--- title: 'The totalitarian state against man, by Count Richard N. Coudenhove-Kalergi, translated by Sir Andrew McFadyean, with an introduction by Wickham Steed' url: 'https://samisdat.in/books/the-totalitarian-state-against-man-1938/read' markdown: 'https://samisdat.in/books/the-totalitarian-state-against-man-1938/read.md' lang: eng date: '1938-12-12' description: 'THE TOTALITARIAN STATE AGAINST MAN THE TOTALITARIAN STATE AGAINST MAN by Count Richard N. Coudenhove-Kalergi translated by Sir Andrew McFadyean With an Introduction by WICKHAM STEED LONDON FREDERICK MULLER LTD. 29 great james street W.C.1 FIRST PUBLISHED BY FREDERICK MULLER LTD. IN 1938 PRINTED IN…' --- ![](https://samisdat.in/user/pages/03.books/1938%20-%20The%20Totalitarian%20State%20Against%20Man/read/_page_0_Picture_0.jpeg?g-16018011) # THE TOTALITARIAN STATE AGAINST MAN # THE TOTALITARIAN STATE AGAINST MAN by Count Richard N. Coudenhove-Kalergi translated by Sir Andrew McFadyean With an Introduction by WICKHAM STEED LONDON FREDERICK MULLER LTD. 29 great james street W.C.1 # FIRST PUBLISHED BY FREDERICK MULLER LTD. IN 1938 PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY SHERRATT AND HUGHES AT THE ST ANN'S PRESS MANCHESTER ![](https://samisdat.in/user/pages/03.books/1938%20-%20The%20Totalitarian%20State%20Against%20Man/read/_page_3_Picture_2.jpeg?g-16018011) #### INTRODUCTION # by Wickham Steed Some thirty years ago I met in the drawing-room of an old Viennese palace a Japanese lady who was the widow of an Austro-Hungarian diplomatist, the late Count Heinrich Coudenhove-Kalergi. Her husband had been Austro-Hungarian Chargé d'Affaires in Tokio; and her charm made it easy to understand that difference of race should not have seemed to him an insuperable obstacle to their union. A few years later I overtook, in a street of the Austrian capital, two well-groomed boys wearing the uniform of the famous Theresianum Academy. They were accompanied by a lady who looked as though she might be their elder sister. As I passed them, this lady, Countess Coudenhove-Kalergi, turned and presented to me her sons, of whom the elder, Count Richard, is the author of this book. After the War, when he was starting his "Pan-Europe" movement and preparing to found the "Pan-Europe Union" which took shape in 1923, he reminded me of this first meeting in Vienna and asked me, both as a friend of his mother and as a student of international affairs, to give him such help and advice as I could. If there be any virtue in race and if, as some authorities hold, a blending of races is not detrimental to the human stock, Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi may be held to unite in one person several distinct ethnic qualities. The Coudenhove family was originally Flemish. The founder of its Austrian branch settled in Bohemia centuries ago, and his descendants were long prominent in the service of the House of Habsburg. One member of this branch, the grandfather of Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi, married the daughter of a noble Cretan family and added her name—Kalergi—to his own. His son, as I have said, found a wife in Japan. So in their son three racial strains are mingled; and it is not surprising that his mind should show traces of Flemish persistence, Greek lucidity, and Japanese talent for synthetic expression. Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi feels himself to be a citizen of the world. Though he is multi-lingual, his education has been mainly German. Indeed, his dominant language, if not precisely his "mother tongue", is German, the harmonious German of Austria. Even to-day I doubt whether any other medium suits his literary genius quite so well; and I am sure that no hypothetically pure-blooded German "Aryan" has more power than he to use the German idiom in succinct and pregnant phrase. Some months ago he sent me the original German text of this book, and did me the honour of asking me to write an Introduction to an English version of it. I promised to do so—in principle—though I trembled to think what a hash a bungling translator #### INTRODUCTION might make of his pellucid style. It was a task I should not have cared to essay. No sooner had I glanced at the proof-sheets of the English version than my fears were set at rest, and gave place to admiration for the translator's understanding and skill. His rendering of intractable German terms like "Rechtstaat" and "Machtstaat" filled me with envy. I did not then know that an eminent scholar and master of things Germanic, Sir Andrew McFadyean, had done this work as a labour of love, out of enthusiasm for the book itself and for the fundamental truths it proclaims. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi is a philosopher and an artist, no less than a man of action. German philosophers, especially those of the older school, might decry his thought as "superficial" because his style is easy and clear. Was it not of them and their like that Richard Porson, the great English Hellenist, said more than a century since: "German scholars dive deeper and come up muddier than any others"? There is no mud in Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi's mind. His clearness of vision and liking for syllogism may sometimes betray him into generalisations to which even I find myself, now and again, inclined to append a question mark. But there is no question of the depth or of the luminous quality of the reasoning with which he combats the deification of the State and demolishes the Hegelian conception of the State as "an end in itself". The State, Hegel declared, is "the