, p. 4. On Hans Knirsch (1877–1933), cf. Ottův slovnik naučny nové doby (Prague, 1934), Part III, 1, p. 589; and on Rudolf Jung, ibid., p. 285. Jung was active in 1939 in Germany. He may still be alive.

⁹²⁹ Cf. A. Ciller, Vorläufer des Nationalsozialismus, p. 119.

⁹³⁰ Cf. Konrad Heiden, Geschichte des Nationalsozialismus; die Karriere einer Idee (Berlin: Rowohlt, 1933), p. 19. The second D.A.P. was so named on January 5, 1919 (ibid., p. 12).

⁹³¹ Cf. Notes 743, 744. The accusation was made that Hitler’s mother spoke no German. Cf. R. Billing, NSDAP: Geschichte einer Bewegung (Munich: Funk, 1931), p. 19. Rudolf Olden, Hitler, trans. W. Ettinghausen (New York: Covici Friede, 1936), p. 14, quite rightly denied it.

⁹³² Cf. Konrad Heiden, “Les débuts du national-socialisme,” Revue d’Alle-magne, VII, No. 71 (Sept. 15, 1933), p. 821. This is also confirmed by Dr. Hans Fabricius, Geschichte der Nationalsozialistischen Bewegung (2nd ed.; Berlin: Spaeth, 1937), p. 15.

⁹³³ Aussig was probably the most important centre of early Nazidom. Cf. also Bei unseren deutschen Brüdern in der Tschechoslowakei, Berichte der vom Nationalen Studentenbund Tübingen (im deutschen Hochschulring) in die Tschechoslowakei zum Studium der Lage der dortigen Deutschen entsandten dreiköpfigen Studienkommission, Dec. 1920–Jan. 1921 (Tübingen, 1921), pp. 38–39. The D.N.S.A.P. of Aussig was primarily recruited from the ranks of railroad employees, private- and state-employed white collar workers, teachers, and some workers.

⁹³⁴ On Streicher’s earlier career cf. R. Billing, N.S.D.A.P., p. 112.

⁹³⁵ On the Salzburg meeting cf. Erich F. Berendt, Soldaten der Freiheit (Berlin: E. C. Etthofer, 1936), pp. 181–210.

⁹³⁶ Cf. Rudolf Jung, Der nationale Sozialismus, pp. 81–83.

⁹³⁷ Ibid., p. 190.

⁹³⁸ On earlier nazism in Austria proper cf. Hans Bleyer-Härtl, Ringen um Reich und Recht: zwei Jahrzehnte politischer Anwalt in Oesterreich (Berlin: Traditionsverlag Kolk, 1939). This author mentions (p. 47) a “Deutschnationalsozialistischer Verein für Oesterreich” in 1919, and the establishment of an Austrian S.A. by Benedikt, Müller, Reschny and Nehéz in 1920.

⁹³⁹ Cf. A. Ciller, Vorläufer des Nationalsozialismus, p. 113.

⁹⁴⁰ Ludendorff was not a Junker, and rejected the title offered to him by William II. His father was a postal employee in Posen (Poznań). But he figures erroneously as Von Ludendorff in many an English and American book.

⁹⁴¹ “What became of the Prussian Army? “in the Virginia Quarterly, XVII, No. 1, p. 42. Compare also with Joseph C. Harsch, Germany at War (New York: Foreign Policy Association, 1942), pp. 46–47.

⁹⁴² Cf. the speech by Deputy Führer Martin Bormann, reprinted in The (London) Tablet, January 27, 1942.

⁹⁴³ Cf. Carl Landauer, “The Allies and Germany’s Future,” Journal of Modern History, XVIII, No. 3 (September, 1946), pp. 259–260.

⁹⁴⁴ “Der Nationalsozialismus ist keine kultische Religion, sondern eine auf exakter Wissenschaft aufgebaute Volksbewegung.” These are Hitler’s words as noted down by this writer in September, 1938. The official published text (as so often) shows minor deviations.

⁹⁴⁵ Professor Theodor Abel, in his panel of six hundred leading National Socialists, was unable to get data for 62 per cent. Catholics were 10 per cent, and Protestants 28 per cent. (Fully one third of the population of the Reich, and 42 per cent, of those ethnically German, are Catholics.) Cf. T. Abel, Why Hitler Came into Power (New York: Prentice Hall, 1938), p. 313. Rohan d’O. Butler, who wrote a book about The Roots of National Socialism (New York: Dutton, 1942) provides it with an—admittedly rudimentary—bibliography of “forerunners,” enumerating sixty-four of them. Of these only six are Catholics (including two Frenchmen).

⁹⁴⁶ Konrad Heiden’s description and commentary in his Die Geburt des Dritten Reiches: die Geschichte des Nationalsozialismus bis Herbst 1933 (Zürich: Europa, 1934), pp. 108–12, is perfectly correct.

⁹⁴⁷ A. Hitler, Offener Brief an Herrn von Papen, dated Coburg, Oct. 16, 1932, which was published in pamphlet form (Berlin, 1932).

Yet how incredibly simple-minded Franz von Papen really was (only the very naïve could see in him a Devil With Top Hat—the title under which a refugee author wrote about him) can be gleaned from his lengthy deposition to American military authorities and presented in the Guido Schmidt case: cf. Der Hoch Verratsprozess gegen Dr. Guido Schmidt (Vienna: österreichische Staatsdruckerei, 1947), Document PS 3300 (thirty-first day of the trial).

⁹⁴⁸ Cf. Dr. Edgar Jung, Die Sinndeutung der deutschen Revolution (Oldenburg: Stalling, 1933).

⁹⁴⁹ A list of the victims has been published by Die Neue Zeit (Berlin) in an article by Emil Dovifat. It was reprinted by Commonweal, XLIII, No. 5 (Nov. 16, 1945), pp. 112–15 (where the name of the author is misspelt as “Dorfat”).

Soon after July 20, 1944, Dr. Ley made a speech against the “blue-blooded swine,” and the Gauleiter of Carinthia compared the aristocracy to “international Jewry.” Cf. Die Kärntner Zeitung, VII, No. 202 (July 24, 1944), pp. 1–2, and The San Francisco Chronicle, August 8, 1944, p. 7. This, incidentally, is a notion which was also entertained by European Jews. Cf., for instance, Walter Rathenau, Die neue Gesellschaft (Berlin: S. Fischer, 1919), p. 34.

Mussolini also suffered from a morbid hatred of the nobility: cf. “Le confessioni di Vittorio Mussolini,” Il Tempo, Rome, February 23, 1948. Hitler, on the other hand, hated the monarchy no less than the aristocracy. His trip to Rome in 1938 increased his anti-monarchic feelings. Cf. Der Hochverratsprozess gegen Dr. Guido Schmidt, p. 356. See p. 368.

Immediately after the Anschluss, Stadholder Bürckel announced in Vienna that he extended a friendly hand to everybody—including the Communists—but certainly not to the Legitimists. For the Nazis the real enemy stood on the “right.” Thus the experience of Nazi-Communist collaboration was not isolated, and many an inmate in these camps also felt acutely the identity of Nazi and Communist rule. Compare with Christopher Burney, The Dungeon Democracy (New York: Duell, Sloane and Pierce, 1946), p. 156.

⁹⁵⁰ Cf. Jules Romains, op. cit., p. 151.

⁹⁵¹ Cf. C. Haensel and R. Strahl, Politisches ABC des neuen Reichs (sie) (Stuttgart: Engelhorn, 1933), pp. 22–23.

⁹⁵² Cf. Gottfried Neesse, Die Deutsche Nationalsozialistische Arbeiterpartei; Versuch einer Rechtsdeutung (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1935), p. 187. This author’s definition of Nazi democracy is on p. 145. Compare with the works of two German authors published in French: Rodolphe Laun (Hamburg), La démocratie (Paris: Librairie Delagrave, 1933)—see especially the appendix; and Gerhard Leibholz, “La nature et les formes de la démocratie,” Archives de Philosophie du droit et de sociologie juridique, VI (1936), No. 3–4, p. 135.

⁹⁵³ Cf. Denis de Rougemont, La part du diable, nouvelle version (N.Y.: Brentano, 1944), p. 105; Peter Viereck, Metapolitics, especially pp. 40, 54–55) 56, 212–13, 226, 243, 307, 311; László Ottlik, “Politikai rendszerek,” A mai világ képe, ed. Gusztáv Gratz (Budapest: Királyi Magyar Egyetemi Nyomda, 1939), II (Politikai élet), 398. See also Note 102.

⁹⁵⁴ Cf. Richard Müller-Freienfels, Psychologie des deutschen Menschen und seiner Kultur (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1930), p. 50.

⁹⁵⁵ Cf. Reventlow in Die Reichswarte, Dec. 13, 1930: “There is no such thing for us as the sanctity of private property.”

⁹⁵⁶ Cf. Franz Neumann, Behemoth, pp. 377, 379, 399.

⁹⁵⁷ Cf. Emil Lederer, The State of the Masses: the Threat of a Classless Society (N.Y.: W. W. Norton, 1940), pp. 98, 110–11.

⁹⁵⁸ Cf. A. Dresler and Fritz Maier-Hartmann, Die Sammlung Rehse: Dokumente der Zeitgeschichte (Munich: Eher, 1938), p. 85. The documents on pp. 90–91 show an even more violent anti-capitalistic bias.

⁹⁵⁹ Cf. E. Reventlow, Nationaler Sozialismus im neuen Deutschland (Berlin: Zeitgeschichte Verlag, n.d.), p. 59.

⁹⁶⁰ Reventlow, Völkisch-kommunistische Einigung? (Leipzig: Graphische Werke, 1924), pp. 17–38.

⁹⁶¹ Cf. Dr. J. Goebbels, Der Nazi-Sozi: Fragen und Antworten für den Nationalsozialisten (4th edn.: Munich: Eher, 1932), p. 10.

⁹⁶² Cf. Ernst Kiefer, Der unbekannte S.A. Mann (Munich: Eher, 1934), p. 31.

⁹⁶³ As quoted in an Associated Press report, Sept. 22, 1936 and in The New York Times, Sept. 28, 1939.

This is nothing new when we remember “liberal”-absolutistic collaboration. Ernest Renan was, at times, almost fanatically pro-Prussian and Michelet celebrated the Austrian defeat at Königgrätz (Sadova). Cf. Jean-Marie Carré, Les écrivains français et le mirage allemand 1890–1940 (Paris: Bovin et Cie, 1947), p. 71 n. Compare also with Erik v. Kuehnelt-Leddihn, “Nationalsozialismus und Common Sense,” Schweizer Rundschau, L, 708 (Oct.-Nov., 1950), pp. 435–48.

⁹⁶⁴ Cf. R. H. S. Crossman, “Government and the Governed,” in Waldo R. Browne, op. cit., p. 159; László Ottlik, “Politikai rendszerek,” pp. 384–85. The lack of intellectual freedom, naturally, did not weigh heavily on those who had nothing to say. And the lack of liberties is very relative and personal. Cf. José Ortega y Gasset, Historia corno sistema y Del imperio romano (Madrid: Revista del Occidente, 1942), pp. 137–38. Neither is the collaboration between the Communist and the Nazi “common man” something very new. Cf. the experiences of Papen’s nephew in a concentration camp: Felix von Papen, Ein von Papen spricht (Nijmegen, 1938).

⁹⁶⁵ Cf. Hermann Rauschning, Hitler Speaks, p. 185, quoting Hitler as follows: “I am not only the conqueror but also the executor of Marxism—of that part that is essential and justified, stripped of its Jewish Talmudic dogma.” Cf. also ibid., pp. 271, 172–73.

⁹⁶⁶ J. Goebbels, Der Nazi-Sozi, p. 12.

⁹⁶⁷ Cf. Antonio Machado, Obras completas (Mexico City: Edición Seneca, 1940), p. 702. This author was a Spanish exile who died in 1939.

⁹⁶⁸ Cf. Karl Marx, Selected Essays, trans. H. J. Stenning (New York: International Publishers, 1926), pp. 88–97. Cf. Also S. M. Dubnow, Noveyshaya Istoriya, II, 100–3.

⁹⁶⁹ Cf. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Briefe—Abteilung of Werke, Schriften, Briefe; historisch-kritische Gesammtausgabe, ed. D. Rjazanow (Moscow: Marx-Engels Institute, 1930), II, 365, 366, 371; III, 82, 90, 91.

⁹⁷⁰ Ibid., III. 84 (letter from Marx to Engels, July 30, 1862).

⁹⁷¹ Cf. Simon Dubnow, Weltgeschichte des jüdischen Volkes, trans. A. Steinberg (Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1929), IX, 361–62.

⁹⁷² Cf. Karl Marx. Friedrich Engels. Briefe Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe, III, 192 (letter of Engels dated Nobember 2, 1864). Compare also with II, 122 (letter of Engels, dated March 7, 1856). Obviously, there is nothing paradoxical about anti-Judaism within a socialistic framework. Compare also with Samuel Gringauz, “Anti-Semitism in Socialism,” Commentary, IX, No. 4 (April, 1950), pp. 371–73. This article is limited to anti-Jewish tendencies in French socialism.

⁹⁷³ cf. The Universal Jewish Encyclopaedia (New York, 1943), IX, 676–77. In this connection it is interesting to note that the Polish armies carried out 30 pogroms, but that the Red Army staged 106 (ibid. VIII, 552)—an impressive series of massacres among the Jews by a body allegedly free from the taint of racialism, and of the materialistic, bourgeois love for loot.

As to the development of anti-Judaism in the U.S.S.R. in recent years cf. Peter Viereck, Conservatism Revisited, pp. 157–61, 174–80; S. N. Schwarz, “The New Anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union,” Commentary, VII, No. 6 (June, 1949), pp. 535–45, and The New York Times, Vol. XCIX, No. 33, 651 (March 13, 1950), p. 1.

⁹⁷⁴ Sheer terror is another aspect of the dictatorial movements. Mallet du Pan commented on its efficiency during the French Revolution: cf. Correspondance inèdite de Mallet du Pan avec la cour de Vienne, 1794–1798, ed. André Michel (Paris: Plon, 1884), II, 3: “Terror makes proselytes for the Chouans as it does for the Jacobins: one joins them to be spared, and there are Chouans by force as there are republicans by force.”

⁹⁷⁵ From G. Feder, Das Programm der NSDAP (Munich: Eher, 1936 [“Nationalsozialistische Bibliothek,” Heft 1]), last page.

⁹⁷⁶ Cf. Ehart (ed.), Unter Hitlers Fahnen: grossdeutsches Liederbuch (N.p.: Verlag Grossdeutschland, 1932), p. 4.

⁹⁷⁷ We would like to mention that the present author is partly of Czech (Taborite) ancestry, and that he shares no “Austrian” animosity against the Czechs—or any other people.

⁹⁷⁸ Cf. Carl Dyrssen, Die Botschaft des Ostens (Breslau, 1932), p. 186: “National Socialism is the primitive form of Prussianism.” Dyrssen belonged to the strongly pro-Russian, National Bolshevik wing of the party. Compare also with Erich Müller, Nationalbolschewismus (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt 1933).

⁹⁷⁹ In Metnitz’ Die deutsche Nationalbewegung and Bleyer-Härtl’s Ringen um Reich und Recht we find the following names of Austrian Nazis: Michalek, Woitsche, Cséri, Kozich, Werkowitsch, Jakubitschek, Jerabek, Mattausch, Jagschitsch, Gallé, Blosch, Papez, Hudl (Hudal?), Berdinik, Wanek, Domes, Formanek, Seyss (Zajic), Foppa, Blaschke, Foglar, Krai, Slupetzky, Wessely, Jury, Tomschitz, Wurnig, Derda, Suchenwirth (Suchanek), Bolek, Reschny, Nehéz. Dollfuss’ assassin Planetta came from Vischau in Moravia, his accomplice Feike from Prerau (Preřov). The party allegiance of his would-be assassin Drtil is doubtful.

⁹⁸⁰ Cf. Brockhaus (1932 ed.), Vol. XIII.

⁹⁸¹ Cf. Gustav Stolper, This Age of Fable, p. 315; E. Wiskemann, Czechs and Germans, p. 197; Konrad Heiden, A History of National Socialism (London: Methuen, 1934), pp. 22–25. Other sources: Erich Kühne, Sudetendeutscher Schicksalskampf (Leipzig: Bibliographisches Institut, n.d.), pp. 44–46; Dr. J. Pfitzner, Sudetendeutsche Einheitsbewegung: Werden und Erfüllung (Karlsbad, 1937), pp. 28–29; Böhmerlandjahrbuch für Volk und Heimat (Eger, 1921), p. 57; Volk und Gemeinde (Aussig: Nationalsozialistische Monatshefte, 1931).

⁹⁸² Cf. Johann von Leers, Der deutsche Aufstand: die Revolution des Nachkriegs (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1934), p. 310. He writes about Bohemian National Socialism: “For all practical purposes it influenced Adolf Hitler’s founding of the party very little.”

⁹⁸³ The economic reasons for the rise of the movement as such are often overemphasized. The crisis in Germany was not graver during 1932 than in the United States. Cf. the tabulations in Etienne Mantoux, The Carthaginian Peace, or the Economic Consequences of Mr. Keynes (London: Oxford University Press, 1946), p. 115. Mantoux also quoted Das deutsche Volkseinkommen vor und nach dem Kriege: Einzelschriften zur Statistik des deutschen Reichs (Berlin, 1932), No. 24.

⁹⁸⁴ Arthur Moeller van den Brück, who is the modern coiner of the term “Drittes Reich,” committed suicide in 1924. He was violently attacked by Alfred Rosenberg in an article entitled “Gegen Tarnung und Fälschung,” Der Völkische Beobachter, December 8, 1933. Spengler, who died in 1936, was prevented from publishing the second volume of his Jahre der Entscheidungen, and was bitterly assailed by the party press. Nietzsche was furiously criticized for his pro-Jewish and anti-German utterances. Haushofer’s son, Albrecht, was executed in April, 1945, and Haushofer himself was forced to resign from his position in the German Academy of Sciences as early as 1935. Stefan George died in Switzerland and willed that his body should not be brought back to Germany as long as the Nazis ruled. The confusion about the Teutonic Knights comes from the fact that the National Socialists established training schools called Ordensburgen.

NOTES TO CHAPTER EIGHT

⁹⁸⁵ Cf. A. P. von Segesser, “Studien und Glossen zur Tagesgeschichte,” Sammlung kleiner Schriften (Bern: K. J. Wysz, 1877), I, 325. Von Segesser, the great Swiss Catholic leader of the nineteenth century, stressed the relativity of the means of achieving lasting freedom.

⁹⁸⁶ Ernest Renan saw a monstrous increase of human inequality in spite of the “democratic” triumph of technology. See his Dialogues et fragments philosophiques (13th ed.; Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1936), pp. 103–4.

⁹⁸⁷ Hence Dr. Johnson could say: “The duration of Parliament, whether for seven years or for the life of the King, appears to me so immaterial that I would not give half a crown to turn the scale one way or the other. The Habeas Corpus is the single advantage which our government has over other countries.” Cf. F. C. Nappold, Towards a New Aristocracy (London: Faber and Faber, 1943), pp. 20–21.

⁹⁸⁸ Cf. Voltaire, Dictionnaire de Philosophie (Paris: Lebigre Frères, 1834), III, 196.

⁹⁸⁹ “One should never forget that totalitarian tyranny is the result of the democratic and humanitarian mystique. The former is not opposed to the latter as the remedy is to the disease; we are faced here by two successive (but basically identical) manifestations of the corruption of political man.”—Cf. Gustave Thibon, “Le risque au service de la prudence,” Études carmélitaines, XXIV, Vol. I, 52 note.

⁹⁹⁰ It is therefore refreshing to see a high official of theU.S. State Department rejecting the notion of a “democratization” of Russia. Cf. George F. Kennan, “America and the Russian Future” in Foreign Affairs, XXIX, 3 (April, 1951), 355–56.

SUPPLEMENTARY NOTES

Add to Note 79. The same sentiment was voiced by Gouverneur Morris, then American Ambassador to Paris, who wrote on June 23, 1789: “At dinner I sit next to M. de Lafayette, who tells me I injure the cause; for that my sentiments are continually quoted against the good party. I seize this opportunity to tell him that I am opposed to the democracy from regard to liberty.” Cf. Diaries and Letters of Gouverneur Morris, ed. Anne Cary Morris (New York: Scribner, 1888), I, 104.

Add to Note 488. On the relationship between Christian theism and the “father image” in medical psychology cf. the paper of Dr. Rhaban Liertz “L’image du père et son influence sur l’éducation religieuse,” Psyché, VI, 59 (September, 1951), pp. 583–88. (This paper was read at the Second International Catholic Congress of Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy.)

Add to Note 535. Devastating for the democratic and egalitarian assumptions were the results of a large-scale investigation of the intelligence of a quarter million German schoolchildren between the ages of 10 and 14. (Research Project of the Institut für empirische Soziologie in Hanover.) Cf. the article “Tradition ist wichtiger als Umwelt” in Salzburger Nachtrichten (VII, 185) August 11, 1951, p. 9, 1. 3.

Add to Note 553. On the American influence in France prior to the Revolution cf. also Comte de Saint Priest, Mémoires. Règnes de Louis XV et Louis XVI, ed. Baron de Barante (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1929), pp. 195–97.

Add to Note 725. Hannah Arendt in her thoughtful volume The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1951), pp. 258, 303, makes a good case for the notion that Italian Fascism (as “Fascism” in general) at its worst is “semi-totalitarian.” True totalitarianism she sees only in the Russian and German experiments.

Add to Note 823. A comparison between the German and the New World brands of anti-semitism can be found in the book of the Jewish convert Karl Stern, The Pillar of Fire (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1951), pp. 243–44.

Add to Note 866. A recent contribution to American nihilism and relativism in legal thinking can be found in Chief Justice Vinson’s opinion upholding the conviction of eleven Communist leaders. “Nothing is more certain in modern societies than the principle that there are no absolutes . . . we must reply that all concepts are relative.” (Cf. Felix Morley’s article in Barron’s magazine, June 18, 1951.)

Add to Note 949. To what extent Hitler and the whole Nazi machine pursued an anti-Habsburg and anti-monarchical policy in Central Europe (with the direct co-operation of Rome and Belgrade, and the more indirect support of Czechoslovakia) can be seen from Elizabeth Wiskemann’s The Rome-Berlin Axis (London: Oxford University Press, 1949), passim. “Democracy” and modern tyranny like to league together against all forms of “reaction.” Compare also with Dr. Henry Picker, “Hitlers Tischgespräche,” II. “Hitler und die Könige,” Quick (Munich, June 17, 1951), IV, 24, p. 787 sq. The Führer expressed his gratitude to the German Socialists for having destroyed the monarchical institutions in Germany.

INDEX

INDEX

The terms liberty, equality, liberalism, democracy, freedom, since they refer to the main theme of this book, are listed only in parts.

A

Abel, Theodor, 265–66, 363

Absolute, the (Catholic implications), 191, 242, 243, 244–45

Absolutism, 83; (Catholic) 191; 205, 236

Académie Française, 143

Acton, Lord (John Dalberg-Acton), 14, 22, 130, 152, 201, 289, 291, 317

Adam (and Eve), 95, 313

Adam, Karl, 330, 338, 339, 348

Adamites, 346

Adams, Brooks, 285, 295, 299, 301, 302

Adams, Charles F., 286

Adams, Ephraim D., 341

Adams, Henry, 14, 77–78, 84, 122, 285, 286, 295, 298, 300, 302, 310, 311, 344

Adams, James T., 286, 317

Adams, John, President of the United States, 6, 62, 159, 286, 298

Adams, John Quincy, President of the United States, 8, 159, 298

Adler, Friedrich, 191

Adler, Max, 293

Adler, Dr. Mortimer, 7, 286

Adler, Viktor, 254, 256

“Æsthetic government,” 121

Administration, 277, 324

Advisers (royal), 316

Agapé, 182

Agar, Herbert, 286

Age limits, 174

Agnosticism, 191

Agrarianism, 78

Albert I, King of the Belgians, 153, 156

Albert, Prince Consort, 153

Albigenses (Cathari), 212, 345, 351

Alcazarquivir, 142

Alexander I, Emperor of Russia, 156, 320, 322, 352

Alexander II, Emperor of Russia, 153, 320

Alix, Empress of Russia, 318

Alleghanies, 181

Allers, Dr. Rudolf, 140, 315

Alliances, military, 82

“Alloy,” monarchical, 125, 128, 129

Almagro San Martin, Melchor de, 335

Alfons of Liguori, St., 339

Alsace-Lorraine, 55–56, 244

Altruism, 105

Amateurism, 65, 160, 273–74, 278–79, 299, 310, 311, 319, 324

Ambrose, St., 322

America, see United States

American Catholic Philosophical Association, 286

“American Gothic,” 182–83

American Revolution, 6, 13, 352

“American way of life,” 101

“Americanism” (heresy), 99, 341

Amerling, K. S., 251

Ames, Fisher, 44, 62, 88, 106, 109, 294, 298, 305, 307

Amiel, Henri-Frédéric, 14, 26, 27, 34, 68, 82–83, 150, 292, 299, 300, 303, 310

Ammon, Otto, 320

Anaclet II, Counter-Pope, 155

Anakýklosis, see Evolution, political Anarchism, 201–02, 203

Anarchist leanings, 192–93, 240, 336, 341–42, 344

Anarchists, 202–03, 241, 337

Ancien Régime, 13, 280

Anderley, C. B., see Norton, Lord

Angell, Sir Norman, 200, 341

Anglicanism, 196

Anne of Bohemia, Queen of England, 212

Anonymity, 150, 238, 311

Anschluss, 244

Anti-Catholicism, 265

Antichrist, 74, 216

Anti-clericalism, 237, 251–53, 357

Anti-fascism, 38

Anti-Hitlerism (Marxist), 356

Anti-Judaism, 58, 170–71, 203, 219, 228–230, 253, 257, 267–68, 270; (Czech), 360; 365, 368

Anti-Leopoldism (Belgium), 141, 141 n

Anti-Semitism, see Anti-Judaism

Antonine, St., 339

Antonio “Conselheiro,” 47, (E. da Cunha on) 295

d’Antonio Fernando, 333

Antonowytsch, Dr. Michael, 359

Apponyi, Count Albert, 145

Arco-Valley, Count Anton A., 333–34

Arendt, Hannah, 368

Aretz, Gertrud, 323

Argovia (Aargau), 54

Arimichi, Ebisawa, 315

Aristocracy, 20, 28, 38, 57, 58, 247, 318

Aristocracy, natural, 7, 38

Aristocracy (form of government), 155

Aristotle, 6, 12, 14, 18, 32, 46, 52, 100, 107, 147, 162

Armed forces (army), 42–43, 194–95

Arnaldo di Brescia, 203

Arnold, Matthew, 38, 293

Aron, Raymond, 289

Aryans, 200

Aschendorf-Hümmling (district), 218

Asia, 49, 76, 79

Assassination, political, 190–91, 328

Association (see also Coalition), 35–36

Astrid, Queen of Belgians, 141, 141 n, 156

Astrow, Wladimir, 305

Atheism, 71

Athens, 162

Atlantic Charter, 283, 304

Aubert, Alfred, 324

Augustine, St., 57, 198, 215, 273, 305, 309, 338, 339

Augustinianism, 117

Augustus, 128, 318

Aulard, F., 295

d’Aulnoy, Marie C. Le Jumel, 342

Aussig (Usti-nad-Labem), 255, 256, 258, 259

Austria, 98, 131, 161, 170, 191, 198, 202, 204–05, 206, 237, 244, 253, 256, 259, 260, 331, 336, 337, 344, 355; (German national movement in), 360; (National Socialists in) 361; 362, 363

Austrian revolutions, 102

Austro - Hungarian monarchy, 257, 258, 314, 334

Austro-Prussian War, 201

Authoritarianism, 192–93, 240–41

Authorities, secular, 223–27

Authority, evidence of, 174–75

Authority, examples, 176–77

Authority, in monarchies, 289

Authority, political, 51, 61, 107, 168–77, 226, 241, 314; (and acclamation) 328

Authority, transference of, 171–74, 327

Average man, 88

Averroism, 315

B

Baader, Franz von, 321

Babbitt, Irving, 48, 50, 77, 288, 293, 295, 296, 301

Babceuf, Gracchus, 258

Bachofen, J. J., 14, 26, 67, 290

Badeni, Count Casimir, 254

Badoglio, Marshal Pietro, 248

Bagehot, Walter, 14, 18, 44–45, 288, 294, 341

Bainville, Jacques, 56, 297, 354, 355

Baker, James, 346

Bakunin, Michael, 50, 296

Baldensperger, Fernand, 354

Baldwin, Hanson W., 311

Baldwin, Stanley (Lord), 345

Balfour, Lord, 198

Ballin, Albert, 303

Barante, Baron de, 296, 327

Barea, Arturo, 337

Baring, Maurice, 300

Barker, Sir Ernest, 351

Baron, Hans, 331, 349

Baroque, 182, 221, 234

Barr, Stringfellow, 290

Barth, Karl, 219, 326, 336, 348

Bartoš, F. M., 213, 346, 356

Baunard, Abbé, 291

Bavaria, Bavarians, 191, 217, 218, 331

Bavarian People’s Party, 101, 231, 262

Beaconsfield, Lord, see Disraëli, Benjamin

Beaujour, Félix de, 193

Beerbohm, Max, 311

Beggars, begging, 185–86, 332

Beghards (Begards, Picards, Pickarts), 213, 250, 346, 358–59

Behn, Siegfried, 140, 316

Behrman, S. N., 297

Belanger, Auguste, 339

Belgium, 141, 141 n, 331

Belief, faith (as opposed to knowledge), 140, 316

Belisarius, 302

Belknap, Jeremy, 63

Bell, Bernard Iddings, 305

Bellarmine, St. Robert, 6, 137, 139, 156, 167–68, 171, 174, 315, 321, 325, 326; (Bellarmine - Suarez thesis) 327; 331, 338, 339

Bellarmine-Jefferson legend, 168

Belloc, Hilaire, 14, 157

Benda, Julien, 264

Beneš, Dr. Edward, 253, 257, 260, 356

Beneš, Vojta, 356

Bentham, Jeremy, 203

Benz, Richard, 342

Berdyaev (Berdyayev, Berdiaëff, etc.), Nicholas, 293, 301, 305, 307, 319, 323, 327, 341, 342

Berendt, Erich F., 363

Bergstraesser, Ludwig, 329

Berlin, 154, 242, 353, 354

Berlin, Ellin, 248

Bernanos, Georges, 97, 115, 246, 291, 305, 322, 342

Bernhart, Josef, 316, 329, 338

Bernouilli, C. A., 352

Bernstein, Ulrich, 352

Bestiality, 54

Betts, Charles H., 289, 309

Beveridge, Albert J., 293

Bevin, Ernest, 319

Bèze, Theodore de, 197, 331, 348

Bezold, F. von, 353, 358

Bible, 230–31

Bibliolatry, Protestant, 105

Billing, R., 362, 366

Billington, Ray Allen, 325

Billot, Cardinal Louis, S.J., 174, 327

Binchy, Daniel, 357

Binder, Julius, 332

Birth-rates, 311

Bishops, German, 348

Bismarck, Prince Otto, 76, 157, 161, 310, 312, 320, 323, 331, 359

Black (colour), 202, 241

Blake, William, 19

Bleyer-Härtl, Hans, 363–66

Bliven, Bruce, 345

Bloch Iwan, see Duehren, Dr. Eugen

Blondel, Maurice, 310

Blood, 239

Bloy, Leon, 192, 334

Bluntschli, J. C., 124

Bockelmann, Dr. Wilhelm, 362

Bockelson, see Jan van Leyden

Body, Catholic view of, 330

Boegner, Marc, 330

Boehmer, Heinrich, 214, 240–41, 347, 350, 353

Bogner, Hans, 312

Bogumil, 212

Bohemia-Moravia, 161, 211, 212–16, 244, 248, 249, 251–58, 356

“Bohemianism,” 251

Böhlau, publishers, 220

Böhm, “agrarian saint,” 213

Boii, 248

Bolingbroke, Lord, 152

Bolivar, Simon, 345

“Bolsheviks,” 202–03

Bonald, Louis G., Vicomte de, 327

Bonaparte (House of), 17, 147

Bonapartism (see also Cæsarism), 41, 61–62

Bonaventure, St., 197

Bongar, W. A., 314, 335

Boniface VIII, Pope, 338

Bonnard, Abel, 139, 315

Booth, John Wilkes, 334

Borchardt, Hermann, 326–27

Bormann, Martin, 363

Bossuet, Jacques B., 152, 308, 321, 323

Boston, 233

Boston College, 196

Botticelli, Sandro, 182

Botzenhart, Professor, 350

Boulanger, General Georges (Boulangism), 20, 62

Bourbon, House of, 322

Bourgeois (spirit), 155, 203

Bourget, Paul, 50, 296

Bourne, Geoffrey, 299

Bourne, Randolph, 330

Boutmy, Émile, 340

Bouvier, B., 299

Bowen, Catherine, 342

Boy Scouts, 351

Bragança (House of), 316

Brandenburg, Electorate of, 242

Brtianu, Ionel and Vintila, 145

Bratton, Fred Gladstone, 345

Braunias, Karl, 360

Brazil, 47, 203, 351

Bremen, 258

Brethren (bratři), 213, 250

Briand, Aristide, 145

Brieger, Theodor, 346

Brinton, Crane, 295, 296, 352, 355

“Britannia” (symbol), 148

Brodrick, James (S. J.), 168, 325

Broeckx, Edmond, 351

Brogan, D. W., 193, 314, 332, 353

Bromfield, Louis, 248

Brougham, Lord, 47, 294, 295

Brown, J. L., 340

Browne, Waldo R., 304, 365

Brownson, Henry F., 305

Brownson, Orestes A., 14, 21–22, 24, 40, 289, 293, 299, 305, 320, 325, 331

Brüning, Dr. Heinrich, 63, 263, 354

Brunn (Brno), 254

Bruncken, Ernst, 137, 314

Brunner, Emil, 326, 349, 353

Brussels, 141

Bryce, James (Lord), 14, 59, 297, 308, 309, 310, 324

Bubnoff, N. von, 336

Buckle, H. T., 352

Buenos Aires, 337

Bulgaria, 161

“John Bull,” 148

Bullitt, William C., 309

Bürck, F. J., 339

Bürckel, Gauleiter of Austria, 364

Burckhardt, Jacob, 14, 18, 19–20, 23–24, 26, 44, 46, 48, 50–51, 53, 59–60, 67, 71–72, 76, 117, 150, 160, 288, 289, 293, 294, 296, 298, 299, 300, 301, 304, 308, 309, 318, 323, 338, 355

Bureaucracy (officialdom), 20, 22–23, 51–52, 121–22, 160, 298; (and democracy) 299; 324

Burke, Edmund, 14, 41, 48, 61, 236, 294. 298, 307, 323, 340, 352, 365

Burney, Christopher, 364

Burnham, James, 110, 298

Burns, E. M., 286, 293

Burschofsky, Ferdinand, 254, 256, 361

Burt, Sir Cyril, 308

Burton, Sir Richard, 316

Busch, Noel, 149

Businessman (in Catholic societies), 186

Butler, Miss E. M., 242–43, 354

Butler, Nicholas Murray, 286

Butler, Rohan d’O., 363

Byelozerski, N., 292

C

Cabaneiro, 186

Cabinet wars, 153–54

Cæsar, C. J., 128, 163, 318

Cæsarism, 34, 65–66, 71–72, 144, 147, 318

Calhoun, John C., 21, 288, 307

Calvin, John, 57, 183, 203, 209, 221, 226, 233, 235, 239, 241, 319, 326, 331, 340, 349, 351, 353

Calvinism, Calvinists, 196, 222; (development of) 239–40; 241–42, 352

Cambridge Medieval History, 285

Cameron, Elizabeth, 77, 301

Camōes, Luis de, 316

Campan, Madame de, 322

Campbell, Francis S. (E. v. Kuehnelt-Leddihn), 285, 287, 299, 300, 306, 313, 335, 338

Capéran, Louis, 339

Capital punishment, 191, 334

Capital, capitalism, 5, 67, 74

Capitalism and socialism, 285, 299 302

Capitant, René, 351

Capito von Hagenau, 213

Capitol Hill, 163

Capuchin crypt (Vienna), 185

Cardinals, College of, 173

Careers, political, 115

Cargill, O., 290

Carlism, 41, 201–02

Carmona, General, President of Portugal, 317

Carol I, King of Rumania, 153

Carré, Jean-Marie, 365

Carrel, Alexis, 310

Cartesian philosophy, 187

Casalis, Georg, 348

Casas, Bartolomé de las, bishop, 345

Casement, Sir Roger, 327

Castlereagh, Lord, 278

Cater, Harold Dean, 301, 302

Catherine II, Empress of Russia, 79, 162

Catholic culture, 184

Catholic nations, 86–87, 126, (and revolutions) 185; (internal tensions) 186–87; (character of) 188–208, 243

Catholic Periodical Index, 234

“Catholic Programme,” 186

Catholic society, 184, 193

Catholicism, Catholics, 11, 70–71, 183; (logic and reason) 189; 190, 193–94, 196–98, 228, 232, 234, 236; (at German elections) 262; (libertarian implications of) 282–83; (and liberty) 335

Catholicism in the dispersion, 199, 203

Catholicism, French, 334

Catholicism, Irish, 182

Catholicism, pictorial character, 234–35

Catholicism, Spanish, 334

Catholicism in the United States, 318–19

Cathrein, Victor (S. J.), 339

Catiline, 66

Cato, 328

Caulaincourt, Armand A. Marquis de, 153–54, 321

Cavaignac, Eugene, General, 45

Cavour, Camillo, Conte di, 50, 161

Celts, 248

Centralization, centralism, 17, 43, 50–52, 67, 201

Centrist (Centre) Party of Germany, 101, 231, 262

Cermak, Anton J., Mayor of Chicago, 334

Černý, co-founder of Sokol, 251

Chambeau, Colonel, 353

Chamberlin, W. H., 288

Chambers, R. W., 351

Chambon, Josef, 352

Change of governments, 161

Chapman, John Jay, 354

Charlemagne, Holy Roman Emperor, 16, 141, 155

Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, 314

Charles I, Emperor of Austria, 111, 156

Charles III, King of Spain, 322

Charles Martell, 302

Chateaubriand, François R. Vicomte de, 75, 272, 289, 290–91, 309, 312, 336

Chaves, Luis, 316

Chelčický, Peter, 213, 250, 356

Chesterton, G. K., 293, 307

Chevré, Henri, 336

Child Labor Amendment (U.S.), 201

China, 25, 128

Chinovniki (Russ. officials), 277

Choisy, Eugène, 348, 353

Chopin, Jules, 359

Chotek, Countess Sophie (Duchess of Hohenberg), 159

Christ, Jesus, 127, 186, 216, 228, 350

Christ, Mystical Body of, 196

Christian X, King of Denmark, 156

Christian Brothers, 70

Christianity, 42, 68, 90; (and forms of government) 137–38

Christians, rôle of, 196

Christina, Queen of Sweden, 339

Christlichsoziale Partei (Austrian Catholic Party), 98

Church, Catholic, 54, 79, 163–64, 195, 196–98, 240, 244, 247, 331

Church, Evangelical, 220

Church (compared with State), 48

Ciechanowski, Jan, 310, 333

Cihula, Austrian National-Socialist, 361

Ciller, A., 361, 362

Citizen, according to Spinoza, 106

Citizenship (as opposed to nationality or race), 287

Civil liberties, 205

Civil War, American, see War between the States

Civil War, Russian, 191

Civilization 49; (end of) 84–85; (Christian) 163–64; (“schematic”) 302

Class feeling, 332

Class pride, 141

Class struggle, 27

Claudel, Paul, 189

Claudianus, 322

Clémenceau, Georges, 111, 145, 243, 244, 257, 354

Clemency, 318

Clement XI, Pope, 196

Clement, Jacques, 334

Clericalism, 196, 338

Coalition, political, 35, 126

Coburg, House of, 170, 316

Cochlaeus, Johannes, 346, 358–59

Code of Canon Law, 5, 146, 285

Co-election, 106

Colbert, Abbé, 339

Collectivism, 52, 247, 267

Colleges, Catholic in the United States, 325

Collegium Clementinum, 346

Colonies, British and French, 203

Columbia (symbol), 148

Comenius, Amos (Komenský), 356

Commercialism, 186

Common denominator (common framework of reference), 97–102, 106, 122, 157, 189–90, 198, 199, 200–01, 282–83.

Common good (bonum commune), 135, 170, 171, 174, 176

“Common Man,” 8, 45–46, 83–84, 88, 237–38, 267, 280, 309, 315

Communism, communists, 52, 89, 203, 219

Communism, German, 217–18, 266

Communism, Russian, 240

Community feelings, 193

Compromise, 120, 188, 192, 334–45

Comte, Auguste, 51–52, 296

Conclave, 173

Confederacy, War of, (Sonderbundskrieg), 201

Confidence, international, 159–60

Conformity, 293; (totalitarian) 199; 201

Congar, Yves (O.P.), 348

Congress, American, 10, 88

Conscience, 5, 196–98; (and Free Will) 336, 337, 338–39

Conservative Party (of Great Britain), 100, 103

Conservative Party of Canada, 104

Conscription, 60–61, 153, 320

Conspiratorial thesis of National Socialist rise, 356

Constance, city of, 347

Constant de Rebecque, Benjamin, 14, 16–17, 52, 68, 127; (during the Hundred Days) 287; 296, 300, 319, 324, 352

Constitution of the United States, 314

Constitutionalism, 62

Continent, European, 80, 81, 82, 206, 207–08, 234, 340

Contraception, artificial, 182 n

Contractual theory, 327

Cooper, James F., 36, 292, 306, 331, 335

Copleston, F. C. (S.J.), 325

Coram, Robert, 64

Cornelissen, A. J. M., 353

Coronation, 152, 319

Corporative representation, 323

Corpus Christi procession, 232

Corpus Iuris Canonici, see Code of Canon Law

Corruption, 52, 157, 161

Costa-Rosetti, Julius (S.J.), 323

Coterell, William, 292

Coudenhove-Kalergi, Count Richard, 257 n

Cousin, Victor, 316

Cram, Ralph Adams, 286, 307

Crankshaw, Edward, 344

Creston, Dormer, 321

Criminality, 335–36

Criminals, political, 90–91

Criminals, punishment of, 225

Crispi, Francesco, 145

Crossman, R. H. S., 365

Cromwell, Oliver, 318

Cronin, Michael, 327

Croiset, A., 312

Crusius, Friedrich, 302

Culture, Catholic, 182, 234–35

Culture, religious, 234–35, 351

Cunha, Euclides da, 295

Curtain (“Iron Curtain”), 81

Custine, Astolphe, Marquis de, 76–77, 79, 301, 302, 303

Czechoslovakia, 27, 131, 258, 259, 260

Czechs, 248–49, 251–53

Czerwenka, Bernhard, 359

Czotgosz, Leon, 334

D

D.N.S.A.P., see German National Socialist Workers’ Party

Daimonic man, 47–48

Dalberg-Acton, John H. E., see Acton, Lord

Dalbiez, Roland, 316

Dallin, David J., 296

Damaschke, Adolf, 360

Damon, Bertha, 292

Daniel, Prophet, 215

Dante Alighieri, 21, 138–39, 197, 315

Danton, Georges J., 242

D’Arcy, Martin C. (S.J.), 306

Darwin, Charles, 56–57, 251, 310

Darwinism, 280

Davy, Sir Humphry, 310

Dawson, Christopher, 123, 234, 290, 342

de Greeff, Dr. Arthur, 324

de Man, Hendrik, 267

Death, 185, 334, 337

Declaration of Independence (American), 137, 273, 305

Dekabrists, 90

Delbrück, Hans, 306

Delegation (of authority) v. designation, 173–74

Deliveries (of queens), 323

Délos, J. T., 265, 292

Demagogues, demagogy, 40–41

Democracy in antiquity, 292, 311, 312

Democracy and Catholic doctrine, 184

Democracy, Christian, 312

Democracy, definition of, 5–10, 87–88

Democracy, direct, 6, 7, 94–95, 127–28, 311

“Democracy, German,” 239, 264

Democracy, indirect, 7

Democracy, Jacksonian, 6

Democracy, Jeffersonian, 6, 7

Democracy, military weakness of, 143–44

Democracy, according to National Socialist leaders, 264–65

Democracy, oligarchic aspects of, 109–10, 128, 307

Democracy and progress, 309

Democracy, total (example of), 94–95

Democratic Party (of the United States), 103, 112 n; (in New York State) 183; 306

Demophily, 6, 186, 204, 331

Denifle, Heinrich (O.P.), 346, 348

Denis, Ernest, 358

Denzinger (Enchiridion), 321

Depretis, Agostino, 145

Deputies, independence of, 112, 308

Déroulède, Paul, 20

Descartes, René, 203

Designation (of authority) v. delegation, 173

Despotism, see Tyranny

Deus absconditus, 234

Dewey, John, 310, 335

Dewey, Thomas, 104

Dialectics, Protestant, 180, 187, 233–35

Dictators, family background of, 145–46

Dictatorship, dictators (see also Tyranny), 10, 53, 71–72, 145–49

Dictatorship, plebiscitarian, 151, 157–58

Diet (Landtag), Moravian, 256

Diminution of the faith, 180

Diocletian, 163

Diodorus, 86

Dionysius Areopagiticus, 321

Diplomats, Czechoslovak, 356

Discipline, 194–95

Discussion, political, 125

Disraëli, Benjamin (Lord Beacons-field), 14, 58, 142–43, 297, 331, 355

Dittrich, Ottmar, 306

Diuturnum Illud (Encyclical), 173–74

“Diversitarian” sentiment, 15

Dobrowsky, Joseph, 346

Dodd, W. (U.S. ambassador), 348

Dollfuss, Engelbert, 366

Domorázek, Karel, 359

Donoso Cortés, Juan, Marqués de Valdegamas, 14, 17, 41–44, 51, 78–80, 143, 287, 288, 294, 302, 309, 317, 336

Doriot, French collaborationist, 266

d’Ors, Eugenio, see Ors

Dostoyevski, Fyodor M., 14, 19, 32–33, 35–36, 74, 167, 288, 292, 301, 303, 325

Doumergue, Emile, 235, 351

Dovifat, Emil, 364

Drähndorf, Johann, 213

Dresden, destruction of, 280

Drexler, Anton, 258–59, 364

Drieu la Rochelle, Pierre, 292

Droz, F. X., 33

Drucker, Peter F., 260, 300, 305, 307

Dubnow (Dubnov), Simon, 362, 365

Ducatillon, J. V. (O.P.), 265, 292

Duehren, Dr. Eugen (pseud, for Iwan Bloch), 288, 328

Dürr, Emil, 293

Dulles, Allen Welsh, 333, 355

Durnovo Memorandum, 81, 303

Duty, 194–95, 337

Dux (Duchov), 258

Dynasty, dynasties, 159–60, 315

Dyrssen, Carl, 366

E

East Prussia, 218, 261

Easum, Chester V, 317

Ebert, K. E., 357

Eck, Dr. Johann (Maier), 213, 216

Economic crisis (1929–1935), 245

Economic Middle Class Party (Wirtschaftspartèi des Mittelstandes), 261–62

Economic security, 278–79

Education, compulsory, 63–64

Education (experience, training), 151–52

Education, general level of, 278

Educationalism, 63–64, 117, 129

Edward VII, King of Great Britain, 153

Efficiency, 91, 118, 121, 341

Egalitarianism, 17–19, 74, 130, 184–85, 204, 328, 331

Egenter, Richard, 338

Eger (Cheb), 254

Egerton, F. C. C., 332

Egoism, 105, (national) 267

Ehrenburg (Erenburg), Ilya, 331, 340

Eiffel tower, 107

Eichthal, Eugàne, 288

Eisenhower, Dwight D., 104

Eisner, Kurt, 333

Elbe River, 217

“Elder Statesmen,” 145

Elections, 171

Elections, German, 217–18, 231, 261–62

Eliot, Charles W., 47, 295, 306

Eliot, T. S., 290

Elizabeth, St. (of Hungary), 155

Élite, élites, 7, 20, 89–90, 109, 257, 264, 277, 282, 296, 318, 322

Éluard, Paul, 300

Elysée de la Nativité (O. Carm.), 339

Emden, 355

Emerson, Ralph W., 39, 285

Emotions, emotionalism, 64, 117, 118, 172, 222

Emperor, Holy Roman, 138–39, 157–58; (election of) 174,

Empire, Holy Roman, 232

Empiricism, 192

Ena, Queen of Spain, 318

Encyclopedia Britannica, 286

Enemy alien, 59

Engels, Friedrich, 27, 268, 290, 358, 365

England (see also Great Britain), 170, 179, 213, 217; (anti-intellectualism) 340

Engliš, Karel, 254, 361

English-speaking Nations, 9

Equality (human), 2, 3, 90–91, 343

Erasmus of Rotterdam, 182, 217

Erbe, Hellmuth, 353

Erichsen, Hans, 349

Erman and Réclam, authors, 353

Eros, 182

Error, toleration of, 4–5, 89

Esdras (I), 350

Esprit d’escalier, 323

Ethics, 83, 85

Ethics (Christian), 112–114

Ethnicism, see Nationalism, ethnic

Eugene of Savoy, Prince, 302

Euler, Carl, 359

Europe, 49, 73–77; (love of freedom) 204

Evil, prevention of, 121

Evolution, political (political cycles), 12–13, 22–23, 28–33, 67, 104, 127–28, 132, 144, 147

Evolution v. revolution, 37–38

Exclusiveness, Catholic, 188

Existentialism, 116–17

Experience, 324

Expert knowledge, expert rule, 65, 118–22, 160, 278–79, 299, 324

Extremism, 33, (Catholic) 188; 191–92

Eylert, R. F., 321

F

Fabricius, Hans, 363

Faguet, Émile, 286, 315, 318

Faith, 180, 222

Faith, salvation by, 226

Falange, 345

Fall (original sin), 92–96, 114, 128–29, 151, 222, 313

Families, royal, 152–53

Family, 108, 138, 141, 141 n, 147–48, 315

Fanfani, Amintore, 179, 234

Fascism (Italian), 9, 38, 123, 240, 250; (original programme of) 325; (and anti-clericalism) 357; (and Protestantism) 358; 368

Father, image of, 138–39, 144–45, 315, 318, 367

Father-son relationship, 138, 139, 144–45, 146, 148

Fatherhood, see Patriarchalism

Fatherland, 318

Faulfisch (student from Prague), 212, 346

Faulhaber, Michael von, Cardinal, 260

Faulkner, Harold U., 293

Faure, Élie, 332, 344

Fausses idées claires, 48

Fay, Bernard, 352

Feder, Gottfried, 259, 366

Federalism (anti-centralism), 49, 201

Federn, Dr. Paul, 144–45, 317

Feeney, Leonard, 196, 339–40

Felhorska, F., 320

Felice, G. de, 352

Femininity, 148–49

Fénelon, Francois de, bishop, 152

Ferdinand I, Czar of the Bulgars, 153

Ferdinand VII, King of Spain, 72

Fermanagh, 96

Ferrero, Guglielmo, 31, 45, 147, 162, 294, 313, 317, 320, 324, 325, 328, 344, 356

Ferrero, Leo, 31, 291, 344

Fick, F., 352

Fideism, 183–84, 188, 196, 222

Fierlinger, Zdenĕk, 251

Figueiredo, Anteiro de, 316

Figueras, Tomás García, 316

Filmer, Sir Robert, 313

Finland, 205, 231, 267

Flags (in churches), 306

Flajšhans, Vaclav, 358

Flattery, 157–58, 308

Foch, Ferdinand, Marshal, 59, 320

Fontane, Theodor, 354

Folliet, Joseph, 296

Foreign Legion (French and Spanish), 194–95, 337

Forst de Battaglia, Otto, 321

Forster, E. M., 330

Fortress (confinement in), 191

Founding Fathers, American, 6, 104, 148, 314

Fourier, François Charles, 74

France, 17, 34–35, 50, 79, 145, 157, 173, 194, 202, 203, 206, 240, 342, 351, 354; (pro-Germanism in) 365; 367

France, Anatole, 243, 289

Franchise, popular, 62, 108–09; (qualifications for) 341

Francis Joseph I, Emperor of Austria, King of Hungary, 138, 153, 157, 159, 320, 331, 338, 359

Francis-Ferdinand, Archduke, 153, 159, 191, 321

Franco y Bahamonde, Francisco, Spanish Chief of State, 90, 206, 326

Franco-Prussian collaboration, 242

Franco-Prussian war, 353–54

Frank, Hans, 267

Frank, Waldo, 296

Franke, co-founder of Czech National-Socialist Party, 252

Frantz, Constantin, 49, 67, 72, 76, 295, 299, 300, 301

Fraternalism, 36, 141, 146, 315

Frayman, Joseph, 319

Fredborg, Arvid, 348

Frederick I Barbarossa, Holy Roman Emperor, 141

Frederick V, of the Palatinate, King of Bohemia, 251

Frederick II, King of Prussia, 135, 155, 242, 277, 313, 336

Frederick William III, King of Prussia, 154, 156, 321

Frederick III, Elector of Saxony, 225

Free Will (freedom of choice, libertas arbitrii), 70, 195–96

Freedom (definitions), 2, 3; (in relation with equality) 304, 313; (intellectual) 365

Freemasonry, 199

Freiligrath, Ferdinand, 357

French Canada, 187, 189, 329

French Revolution, 6, 13, 17, 23, 40, 50, 52, 59, 67–68, 91, 153, 164, 177–78, 187, 209, 211; (Protestant aspects of) 235–36; 243, 268, 368

French Revolution and National Socialism, 238, 247, 352

Freud, Sigmund, 139–40, 160, 324

Frey, Justus, 357

Freyre, Gilberto, 317–18, 333

Friedjung, Heinrich, 254

Friedlander, Otto, 330

Friedrich, Carl J., 320

Fromm, Erich, 219, 348

Fügner, Jindřich, 251

Führer-State, republican, 248

Fuller, Basil, 320

Fuller, Major-General J. F. C., 341

Fülöp-Miller, René, 346

Fürer-Haimendorf, Christoph von, 314

Funck-Brentano, F., 295, 325

Fustel de Coulanges, Numa, 6, 18–19, 33–34, 288, 292

Future, visions of the, 15–85, 302, 312, 355–56

G

Gablonz (Jablonec), 255

Gabriel, R. H., 99, 321, 341

Gaidoz, Henri, 306

Gairdner, James, 347

Galéra, Karl Siegmar Baron, 254, 361

Gallup Poll, 97, 103

Gambs, Charles-Christian, 352

Gangale, Giuseppe, 358

Ganivet, Angel, 198

Garfield, James A., President of the United States, 117, 289

Garibaldi, Giuseppe, 50

Garrigou-Lagrange, Reginald (O.P.), 306

Gaskell, Charles Milnes, 302

Gasparin, Agénor Comte de, 144

Gattermayer, D.A.P. delegate, 256

Gaulle, Charles de, 206, 344

Gedye, G. E. R., 362

Geiger, Theodor, 294

General Will (volonté générale), 96, 238, 265, 298, 305

Generosity, 225

Geneva, 183, 233, 239, 331, 353

Genghiz Khan, 155

Genius, 153

Genoa, 128, 313

Gentleman, Christian, 307

Geographic factor, 328–29

Georg I, King of the Hellenes, 156

George III, King of Great Britain, 88, 137, 156

George, Duke of Saxony, 350

George, Stefan, 271

Gerlich, Fritz, 361

German Democratic Party (Staatspartei), 261

German National Party (Deutschnationale Volkspartei), 255

German National Socialist Workers’ Party (D.N.S.A.P.), 254, 257; (programme of) 258, 259, 260, 270, 363

German Social Party (Deutschsoziale Partei), 253

German Workers’ Party (D.A.P.) of Bavaria, 259, 266

German Workers’ Party (D.A.P.) of Bohemia-Moravia, 253, 255, 256, 270

Germans (Italianized), 227–28

Germany, Germans, 17, 27, 34, 49, 58, 73, 77, 82, 94, 101, 124, 161, 179, 180, 191, 195, 198, 202, 203, 214, 217–19, 230–32, 240, 241–45; (character) 242–43, 260–71, 301; (resistance to Russia) 302, 312, 328, 336, 342, 344, 351, 354, 355

German extremism, 354

German Federal Execution against Prussia, see Austro-Prussian War

Germany, northern, 269

Gibbs, Sir Philip, 248

Gilchrist, J. M., 330

Gillouin, Réné, 296

Gilman, Daniel, C., 291

Gilson, Étienne, 315, 333, 338

Giolitti, Giovanni, 145

Gladstone, W. E., 12

Glarus, Diet of, 117

Gleichschaltung, 38

Gobineau, Joseph A. Comte de, 28, 56–58, 297

God, 85, 158, 169, 173, 204

Goebbels, Josef Paul, 232, 238, 248, 264–65, 266, 267, 348, 365

Gödöllö, 351

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 12, 34, 47–48, 85, 89, 133, 231, 232, 272, 295, 304, 313

Gogarten, Friedrich, 295, 348, 349

Golden Bull (Arany Bulla), 90

Goll, Jaroslav, 213, 346

Gooch, G. P., 183, 219, 234, 330, 331, 348, 352

“Good Pagan,” 113–14

Gorer, Geoffrey, 315

Gorham, Nathaniel, 317

Göring, Hermann, 146, 192, 355

Görres, Joseph von, 300

Gosse, Edmund, 349

Gothic style, 181

Gottwald, Klement, 251, 343

Government, 92–94, 118, 134–35

Government, from above, 125

Government, basic forms of, 167–68

Government, Catholic view of, 226

Government, by consent of the governed, 109

Government, good and bad forms of, 115

Government, minimal, 277, 282

Government, mixed forms of, 97, 326

Government, organic forms of, 175

Government, parliamentary, 205

Government, radius of action, 119, 277

Government, representative, 9, 87, 104

Government, suggested forms of, 274–77

Gracchi, 66

Grace (supra-natural), 196

Graham, W. H., 360

Grant, Ulysses S., President of the United States, 18, 288

Graves, Robert, 341

Grayzel, Solomon, 350

Great Britain, 37, 76, 77, 78, 81, 82, 96, 97, 103, 104, 159–60, 164, 187, 191, 243, 248, 331, 332, 335

Great Britain, Constitution of, 105, 135

Greece, 91

Greeff, Arthur, see de Greeff, A.

Greek Orthodox countries, 203, 205, 336

Greek Orthodoxy (Eastern Schism, Pravoslavism), 79, 188, 199, 203, 228, 333

Greenslide, S. L., 349

Greenwood, H. Powys, 321

Gregorovius, F., 350

Gregory VII, Pope, 305

Grégr brothers, 251

Gresham’s Law, political, 115

Grey, Sir Edward (Lord Grey of Fallodon), 344, 356

Grillparzer, Franz, 14, 54, 296, 309, 353

Grimm, F., 354

Grimmeishausen, H. J. C. von, 151, 319

Gringauz, Samuel, 365

Grisar, Hartmann (S.J.), 347

Groethuysen, Bernard, 330

Group control, 36

“Group soul,” 107

Grynszpan, Herszel, 334

Guardini, Romano, 339

Guderian Heinz, Col. General, 260

Guerlac, Othon, 354

Guicciardini, Francesco, 355

Guiteau, Charles J., 334

Guizot, F. P. G., 84, 313, 319, 336

Gumpert, Martin, 351

Gurian, Waldemar, 342

H

Habeas Corpus, 367

Habsburg, House of, 170, 185, 251, 257, 362

Hadrian VI, Pope, 220–21

Haeckel, Ernst H., 293

Haecker, Theodor, 306, 325, 332

Haensel, C., 364

Hagen, Matthias, 213

Hajn, Alois, 359

Half education, 63, 333

Halévy, Élie, 295

Haller, Carl L. von, 143, 311, 323, 352

Halmann, Ludwig, 323

Hamburger, Philip, 337

Hamilton, Alexander, 6, 62, 122, 143, 286, 317, 356

Hamilton, Cicely, 298

Hanke, Lewis, 333

Hanover, House of, 157, 170

Hanseatic Cities, 128

Hardenberg, Karl August, Prince, 278

Harnack, A. von, 228

Harrison, Benjamin, President of the United States, 159

Harrison, William Henry, President of the United States, 159

Harsch, Joseph C., 363

Hart, Charles E., 286

Hartmann, Eduard von, 86, 304, 348

Hartmann, Moritz, 357

Hasbach, Wilhelm, 299, 310

Hassinger, Hugo, 358

Hauffen, Adolf, 347

Hauser, Henri, 48

Haushofer, Albrecht, 366

Haushofer, Karl, Major-General, 271, 366–67

Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 336

Hayek, Friedrich A. von, 240, 296, 349

Hayes, Carlton J. H., 4, 285, 297, 303, 341

Hebrides, 179, 329

Hecht, Ben, 290

Hefele, Hermann, 288

Hegel, Friedrich, 170, 187, 211, 236, 238, 332, 352

Hegemann, Werner, 219, 348

Hehn, Victor, 331–32

Heiden, Konrad, 258, 362, 363, 366

Heiligenkreuz (Austrian monastery), 205

Heimann, Eduard, 289

Heine, Heinrich, 300

Hell, 197

Hellman, Lillian, 248

Hello, Ernest, 35, 292

“Helvetia” (symbol), 148

Hendrick, Burton J., 344

Henessey, Thomas E., 315

Henlein, Konrad, 258, 260, 362

Hennigsen, C. F., 34

Henrietta Maria, Queen of England, etc., 318

Henry, Prince of Prussia, 317

Hensler, Dorothea, 300

Herben, Jan, 213, 347, 358

Herd, human, 66, 97

Heredity in royalty, 152–53, 320

Hermens, Ferdinand, 297

Hernández, Jesús, 337

Herodotus, 304

Herold, J. Christopher, 329

Hertling, G. Count, 289

Herwig, author, 360

Herzen, Alexander, 14, 34–35, 73–74, 81, 292, 300, 301, 303, 335

Hess, Rudolf, 264–65

Hessen, Johannes, 348

Heterodoxy, 38

Heuss, Theodor, President of the Federal German Republic, 360

Hierarchy, 139–40

Hieronymus of Prague, 216, 347, 357

Hildebrandt, Franz, 350

Hill, William E. (S.J.), 325

Himmler, Heinrich, 232

Hindenburg, Paul von, President of the German Reich, 104, 145, 355, 362

History, 86–87, 160

Hitler, Adolf, 45, 46, 47, 62, 67–68, 90, 148, 161, 174, 203, 219, 221, 232, 241, 247, 249, 257, 259, 260, 262, 263, 264, 267, 270, 271, 280, 296, 299, 324, 328, 333, 348, 355, 360, 361–62, 363, 364, 365, 366, 368

“Hitlerism,” 271

Hlinka, Andrew, 145

Hoban, P. James, 335

Hobbes, Thomas, 351

Hoch, Karel, 252

Hodge, Alan, 341

Hodža, Milan, President of Czechoslovakia, 356

Hofbauer, St. Clement Maria, 180

Hoffet, Frédéric, 329, 342, 354

Hoffman, Ross J. S., 323, 344

Hofstadter, Richard, 314

Hohenzollern, House of, 90, 239, 242, 316, 362

Hohlbaum, Robert, 357

Höhn, Reinhard, 355

Holbrook, Stewart H., 292

Hollis, Christopher, 308

Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Jr., 354

Holstein-Gottorp, House of, 316

Holy Alliance, 82

Hooker, Richard, 168

Hoover, Herbert, President of the United States, 299

Hopkins, Harry, 188

Hora, C. M., 358

Horizontal pressure, 306

Horst Wessel Lied, 268

Huch, Ricarda, 350

Hübner, Count Joseph A., 153, 305, 321

Hügel, Baron Friedrich von, 338, 354

Hülsemann, Johann Georg, 298

Hughes, Emmet J., 304

Hugo, Comte Victor-Marie, 332

Huguenots, 242, 353

Huizinga, Johan, 192, 332

Huldermann, B., 303

Humanism, 180, 181, 220, 221

Humanitarianism, 188, 191

Humanity, 272

Humour, 329

Hungary, 58, 161, 179, 191

Hunter, Stanley A., 295

Hus, John, 197–98, 209, 211–16, 249–51, 269, 346, 347, 357, 358

Huss, Pierre J., 348

Hussites, 250–51, 346–47 (see also Taborites)

Hussitism, 213–15, 250–51, 357, 358, 359

Huxley, Thomas, 38, 293, 299, 310

I

Iberian Peninsula, 145

Iceland, 231

Identitarian instinct, 15, 305

Identity and uniformity, 15–18, 30–31, 72, 146, 201, 244

Ideologies, 340

Ignorance, progressive, 310

Illegitimacy, 175

Illiteracy, 63, 189, 341

Immigration, U.S. legislation relating to, 297

Inbreeding, 152–53

Indian Civil Service (I.C.S.), 277

Individual, lonely, 177

Individualism, “individuals,” 40, 52, 150; (in the American scene) 193; 194–95, 201; (Christian) 307; (Catholic) 336; 343

Individuality, 26

Inequality, 33, 38, 317, 367

Inge, Dean, 219, 339, 342, 343, 348

Inheritance laws, 161

Innocent III, Pope, 339

Inquisition, 5, 36, 285, 323

Insane, extermination of the, 227

Intelligence (among classes), 320, 367

Intermarriages, royal, 152, 154–55, 159

International, Second, 131, 252

Internationalism, 55, 320

Interracialism, 155

Intervention, foreign, 161–62

Intolerance, 36–37; (Protestant) 190, 351

Intuition, 117, 309

Iorga, Nicola, 145

Ireland (Eire), the Irish, 96, 188, 329, 344

Irlinger, Max, 355

Irrationalism, 198, 283, 309

Irresponsibility, 158

Isocrates, 319, 324

Isonomy, 2

Italy, Italians, 50, 124, 125, 161, 162, 194–95, 202, 206, 240, 337–38, 351, 355

J

Jaccoud, J. B., 311

Jackson, Andrew, President of the United States, 7, 8, 31, 64, 296

Jacobins, 50, 52, 53, 236

Jaeger, Georg, 353

Jahn, Friedrich, 209, 251, 359

Jamboree, 351

James, Henry, 292, 306

James, William, 34, 242, 292, 342, 354

Jan van Leyden (Bockelson), 258, 362

Jansenius, Jansenism, 51, 187, 196, 209, 352

Japan, 82, 138–39

Jarrett, Bede (O. P.), 355

Jaspers, Karl, 288, 294

Jefferson, Thomas, 6–8, 62, 143; (American moral emancipation on) 193; 286, 293, 298, 310, 314, 317, 326, 335, 356

Jerrold, Douglas, 311

Jesuits, 168; (Jesuit Scholastics) 184

Jesuit style, see Baroque

Jews, 5, 58, 170–71, 196, 201, 228–30, 239, 257–58, 280, 328, 342–43; (in the Middle Ages), 350; 360, 364, 365

Ježek, J. F., 357

Joan of Arc, St., 197

Jodl, General Alfred, 260

John, St., Evangelist, 90

John, Archduke of Austria, 153

John, Elector of Saxony, 225

Johnson, Dr. Samuel, 367

Jordan, Max, 351

Joris, J. A., 332

Jouvenel, Bertrand de, 304, 311

Joyce, James, 190, 333

Juarez, Benito, 203

Judas Iscariot, 90

Jung, C. G., 140

Jung, Edgar, 264, 355, 364

Jung, Rudolf, 254, 256, 258, 259, 260, 270, 361, 362, 363

Jung, leader of “Young Czechs,” 251

Jünger, Ernst, 147, 299, 310, 315, 325, 328

Jünger, Friedrich Georg, 68, 299

Junker, North-German, 53, 249, 260, 298

Jurieu, Pierre, 326

K

Kabinettskriege, see Cabinet wars

Kaergel, H. C., 359, 362

Kahr, August R. von, 260

Kalb, Baron Jean de, 9

Kalinine, M. I., 287

Kampschulte, F. W., 331

Kannegiesser, assassin of M. Uritzki, 334

Kaplan, Dora, 334

Karagjorgjević, House of, 316

Karam, Raymond, 340

Karrer, Otto, 197, 319, 338

Kautsky, Karl, 358

Keitel, Wilhelm, General, 260

Kelsen, Hans, 289, 308, 313

Kendall, Willmoore, 326

Kennan, George F., 367

Kern, E., 307

Keynes, Lord (John Maynard), 366

Keyserling, Count Hermann, 51, 193, 294, 300, 335, 337, 340, 345, 354

Kham, khamstvo (slavery), 299

Khomyakov, A. S., 81, 300, 303, 306

Kiefer, Ernst, 365

Kierkegaard, Søren, 14, 35, 40, 83, 133, 152, 237, 242, 292, 293, 303, 311, 317, 352, 354

Kindt, Karl, 229, 351

King, MacKenzie, Canadian Prime Minister, 104

Kipling, Rudyard, 155

Kisch, Guido, 360

Klein, Abbé Félix, 341

Klofáč, Václav, 252

Knirsch, Hans, 254, 255, 258, 361, 362

Knowledge, 65, 116–22, 172; (related to political problems) 278–79

Knowledge, relative shrinkage of, 119–20

Knox, John, 351

Knox, Mgr. Ronald, 163–64

Kobylinski-Ellis, Leo, 322

Koestler, Arthur, 41–42, 300, 316, 321

Kohn, Hans, 298

Kohn-Bramstedt, E., 317

Kolnai, Aurél, 294, 305, 315

Köpphel, Wolff, 347

Kornis, Gyula, 310

Kościuszko, Thaddeus (Tadeusz), 9

Kraft, Wilhelm, 348

Kralik, Richard von, 302

Kraus, Arnošt, 357

Krauss (S.J.), 179

Krebs, Engelbert, 350

Krebs, Hans, 254, 256, 258, 359, 361, 362

Kroll, Gerhard, 355

Kronos, 147

Kroy, early National Socialist, 361

Krummel, Leopold, 358

Ku Klux Klan, 297

Kucharzewski, Jan, 324, 354

Kuehnett-Leddihn, Erik von (see also Campbell, F. S.), 285, 306, 311, 313, 316, 329, 336, 339, 342, 365

Kühlmann, Richard von, 320

Kühn, Erich, 335

Kuhn, Helmut, 293, 356

Kühne, Erich, 366

Kuypers, Abraham, 353

Kuzmin, L., 300

Kvačala, J., 358

Kyffhäuser (mountain), 141

L

La-Tour-du-Pin de la Charce, Imbart, Marquis de, 301, 314

Laboulaye, René de, 352, 353

Labour Party of Great Britain, 100

Lacroix, Jean, 315

Lafayette, Marquis Marie-Jean de, 90, 367

Lagarde, Georges, 353

Lagarde, Paul, 341

Lally, J. M., 340

Landauer, Carl, 363

Landsgemeinde (Swiss cantonal direct democracy), 94, 278

Landtmann, Gunnar, 314

Lane, Franklin K., 355

Lane, Jane, 334

Languages, teaching of, 64

Lansing, Robert, 297

Larenz, Karl, 332

Laros, Mathias, 338, 339

Lasalle, Ferdinand, 268, 323

Laski, Harold, 97–98, 102, 198, 290, 305, 340

Latins, 343

Latvia, 179, 198

Laun, Rodolphe, 364

Laurentius de Brezina (Březina), 346

Laurier, Sir Wilfrid, 338

Laval, Pierre, 266

Lavoisier, Antoine L., 65

Law, 222

“Law of numbers,” 132

Lawrence, D. H., 183, 193, 221, 330

“Leader” (Führer, dace), leadership (as opposed to “rule”), 34, 46–48, 68, 71–72, 124, 142, 145, 146, 238, 317, 319, 355

Leaders, “royalization” of, 147–48

Leadership, charismatic, 294, 309

Lecky, W. E. H., 14, 22–23, 55, 62–63, 289, 297, 298, 316, 340

Lecomte du Nouys, Pierre, 320

Lederer, Emil, 40–41, 292, 294, 364

Lee, Henry, 326

Leers, Johann von, 366

Leftism, European and National-Socialism, 266–67

Legal theories (in the United States), 167

Legaz y Lacambra, Luis, 288

Legends, royal, 141–42

Leger, Louis, 358, 359

Legitimacy, 147, 226, 313

Legras, Jules, 337

Leibholz, Gerhard, 122, 291, 311, 364

Leidender Gehorsam (suffering obedience), 168

Leiper, Henry Smith, 204

Leipzig (disputation of), 213, 214, 215, 216

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyitch (Ulyánov), 9, 79, 287

Leo XIII, Pope, 155, 173, 174, 321, 327, 338, 341

León, Ricardo, 338

Leonhard, Rudolf, 293

Leontyev, Constantine, 14, 17, 54–55, 74, 288, 296, 297, 301, 341

Leopold II, Holy Roman Emperor, 319

Leopold I, King of the Belgians, 153

Leopold II, King of the Belgians, 153

Leslie, Sir Shane, 343

Levack, Paul, 323

Levy, Oscar, 337

Lewis, E., 343

Ley, Robert, 364

“Liberal heresy,” 127

Liberal, liberalism, 3–4, 9, 87–88; (origin of term) 285; 304, (irreligious type) 305; (royal) 343; (Continental and British) 355

Liberalism, German, 262

Libertarian ideals, 277–78

Liberty, see Freedom

Liberty, symbol of, 148

Liberum Veto, 171

Liddell Hart, Basil H., 320

Lieber, Francis, 109, 137, 307, 308, 314, 322

Lies, Luther’s views on, 227

Liliencron, Detlev von, 249

Linden, Walter, 229, 350

Linton, V., 300, 301, 303

Lippitt, Francis J., 291

Listenwahlrecht (voting for parties), 112

Literati, 161

Lloyd, A. H., 110, 307

Lloyd George, David, 111, 257, 267

Lobanov-Rostovsky, Prince A., 301

Locke, Alain, 290

Locke, John, 168, 326

Lods, A., 352

Loenrod, Ludwig von, Major, 333

Löwenstein, Hubertus, Prince, 355

Loewenstein, Karl, 312, 347

Lollards, 217

Loneliness, 294

Long, Huey, 123

Loserth, Johann, 346

Lossow, General von, 260

Lothrop, Samuel L., 314

Louis XIV, King of France, 10, 49, 88, 156, 281, 308, 326, 339

Louis XV, King of France, 308, 367

Louis XVI, King of France, 111, 156, 322, 323, 367

Louise, Queen of Prussia, 156

Louvre, 157

Love (affection), 116, 140–42, 316, 321, 327

Lower classes, 22

Loyalists, American (Tories), 201

Loyalty, 337

Lubimoff, Leon, 322

Luchaire, A., 327

Ludendorff, Erich, General, 260, 363

Ludwig, Emil, 355

Lugo, Juan de, Cardinal, 338

Luther, Martin, 94, 168, 181; (on sex and marriage) 182; (on reason) 188; (on man’s intelligence) 189; 196, 197, 209–31, 239–40, 249, 259, 305, 319, 333, 345–52

Lutheranism, 212, 222, 231–32, 240–41

Lutherans, 213, 240–41

Luxemburg, 175

M

Mably, Gabriel de (Abbé), 91, 305

Macartney, H. A., 331

Macaulay, Th. B. (Lord), 22, 117, 289, 309

Maček, Vladimir, 145

MacGifford, A. C., 351

Machado, Antonio, 345, 365

Mackenzie, Compton, 334

MacLaughlin, Andrew C., 286

Macomber, William F., 325

Mac Williams, Carey, 314

Madariaga, Salvador de, 207, 336, 337, 344, 345

Madison, James, President of the United States, 6, 7, 8, 38, 39, 286, 290, 293, 298, 326

Madness (folly), 243

Madol, Hans Roger, 323

Magistrate, prerogatives of, 222–23

Mährisch - Trübau (Moravská Trebova), 255

Maier-Hartmann, Fritz, 364

Maine, Sir Henry, 14, 55, 63, 110, 297, 298, 308, 343

Maistre, Joseph Comte de, 13, 41–42, 78, 140, 207, 245, 287, 301, 303, 316, 321, 344, 348, 349, 352, 355

Majority, majority rule, 36, 39, 41, 88, 106, 124, 172, 173, 265, 306, 309, 326

Majority consent, 170

“Malism,” 304

Malitz, Bruno, 349

Mallet, Sir Bernard, 323

Mallet du Pan, Jacques, 323, 366

Man, algebraic nature of, 108

Man, political aspects of, 92–93

Man, psychological aspects of, 196

Man, theological and philosophical aspects of, 165–66, 181

Manchester school, 89

Mani, 212

Manichæism, 329, 333

Mann, Thomas, 24, 289, 345

Mannheim, Karl, 290, 322

Manning, Henry Edward, Cardinal, 342

Manteuffel, Edwin, Baron, 331

Mantoux, Étienne, 366

Marat, Jean Paul, 161, 258

Marcel, Gabriel, 331, 337

March, William, 292

Maria Theresa, Empress, 135, 141, 155, 277

Maria Theresa, Order of, 337

Maria, Queen of Hungary, 318

Maria Christina, Queen of Spain, 153, 156

Maria Christina, Archduchess of Austria, 319

Mariana, Juan de (S.J.), 6, 333

“Marianne,” symbol of France, 148

Marie Antoinette, Queen of France, 322, 323

Maritain, Jacques, 292, 305, 306, 310, 327, 343, 345

Marius, 318

Marquiset, M., 300

Marshall, John, 6, 293

Marsiglio (Marsilius) of Padua, 212, 250, 345, 358

Martin, Everett Dean, 183, 190, 289, 304, 309, 330, 335

Marx, Karl, 203, 211, 236, 267, 358, 362, 365

Marxism, 69–70, 267

Mary, St., 231

Masaryk, Jan, 356

Masaryk, Thomas G., President of Czechoslovakia, 253, 257, 258, 343, 356, 358, 359, 360

Masaryk University, 254

Mass democracy, 130

Mass (Catholic), 351

Masses (multitudes, crowds), 34, 39, 40, 57, 64, 130, 190, 231, 319, 323

Masurians (East Prussian Poles), 218, 329

Materialism, 68–69

Matthes, Kurt, 351

Matthews, Herbert L., 293

Matriarchalism, 148–49

Matrimonium consummatum, 182 n

Maugham, W. Somerset, 332

Maundy Thursday, 152

Mauriac, Francois, 308

Maurois, André, 333

Maurras, Charles, 84, 296, 313

Maximilian I, Emperor of Mexico, 343

Maximilian II, Elector of Bavaria, 319

May, Eduard, 311

May, Sir Erskine, 22

Mayer, J. P., 294, 295, 298

Maynard, Theodore, 299, 305, 325

Mazarin, Jules, Cardinal, 161

Mazzini, Giuseppe, 50

McGovern, W. M., 219, 348

McKinnon, Harold R., 325, 354

McNeill-Moss, Major Geoffrey, 342

Mecklenburg, 261

Medievalism, Protestant, 181, 182–83

Mediocrity, 73, 85, 300

Meertens, P. J., 336

Meinecke, Friedrich, 361

Meissner, Alfred, 357

Meissner, Erich, 325

Melanchthon, Philip, 181, 350

Melville, Herman, 14, 24–25, 60, 70–71, 290, 292, 298, 300, 307, 335, 340

Ménasce, Jean de, 290

Mercier, C., 353

Mercier, Désiré, Cardinal, 166

Merezhkovski, Dmitri, 48, 65, 73, 295, 299. 300, 303, 318, 342

Mesens, E. L. T., 143

Messer, August, 339

Messner, Johannes, 323

Metaphysics, democratic, 307

Metnitz, Gustav Adolf von, 361, 366

Metternich, Clement, Prince, 81, 121, 278; (character of) 287, 291, 322, 333, 336, 352

Mexico, United States intervention in, 343–44

Michel, Ernst, 337

Michelet, Jules, 76, 300, 301, 335, 365

Michels, Robert, 109–10, 295, 308

Middle Ages, 4–5, 165–66, 171

Middle class, 22, 59, 106, 203, 323

Middle West, 37

Migne, Jacques Paul, 305, 322, 338, 339

Militarism, 59–62, 66, 252

Military dictatorship, see Bonapartism, Boulangism, etc.

Mill, John Stuart, 14, 15, 25–26, 27, 37, 38–40, 51, 117–18, 135, 287, 290, 291, 292, 293, 296, 299, 319

Miller, John C., 286, 325

Miller, Samuel Freeman, Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, 322

Minorities, ethnic, 158, 161–62, 314

“Minus Six” (exile from six Soviet capital cities), 109

Mirabeau, H.G. Riqueti, Comte de, 90

Mirkine-Guétzévitch, B., 327

Mises, Ludwig von, 290

Mississippi (State of), 328

Mob, the, 224

Moderation, 334–35

Modernity, 83

Moeller van den Brück, Arthur, 271, 290, 366

Mohammed, 155, 321

Mohammedanism, 228

Mohler, Arnim, 361

Molisch, Paul, 360

Molnàr, Ferenc, 297

Moltke, Count Hellmuth von, General, 65, 300, 336

Monarchs, education of, 319

Monarchs, essential character of, 142, 150–61, 320

Monarchy, 13, 34, 52, 71–72, 93, 104, 124, 132, 133, 135–143, 150–163, 206–207; (in Scandinavia) 231; 240, 247, 272, 280–81, 313, 314; (international character of) 316; 318, 320, 321, 322, 323, 324; (and liberty) 324–35

Monarchy, absolute, 28, 42, 68, 82, 129

Monarchy, elective, 184

Monarchy, pagan, 144

Monarchy, parliamentary, 161

Monarchy in Protestant countries, 205

Monnerot, Jules, 292

Monotheism, 139

Montaigne, Michel de, 332

Montalembert, Comte Charles de, 14, 33, 288

Montanelli, Indro, 332, 343

Montcheuil, Y. de, 310

Montesquieu, Charles, Baron Secondat de, 13, 15–16, 57, 287, 290, 297, 318, 331

Moreau de St. Méry, M.L.E., 313

Morganatic marriages, 159

Morgenthau, Henry, Jr., 310

Mörike, Eduard F., 230

Morley, Felix, 368

Morrell, George, 340

Morris, Gouverneur, 6, 314, 322, 367

Morris, Lloyd, 105

Morrison, Herbert, 319

Mosca, Gaetano, 109, 290

Mosheim, Laurentius von, 358

“Motherland,” 146

Mounier, Emmanuel, 324

Mowrer, Edgar A., 356

Muckermann, H., 329

Mueller, Franz H., 314

Müller, Adam von, 307

Müller, Erich, 366

Müller-Freienfels, Richard, 296, 307, 364

Münch, Hermann, 360

Münsterberg, Hugo, 306, 313

Münzer, Thomas, 225

Multiple function, 166

Munich, 203, 218, 276

Muret, Charlotte, 288

Murray, J. Courtney (S.J.), 339

Murray, Rosalind, 91, 305, 307

Mussolini, Arnaldo, 202–03

Mussolini, Benito, 45, 124, 145, 148, 161, 162, 186, 203, 209, 211, 219, 250, 325, 355, 357, 364

Mussolini, Vittorio, 364

Myrdal, Gunnar, 297

“Mystery of Murder,” 48

Myths (political), 123, 199, 313, 340

N

N.S.D.A.P., see National Socialist German Workers’ Party

N.S.S.C., see National Socialist Party of Czechoslovakia

Naab, Ingbert (O.F.M.), 361

Nadler, Josef, 360

Nantes, Edict of, 242

Napoleon I, 50, 59, 61, 66, 82, 90, 154, 297, 309, 321

Napoleon III (Louis Napoleon), 18, 44–45, 54, 68, 153, 176

Napoleonic wars, 242

Nappold, F. C., 367

Nàprstek, co-founder of Sokols, 251

Nash, Ogden, 306, 368

National Liberals, 262

National Socialism, 9, 20, 21, 58, 62–63, 99, 102, 124, 164, 203, 209–11, 217–20, 221, 229–30, 231, 237–38, 240, 243–45, 247–48, 250, 253, 262; (revolutionary element in) 266; (universal spread of) 271; 310, 348, 349, 350, 351, 356, 359–67

National Socialism (marxist interpretation of), 247

National Socialist German Workers’ Party (N.S.D.A.P.), 209, 245, 253, 254, 258, 259–65; (class structure of) 265–66; 269–77; (religious composition of) 363

National Socialist Party of Czechoslovakia (N.S.S.C.), 209–11, 252–53, 255, 269–70, 358, 360

National Socialist votes, 217–18

“Nationalisation” (socialisation), 27, 332

Nationalism, ethnic, 44, 53, 54, 55, 59, 141, 154–55, 200, 209, 211, 227–28, 239, 250, 251–53, 265, 316, 355, 358, 359, 360

Naumann, Friedrich, 253, 360

Nazi, see National Socialism

Neesse, Gottfried, 355, 364

Negrín, Juan, 90

Negroes, 57, 59, 337

Nehéz, early Austrian Nazi, 363

Neo-orthodoxy, Protestant, 188, 235

Neo-Thomism, 1, 91–92, 96, 164–67

Nesmes-Desmarets, Robert de, 327

Netherlands, 179, 187, 191, 198, 240, 336

Neuhäusler, Johann, 348

Neumann, Franz, 219, 348, 351, 355, 364

Neumann, Sigmund, 265, 291

Nevada, 97

New Deal, 104, 172

New England, 37, 233

New York, 97, 181

Newman, Henry Cardinal, 312

Nicholas I, Emperor of Russia, 342

Nicholas II, Emperor of Russia, 111, 156

Nichols, James H., 355

Nickerson, Hoffman, 298, 320

Niebuhr, B. G., 14, 65–66, 72–73, 299, 300

Niebuhr, Reinhold, 219, 348

Niemöller, Martin, Pastor, 241

Nietzsche, Friedrich, 14, 24, 48, 93, 249, 271, 290, 295, 299, 304, 366

Nihilism, philosophic, 4, 368

Nîmes, 352

Nisei (U.S. Japanese), 27, 158, 314

Noailles, Louis Marie Vicomte de, 90

Nobility, noblemen, 8–9

Nock, Albert J., 38, 183, 293, 307, 309, 319

Noldin, H., 339

Non-conformism, 122, 193

Nordic race, 58

Norton, Lord (C. B. Anderley), 147, 318

Norway, 179, 199

Nostrism, 105, 107, 141

Notestein, Wallace, 329

Nude, the, in art, 182

Numeralism, 107–08, 310, 312

Nuremberg, Diet of, 220–21

Nuremberg trials, 219

O

Obedience, 337

Obedience, suffering, 222–26, 240–41

O’Connell, Daniel, 344

Oder, river, 56

Oesterreicher, John M., 350

O’Faoláin, Seán, 344

O’Hara, John, 329

Old Czech Party, 251

Old Testament, 181, 228

Olden, Rudolf, 362

Oligarchy (oligarchies), 110, 128, 135, 318

Oliveira Salazar, A., see Salazar, Antonio Oliveira

Olmütz (Olomouc), 331

One-man-rule, 322

One-party-system, 98

“One World,” 18, 79

Opinion, freedom of, 157

Organic government, 13, 155–56, 313

d’Ors, Eugenio, 308

Ortega y Gasset, Don José, 60, 72, 93, 288, 294, 298, 300, 365

Orton, William Aylott, 304, 308, 321

Ostracism, 19

Ostrogorski, Moises Y., 308

Oswiecim, 107

Otten, Karl, 219, 291, 348

Ottlik, Ladislas (László), 265, 364, 365

Otto, Rudolf, 340

Oyarzun, Roman, 285

P

Pagans, 196

Page, Ambassador W. H., 344

Paine, Tom, 203

Palacký, František, 251, 346, 347, 356, 358

Palatinate, 241

Palatine Hill, 162

Palmer, Joseph, 292

Pan-Germanism (Pan-Germans), 98

Pan-Slavism, 55, 56

Papacy (Vatican), 139, 152, 185, 196, 215–16, 338

Papen, Felix von, 365

Papen, Franz von, 63, 263, 298, 363, 368

Pareto, Vilfredo, 109, 287

Parkes, James, 285, 350

Parliament, all-European, 281

Parliamentarism, 67, 86, 97, 201, 280–81, 309

Parliaments, 246, 355

Parmiter, Geoffrey de C., 327

Parsons, Wilfrid (S.J.), 305

Parties, totalitarian, 246–47

Party dictatorship, 62, 124, 162, 295

Party discipline, 97

Party rule, 150

Pascal, Blaise, 114, 121, 161, 309, 310, 316, 324

Pašić, Nikola, 145, 161

Pasini, Achille, 325

Passerin d’Entrèves, A., 328

Passiveness, 77

Paterson, Isabel, 298

Patriarchalism, 138–41, 144–45, 146–49, 155, 187, 314, 315, 318, 321

Patriotism, 16, 44, 70–71; (definition) 316

Paul, St. (Apostle), 215, 353

Payne, Peter, 212–13, 346

Peace, 24

Peace-criminals, 154

Peasants, 58, 225, 227, 332

Pedro II, Emperor of Brazil, 343

Peers, E. Allison, 185–86, 332

Péguy, Charles, no, 194, 308, 336, 343

Pekař, Josef, 250, 358

Pelhřimovsky, Mikuläš, 213

Pemán y Pemartín, José Maria, 330, 334

Pembaur, Walther, 105

People, common (Luther’s view), 223, 227

People, flattery of, 110, 111

People, The, 171, 265

People’s Court (German), 264

People’s Democracy, 312

“People’s Emperor,” 355–56

People’s Party (Volkspartei), 131

Perkins, Frances, 309

Pernerstorfer, Engelbert, 362

Perrin, Henri, 248

Persecution of convictions, 285

Person (as opposed to individual), 106, 150, 166

Personalism, 201; (Catholic) 236, 343

Personality, person, 25–26, 48, 89, 122–23, 252

“Persuasion,” 190

Pétain, Henri Philippe, Marshal, 344

Petegorsky, David W., 288

Peter, St. (Apostle), 226

Peter the Great, Emperor of Russia, 79, 81

Peter Lombard, 197

Peter, Margarete, 354

Peterhof, 157

Petersen, Julius, 346

Peterson, Erik, 315

Petrie, Sir Charles, 289, 298

Pfister, Kurt, 319

Pfitzner, Josef, 253, 270, 361, 366

Philip of Macedonia, 76

Philip II, King of Spain, 285, 332

Philosophy, 86, 165

Philosophy, political, 222

Picker, Henry, 368

Pierce, Franklin, President of the U.S., 8

Pierleone (Pierleoni), family, 155

Pierson, Donald, 343

Pierson, George Wilson, 291

“Piety,” 316

Pilate, Pontius, 127

Pilgrim Fathers, 148, 221

Pilsudski, Józef, 145

Pimodan, Marquis de, 153–54

Pittsburgh University, 181

Pius II (Aeneas S. Piccolomini), 346

Pius V, 285

Pius VII, 5

Pius IX, 304, 336

Pius XII, 94, (Christmas message) 129; 310, 312

Planetta, Otto, 366

Plato, 6, 12, 14, 19, 32, 44, 105, 147, 196, 289

Plebiscites, 96

Plivier, T., 345

Plutarch, 314

Plutocracy, 157

Pobyedonostsev, C. P., 161

Poland (Polish Commonwealth), 76, 153, 162, 171, 266, 267

Poles, 188

Police, 43

Politbureau, 81

Political animal, 100

Political cycles, see Evolution, political

“Political theology,” 315

Politician, 159, 192, 311

Politicians, moral position of, 111–15, 120

Pomerania, 261

Pope, Alexander, 333

Popper-Lynkeus, Josef, 324

Popular sovereignty, 173–74, 177, 184, 309, 326, 327

Popularity, 174

Portugal, Portuguese, 186, 195

Potsdam, 77, 78, (edict of) 242

Power, 51, 53, 151–52, 168, 170, 174, 226, 241

Power, ecclesiastic, 338

Power, royal, 212

Power, secular, 338

Pradt, Dominique Dufour de, Abbé, 81–82, 303

Pragmatism, 244

Prague, 256, 346

Pravda, 70

Predestination (determinism), 57, 69–76, 183, 196, 348

Prediger, Wilhelm, 255

Preen, Friedrich von, 39, 53, 67, 72, 76, 288, 293, 296, 298, 299, 300, 304, 309, 323

Presidents of the U.S., 151, 321

Pressure, horizontal, 39, 83, 149, 156, 193, (in the U.S.) 292

Pressure, vertical, 149, 193

Prévost-Paradol, Lucien Anatole, 14, 147, 324, 353

Pribilla, Max, 339

Priesthood, 212

Primitive societies (and democracy), 137

Primo de Rivera, José, 345

Princes, pious and merciful, 225–27

Princes, position of, 223

Princes, power of, 223

Prinéip, Gavrilo, 191

Private interpretation, 183, 190

Private spheres, 109

Privileges, 38

Proch (early Nazi), 361

Progress, technical, 43

Prohibition, 9

Prokop, Holy (“the Bald”), 250

Proletariate, urban, 8, 84

Property (private), 5, 27, 33, 65–66, 265, 323

Property, qualification, 115, 120

Proskynesis, 163

Protection, Russian, 79, 81

Protestant Nations, 86–87, 126, 185, 198–99, 240–41

Protestant society, 193

Protestantism, 11, 80, 125, 175, 180–83; (and capitalism) 186; (and education) 189; 212, 231–38, 311, 340–41; (puritan spirit) 349, 354–55

Protestantism, conversion to, 333

Protestantism, evolution of, 182, 188, 233

Protestantism, liberal, 127, 188, 192, 199, 311, 330

Protestantism, orthodox, 196, 221, 244, 330

Protestantism, psychological aspects, 234–35

Protestants in Catholic countries, 330

Protestants, French, 179, 329–30

Protestants, German, 217–19

Proudhon, P. J., 14, 23, 45–46, 109, 157, 179, 289, 294, 299, 308, 323, 328

Prussia, 56, 80, 191, 218, 239, 242, 347, 353, 366

“Prussianism,” 241, 366

Prussians, 249

Psychoanalysis, 139–40, 144–45, 316

Psychology, 165, 196

Puaux, Frank, 326

Public opinion, 36–38, 53, 237

Pulaski, Casimir, 9

Purge (épuration), 52

Puritans, English, 351

Q

Qualification, intellectual, 64–65, 130

Quality, 91

Quantity, 39, 91

Quasi-legitimacy, 162, 175

Quatrefages de Bréau, Jean L. A. de, 353

Quebec (city), 189

Queens, animosity against, 318

R

Raabe, Wilhelm, 230

Race, 239; (religious implications) 351

Racialism, 55–59, 141, 155, 201, 203–04, 228, 316, 342–43, 355–56

Racine, Jean, 339

Raczynski, Count Athanasius, 80, 303

Radbruch, Gustav, 288

Radecki, Sigmund von, 321

Radicals, 54

Rádl, Emanuel, 359

Radowitz, J. von, 332

Rákosi, Mátyás, 312

Rambaud, Alfred Nicolas, 319

Randall, H. S., 22

Rappard, William E., 308

Rathenau, Walter, 364

Rauschning, Hermann, 299, 355, 365

Ravaillac, Francois, 334

Raynal, G. T. F. (Abbé), 321

Read, Herbert, 20, 288

Reade, Charles, 352

Reality, objective, 165

Reason, 64, 171, 172, 221–22, 309, 316, 327

Rebellion, 170

Reck-Malleczewen, Fritz, 362

Red Cross, 233

Redier, Antoine, 290, 291, 292, 293

Reductio ad absurdum, 244

Reformation, 42, 121, 179–83, 220–21, 269

Reformers, political ideas of, 349

“Regular guy,” 192

Reich, 232

Reich, Second, 49

Reichenberg, 255, 256

Reichstag, 99

Reisert, Friedrich, 213

Reiwald, Paul, 317

Relativism, 126, 189–90, 311, 354, 368

Religion, 70, 86–87, 140, 179, 245

Religion, enforcement of, 196

Renaissance, 180, 181, 182, 220–21

Renaissance painting, 182

Renan, Ernest, 14, 55–56, 66, 84, 246, 297, 299, 310, 319, 355, 365, 366

Representatives, political, 7

Republic, republicanism, 6, 9, 21–22, 26, 71–72; (as opposed to democracy) 97; 104, 111, 136–37, 142, 162, 175, 205–06, 248, 273, 309, 314, 321, 355

Republic, degeneration of, 115

Republic, French (Third), 157

Republican Party (U.S.), 103–04, 112 n, 306

“Republican virtues,” 155

Republicanism (in early U.S.), 286; (national socialist), 364, 368

Resistance (Catholic in Germany), 218–19

Resistance (civilian), 37, 127, 169–70, 176–77, 353

Responsibility, 110–11, 158

Restoration, monarchical, 206, 354–55

Retrogression of faith, 180

Reuchlin, Johann, 182

Reventlow, Count E., 265, 266, 364, 365

Revolution, 73, 80

Revolution, liberal, 90

Revolutionism, National Socialist, 266, 268

Reynold, Gonzague Comte de, 26, 131–32, 150, 286, 290, 292, 312

Rhineland, 242

Ribbe, Charles de, 293

Richard II, King of England, 212

Richelieu, Armand Jean du Plessis, Cardinal, 161, 354

Rieger, Francis Ladislas von, 251

Riehl, Dr. Walter, 256, 361–62

Rienzi, see van Kol

Rigorism, Protestant, 180, 182

Rittler, Theodor, 334

Rivarol, Antoine de, 150

Roberts, Kenneth and Anna M., 313

Robespierre, Maximilien de, 50, 90, 161, 187, 258

Robinson, E. A., 86, 304

Rochambeau, J. B. D. Comte de, 9

Rodocanacchi, Emmanuel, 350

Roffens, Johann, 345

Rolland, Romain, 336

Romains, Jules, 289, 364

Rome, 71, 91, 162, 163, 272, 337

Romier, Lucien, 82, 295, 297

Roosevelt, Elliot, 345

Roosevelt, Franklin D., 103, 159, 188, 309, 310, 324

Roosevelt, Theodore, 138, 159, 334

Röpke, Wilhelm, 288, 293, 294, 296, 341, 351, 355, 360

Rose, J. Holland, 61, 297, 298, 323

Rosenberg, Alfred, 229, 351, 366

Rosenberg, Arthur, 319

Rössel, Virgile, 84, 304

Roth, Cecil, 350

Rougemont, Denis de, 26–27, 265, 288, 294, 295, 320, 364

Rougier, Louis, 290, 298, 304, 313, 340

Rousseau, J. J., 6, 51, 92, 94, 106, 187, 203, 233, 258, 276, 304–05, 322, 353

Rousseauism, 168

Rousset, David, 271

Royalism, 143, 152, 344

Royalism, intellectual implications, 287

Royer-Collard, Pierre Paul, 14, 52, 171, 296, 327, 340

Rozanov, Vassili, 68, 300

Roždalowsky, Wenzel von, 214–15

Rubinstein, Anton, 32

Ruggiero, Guido de, 288, 311

Rühel, Johann, 349

Rüstow, Alexander, 307

Rulers (as opposed to leaders), 71, 124, 142

“Rum, Romanism and Rebellion,” 183

Rush, Benjamin, 63–64, 286

Ruskin, John, 182

Russell, Bertrand, 307

Russia (U.S.S.R.), Russians, 51, 55, 56, 72–79, 81–82, 90, 109, 124, 128, 148, 157, 191, 206, 268, 271, 301, 302, 303, 344, 365–66

Russian Revolution, 243

“Russianism,” 318

Russo-German collaboration, 266

Rusticucci, Luigi, 342

Ruthenians (in Austria-Hungary), 314

Rutze, Nicholas, 213

Ryan-Boland thesis, 338

S

S.D.P., see Sudeten German Party

Saaz (Zatec), 212, 255

Sacco and Vanzetti, 202

Sade, Donatien A. F. “Marquis de,” 18, 63, 69, 288, 298, 300, 328

Sagan, Ludwig von, 346

Sagnac, Philippe, 322

Saint-Aulaire, Comte de, 320, 362

Saint-Just, A. L. L. de R. de, 50

Saint-Priest, Comte F. E. Guignard de, 368

Saints, 156

Salazar, Antonio Oliveira, 317, 332

Saldana, Quintiliano, 311

Saltykov-Shtshedrin, Michael E., 336

Salvation by faith, 226

Salvation of heretics, 196–98

Salvation of non-Christians, 183, 195–96, 197, 338

Salzburg, 259, 260, 270

Sanctis, Gino de, 357

Sands, W. F., 340

Sangnier, Marc, 327

Sansa, Giorgio, 335

Santayana, George, 287, 290

Santo Domingo, Republic of, 104

Sartre, Jean Paul, 340

Satan, 223

Savonarola, Fra Girolamo, 355

Saxony, 217, 261

Scandinavia, 191, 231

Schauenburg, Hermann, 304

Scheler, Max, 307, 351

Schérer, Edmond (sénateur), 84, 85, 298, 304, 308, 310

Schiller, Friedrich von, 232, 309

Schilling-Schlettere, Alexander, 361

Schleicher, General Kurt von, 63

Schleiermacher, Friedrich D. E., 340

Schmidt, Carl, 347

Schmidt, Guido, 364

Schmidt, Wilhelm (S.V.D.), 314

Schmitt-Dorotic, Carl, 288, 305

Schneefuss, Walter, 362

Schneider, Reinhold, 315, 317, 322

Schöffler, Herbert, 350

Scholasticism (late forms), 230, 326

Scholz, Richard, 345

Schönemann, Friedrich, 356

Schönerer, Georg Ritter von, 211, 253, 254, 258, 360

Schrank, J., 334

Schröteler, J., 329

Schuetz, Alfred, 316

Schulz-Group in Austria (Nazi), 361

Schumpeter, Joseph A., 290, 319, 324

Schwarz, S. N., 365

Schwarzbard, assassin of Petlyura, 334

Schwarzschild, Leopold, 355

Schwob, René, 39, 110, 308

Scita and scienda, 278

Scoraille, R. de (S.J.), 137

Scotland, 179

Sebastian, King of Portugal, 142, 316

Secrétain, Roger, 293

Sectarian liberalism (liberals), 4, 118, 237

Secularization, 235

Sedgwick, Arthur G., 323

Segesser, A. P. von, 273, 367

Seifert, J. L., 297, 314, 358, 359

Seipel, Monsignor Ignaz, 221

Selchow, Bogislaw von, 249

Self expression, 89

Self government (self rule), 91, 100, 108, 142, 307

Self worship, 141

Sell, Karl, 332

Sementowski-Kurilo, Nikolai, 322

Semitic race, 55

Senate (U.S.), 97

Seneca, 110, 324

Senior, N. W., 75, 288, 301

Serbia, 316

Serfdom (modern slavery), 67, 68

Servants, impertinence of, 223

Servants and masters, 331

Servière, Joseph (S.J.), 168, 325

Sex act, 182 n

Sexuality, 330

Sforza, Count Carlo, 194, 336

Shōgunate, 139

Sieber, Sylvester A., 314

Siegfried, André, 330

Sillon-letter, 173–74

Silva, Pietro, 324

Simmel, Georg, 293, 316, 324

Sin, 312

Skull and crossbones, 185

Slavery, 140, 245

Slaviček, Karel, 360

Slavs, 55–56, 74, 78, 248–49

Sleswig-Holstein, 261

Smith, Adam, 5, 203

Smith, Howard K., 348

Social Democrats, Austrian and German, 98, 131, 157, 211, 236, 244, 253, 256, 262, 360, 362

Social Democrats, Czech, 252, 269, 359

Social Democrats, Danish, 266–67

“Social engineering,” 91, 123

Social pressure, 122

Social pyramid, appeals to parts of, 103

Socialism, 5, 9, 22, 27, 74, 103, 104, 250, 252, 253; (in Third Reich) 301

Socialism, national, see National Socialism (movement and party)

Socialism, Czech (Czech Socialist Workers’ Party), 209–11, 253, 270

Socialists, Belgian, 267

Socialists, French, 266–67

Society, 39–40, 93, 95–96, 99, 155, 313

Society, Catholic, 236

Society, free, 125, 205

Society, Protestant, 237

Society, totalitarian, 199

Socrates, 162, 196

Soglow, cartoonist, 148

Sokol organization, 251

Soldier, 60

Solferino, battle of, 153

Solovyov, Vladimir, 68, 139, 146, 300, 315

Sombart, Werner, 155, 234, 297, 302, 321

Sonino, Baron Sidney, 111, 351

Sonntag, W. H. von, 352

Sorel, Georges, 50, 59, 211, 296, 297

Sorokin, Pitirim, 155, 285, 298, 313, 319, 320

Sós, Endre, 312

Souls, hierarchy of, 184–85

South America, 345

“Southern Bourbons,” 103

Southey, Robert, 4

Soviet zone in Germany, 217

Spain, Spaniards, 36, 72, 75, 90, 191–92, 195, 198, 201, 206, 207; (elections in 1946) 326; 337, 341–42, 345

Spalatin, George Burkhardt, 215, 349

Spanish Empire, 128

Spanish Revolution, 243

Sparks, Jared, 27, 314

Spencer, Herbert, 14, 51, 296

Spengler, Oswald, 49, 84, 271, 366

Sperry, W. L., 318–19

Spinoza, Baruch (Benedictus de), 64, 106, 138, 227, 299, 306, 350

Sport, national socialist, 349

Sportpalast, 248

Srbik, Heinrich Ritter von, 360

St. Aulaire, see Saint-Aulaire

St. Edmund’s Hall, 212

St. Laurent, Louis Étienne, 104

St. Peter’s in Rome, 185

Staël, Madame de, 230, 312

Stahl, Friedrich J., 168, 305, 326

“Stahlhelm” (national conservative organization), 263

Stalin, Joseph D. (Y.), 5, 9, 148, 287, 345

Stambulov, Stefan N., 145

State, 48 (Lutheran concepts of) 49; (and Church) 186

State capitalism, see Socialism

State omnipotence (Metternich’s opinion), 291

“State prison,” 191

Statesmanship, 120, 161

Statesmen, great, 161

Statism (étatisme), 29–32, 63–64, 211, 321

Statistical optimism, 172

Stauffenberg, Count Klaus von, 328, 333

Stauning, Thorvald, 267

Staupitz, John, 215

Staynov, Petko, 288–89

Steed, Henry Wickham, 360

Steiger, Baron Alfred, 264

Stein, Franko, 254, 361

Stein, Heinrich Baron vom, 278

Stein, Lorenz von, 322, 323, 324

Steiner, Johann, 36

Steckel, Wilhelm, 315

Stephen, St., King of Hungary, 316

Stern, James, 355

Stern, Judas M., 334

Stern, Karl, 368

Sterne, Laurence, 59

Stettinius, Edward, U.S. Secretary of State, 310

Steuben, F. W. Baron von, 9, 317

Stifter, Adalbert, 289

Stillwell, Joseph, General, 309

Stirk, S. D., 347

Stolper, Gustav, 356, 366

Stone, Geoffrey, 335

Strahl, R., 364

Strauss, David, 55–56

Streicher, Julius, 219, 228, 259, 363

Stříbrný, Jiřy co-founder of National Socialist Party, 252

Strohm, Gustav, 312

Stryienski, Casimir, 308

Studnicki, S. M., 320

Stürgkh, Count Maximilian, 191

Sturzo, Don Luigi, 86, 133

Suárez, Francisco (S.J.), 167–68, 171, 174; (Bellarmine-Suárez thesis) 327; 328, 331, 338, 339

Subject (according to Spinoza), 106

Subjectivism (Protestant), 188

Sudeten German Party (S.D.P.), 254, 260

Sudeten Germans, 27, 131, 253, 258, 270, 359

Sumner, William Graham, 105, 309, 323

Super-Church, 252

Superiority, intellectual, 328

Superman, 138, 315

Supreme Court (U.S.), 103

Supreme Court, suggested form, 277

Sutherland, Halliday, 329

Sweden, 159, 351

“Swinish multitudes,” 317

Switzerland (Swiss Confederacy), 117, 142, 179, 187, 201, 205, 329, 331, 336

Syllabus (of 1869), 107

Szekfü, Julius, 317

T

Tábor, 213

Taborites (Taboritism), 209, 213, 216, 250, 252, 357, 358, 359

Tacitus, 316

Taft, Howard, President of the U.S., 159

Taft, Robert A., Senator, 159

Taine, Hyppolite, 60, 251, 298

Talleyrand, Charles Maurice, Prince de Périgord, 278

Tannenbaum, Frank, 337

Tanner, Väinö, 267

Tanquerey, A., 331

Taparelli, Luigi (S.J.), 328

Tarquinius Superbus, 272

Tawney, R. H., 179, 234

Taylor, E. A., 303

Taylor, Henry Osborn, 304

Taylor, John, 286

Taylor, Kressmann, 248

Ten Commandments, 85

Tenure, security of, 130

Ternus, J., 329

Terribles simplificateurs, 53, 308

Terror, 366

Teutonic Knights, 271

Thanatocentrism, 185, 332

Theology, Catholic, 183, 195, 197–98, 221

Theology, Calvinist, 241

Theology, Lutheran, 241

Theology, Protestant, 183

Theories, 340

Thibon, Gustave, 285, 332, 367

Thiess, Frank, 289, 293

Thinkers, continental European, 126

Third Empire (Reich), 213

Thirty-Nine Articles, 196

Thomas Aquinas, St., on forms of government, 6, 9, 13, 91–93, 95, 115, 134, 155, 160, 165–66, 168, 184; (on trading) 186; 189, 196, 197, 305, 309, 310, 312, 315, 326, 328, 329, 330, 333, 339, 343

Thomas More, St., 182

Thomas, A. L., 313

Thomism, 1, 2, 164–67, 325, 344

Thompson, Dorothy, 293

Thuringia, 217, 261

Thurn, Count Mathias, 251

Ticknor, George, 74, 121, 204–05, 285, 301, 311, 337, 346

Tillich, Paul, 351

Time lag, 83, 303

Tindale, William, see Tyndale

Tito (Josip Broz), 146, 161

Titz, Karel, 359

Tocqueville, Alexis Comte de, 14, 20, 25, 27–32, 40, 41, 51, 57, 66–67, 69, 75–76, 77, 78, 82, 101, 288; (personal convictions of) 290–91; (aristocracy and liberty) 290–91, 292, 293, 297, 298, 300, 301, 302, 303, 316, 322, 327, 331

Toleration, 285; (Protestant) 334

Tonner, co-founder of Sokols, 251

Torquemada, Thomas, 339

Toryism, 81

Totalitarianism, 10, 18, 23–24, 29–31, 98, 200, 203

Tóth-Szabó, Paul, 359

Town meetings (in New England), 94

Toynbee, Arnold J., 63, 298, 320, 341

Traffic lights, 337

Transcendentalism, 233

Transubstantiation, 212

Trautenau (Trutnov), 255, 270

Traz-os-Montez, 186

Treblinka, 107

Treitschke, Heinrich von, 211, 222, 249, 286, 304, 308, 321, 323, 336, 349

Trial and error, method of, 121

Tribalism, 239, 326

Troeltsch, Ernst, 67, 70, 179, 234, 299, 300, 330, 331, 348, 352, 353

Trotter, Wilfrid, 287, 294, 317, 324

Trotzki, Leon, 287, 340

Trubetzkoy, Evgeny, Prince, 342

Trubetzkoy, Nikolay, Prince, 297

Trujillo, R. L., 104

Truman, Harry S., 104

Truth, 127; (human attainability) 189

Tufts, James, 193

Tunstall, Cuthbert, Bishop, 217

Turkey, 76

Turnov, Peter, 213

Tusar, V., Czech politician, 258

Twain, Mark, 148

Twentieth century, 83

“Twentieth-Century Americanism,” 123

Two-party system, 97–98, 103–04, 198

Tyndale, William (Tindale), 217, 349

Tyrannicide, 190–91, 333, 334

Tyranny (despotism), 12–13, 24, 28–35, 42–67, 74, 79, 83–84, 122, 143–49, 187, 223, 367

Tyranny, origin of, 125

Tyrol, 337

Tyrone, 96

Tyrš, Miroslav, 209–11, 251–52, 359

U

Ulster, 96

Unamuno, Miguel de, 166, 191, 300, 307, 319, 334, 342

Unanimity, 88, 94–95, 171

“Uncle Sam,” 148

Unconditional surrender, 153

Uniformity, see Identity

Union of Socialist Soviet Republics (U.S.S.R.), see Russia

Unitarianism, 233

United Nations, 221

United States (of America), 22, 27, 28–32, 36, 38, 58, 59, 62, 73, 76, 77, 78, 81, 97, 98–99, 102–04, 106, 123, 128, 148, 149, 158, 159, 162, 164, 172, 186, 187, 193, 203, 205, 206, 240, 241, 243, 244, 248, 272–74, 284, 299, 300, 302, 303, 306, 312, 315, 331, 335, 336, 340, 344, 351

United States army, 194

United States, conservatism of the, 136–37

United States Constitution, 104, 273, 306, 316–17

United States, discipline in, 193

United States, government of the, 40

United States, Southern, 37

“Unknown soldier,” 238

Untersberg, 141

Upper classes, 62–63; (German) 262–63

Upper Franconia (Oberfranken), 218

Urban II, Pope, 339

Urbánek, Rudolf, 359

Utilitarianism, 15, 91, 118

Utraquism, Utraquists, 214, 216

V

Valdecasas, Alfonso Garcia, 345

Valensin, A., 310

Valera, Jean de, 79, 303

Valéry, Paul, 337

Valle-Inclán, Ramón de, 191, 334

Valois, Georges, 315

Van Buren, Martin, 8, 286

Van Kol, H. (Rienzi), 46, 294

Vance, Ethel, 248

Vandenberg, Senator Arthur H., 286, 290

Vargas, Getulio, 317–18

Variety, 16

Varmia (Ermeland), 218, 261

Vaughan, James N., 338

Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, 207–08

Venice, 128

Venizelos, Eleutheros, 145

Venus, 182

Vernunft and Verstand, 116

Versailles (court and palace), 59, 157

Vespasian, 163

Veuillot, Louis, 41, 355–56

Vico, Giambattista, 314

Victoria, Queen of Great Britain, 153

Vienna, 131, 254, 256, 259, 260; (Protestants of) 330

Vienna, Congress of, 278

Vienna, University of, 157

Viereck, Peter, 265, 296, 298, 321, 354, 359, 364, 365

Vietz, Karl, 362

Villard, Oswald Garrison, 4

Vinet, Alexandre, 54, 150, 295, 296, 305, 312

Vinson, Frederic M., Chief Justice, 368

Violence in Catholic countries, 191

Vitoria, Franciscus de, 343

Vogel, Ludwig, 254

Vögelin, F. S., 288

Vogelsang, Erich, 350

Volk, 265

Volstead Act, see Prohibition

Voltaire (F. M. Arouet), 90, 276, 367

Vote, intensity of, 108

Voter, importance of, 107

Voting, process of, 106–08, 110–11

W

Wagner, Richard, 232

Wahl, Jean, 114

Wahle, R., 140

Waldo, Peter, 212

Wall, Bernard, 289

Wallas, Graham, 293, 308

Walsh, Robert, 314

Walsh, William Thomas, 314

Walther, Daniel, 314

War between the States, 201

War criminals, 154

War Department, U.S. (publication of), 280

War, general, 59–61, 153

War propaganda (in U.S.), 247–48

War, total, 121, 153, 320–21

Warsaw, 127

Washington, D.C., 8

Washington, George, 62, 201

Watkin, E. I., 182, 309, 311, 328, 330, 338

Waugh, Evelyn, 318, 332

Weaver, Richard M., 331

Weber, Max, 46, 47, 68, 72, 73, 179, 234, 289, 294, 300, 302, 324

Webster, Nesta H., 323

Weckbecker, Hugo Freiherr von, 337–38

Wecter, Dixon, 297

Weil, Simone, 321

Weimar (city), 220

Weimar Constitution, 102, 308

Weimar Republic, 50, 90, 101, 200–01

Weiss, Albert Maria, 346

Wells, H. G., 84, 85, 109, 278, 304, 308, 314

Wends, according to Luther, 227

Wenzeslaus, St., 251

Werfel, Franz, 338

Wesel, Johann, 213

Whalen, Doran, 289

Wheeler-Bennett, John W., 355

Whiggery, Whiggism, 9, 81

White, Elizabeth B., 322

White Mountain, battle of the, 251

Whitman, Walt, 40, 312

Wiechert, Ernst, 329

Wiedemann, Captain, 362

Wiemann, Henry N., 340

Wiener, Peter, 219, 348

Wiercinski, Félix (S.J.), 299

Wiese, Leopold von, 297

Wiggam, A. E., 320

Wilhelmina, Queen of the Netherlands, 149, 153

William I, German Emperor, 323

William II, German Emperor, 82, 155, 157, 300, 363

Williams, Reverend G., 300

Willkie, Wendell, 103

Wilson, Edmund, 354

Wilson, Woodrow, 47, 55, 59, 111, 244, 257, 293, 351, 355

Winnig, August, 360

Winstanley, Gerrard, 21, 288

Winter, E. K., 314

Winter, Eduard, 359

Wintzingerode, Ferdinand Baron, 153

Wirth, A., 302

Wiskemann, Elizabeth, 362, 366, 368

Wiskott, Wilhelm, 353

Witt, Cornélis de, 298

Wittelsbach, Dynasty, 218

Wittenberg, 214

Wittich, Werner, 330

Wolf, Hermann, 359

Wolff, Hans J., 352

Wood, Grant, 182–83

Wood, James N., 291, 293, 294

Woodlock, Thomas, 318

Woodruff, Douglas, 313, 345

Woods, F. A., 320

Woodward, E. L., 336

Worker, workers, 83–84

World War I, 154, 195, 245, 293, 300, 301, 314

World War II, 59, 301

Worms, 213

Wright, Frances, 64

Wulf, Maurice de, 343

Wycliffe, John, 212–13, 216, 250, 345, 346

X

Xenophobia of the masses, 296, 345

Ximénez Caballero, Ernesto, 342

Y

Young Czech Movement, 251

Young, George, 316

Yugoslavia, 161, 271

Z

Zangara, Joseph, 334

Zechmeister, August, 338

Zeller, Eduard, 338

Zetter, J. T. M., 349

Zita, Empress of Austria, 318

Žižka, John, 250, 251, 258, 357, 358, 359

Zog I, King of Albania (Ahmed Zogu), 147

Zola, Emile, 297

Zoological wars, 55

Zumalacárregui, Tomás, General, 341

Zweig, F., 332

Zweig, Stefan, 332

Zwettl, 258