ultimate end which has the highest right against the individual, whose highest duty is to be a member of the State". This doctrine Coudenhove-Kalergi shows to be the root of political evil. Hegel was, indeed, the foster-parent of the Totalitarian State idea, and the parent of the modern reaction against freedom. To his influence can be traced the form of Russian Bolshevism as of Italian Fascism and of German Nazism. Mussolini's dogma that "the State is an Absolute" is merely an echo of Hegel's error. Some knowledge of the philosophical antecedents of this totalitarian heresy may, indeed, be needed before the full force of Coudenhove-Kalergi's demolition of it can be appreciated. His doctrine runs: Man is a creature of God The State is a creature of man . . . Man is an end and not a means. The State is a means and not an end. The value of the State is exactly the value of its services to human beings; in so much as it serves to develop man it is good—so soon as it hinders the development of man it is evil . . . The State is neither a living thing, nor an organism, nor an organ; it is rather a machine, a mechanism, a tool for the service of man in the struggle against chaos and anarchy . . . Man is a being, and the State is his tool—for good or for evil . . . For the State is no human being, and yet it desires to be more than a man. Since it is no god, it becomes an idol. Created by men, it demands their worship. #### INTRODUCTION This creature of man plays the part of an intermediary between God and man; this artificial machine sets itself up as a natural organism; this servant of mankind parades itself as mankind's master . . . We are living through the most dangerous revolution in the history of the world—the revolution of the State against mankind. We are living through the most dangerous idolatry of all ages—the deification of the State. Thus speak the new idolators: "Each individual is only a man; the State is many men. It follows that the State is more than the indi- vidual and more than a man. "Man is the crown of creation. The State as a creature is more than any man as a creature. The State therefore is a demi-god or a god "The value of man is exactly as great as his services to the State; in so far as he assists the State to develop, then he is good, but so soon as he hinders the development of the State, he is evil. "For the State alone is an end in itself—man is a means. "The State alone is an organism—man his organ. "The State alone is a building—man the building material. "The State alone should be free-man fettered. "The State is everything—man is nothing but an atom or a cell in this higher superhuman structure: the State." To these idolatries Coudenhove-Kalergi makes cogent reply. He affirms with truth that "the least of men is immeasurable and infinite, a true child of God". Every man constitutes a world for himself, lives his own life, and dies his own death. Ten million human beings remain always ten million individuals, ten million separate worlds, even if they #### THE TOTALITARIAN STATE AGAINST MAN are living in the best of all States. For this reason, Coudenhove-Kalergi argues, the State as collective being, as super-man, as god, is an invention, a myth, a dangerous lie. The State, he declares, is an insurance company raised to the rank of an idol by its beneficiaries. "We would fight against this idolatry, but not against the insurance company; not against the State, but against the deification of the State, the most fatal heresy of our age." . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The chapters on "Right and Might", on "Athens and Sparta", and on "The Crisis of Freedom" deserve careful attention, for they contain the true doctrine of freedom. They proclaim it at an hour when freedom is menaced as never before within living memory, and when, as Coudenhove-Kalergi says, "the Totalitarian State has become the deadly enemy of the free man. If this process continues there is a risk that the light which Athens kindled will be extinguished—the light of freedom, of personality, and of Western civilisation". I trust that this book will be widely read. Though it is not, in my view, without blemish, and though I should be inclined to take its author to task for his belief that the Italian Fascist "Corporative State" represents "a practical return to democracy and the electoral system", I welcome it as a contribution of outstanding value to the clarification of thought at a moment of supreme crisis in the political history of the world. Its author believes that against the #### INTRODUCTION "totalitarian State" the ideal and the faith of "totalitarian man" will arise and prevail, and that "the blackest cloud which has overshadowed the history of humanity is beginning to pass away". It may be. But it may also be that before it passes away this blackest cloud will pour death and destruction upon millions. We cannot know. We know only that in the end the immortal spirit of man will break the fetters which modern tyrants and their dupes seek to rivet upon it and will once again escape from its gaolers. Meantime the fight against the totalitarian State, with its ideal of enforced "like-mindedness" among the sons of men, is a holy war for the freedom of the human soul. The fight must go on till Kipling's vision comes true: And so, when the world is asleep, and there seems no hope of her waking Out of some long, bad dream that makes her mutter and moan, Suddenly all men arise to the noise of fetters breaking, And every man smiles at his neighbour, and tells him his soul is his own. W.S. #### CONTENTS | CHAPTER | | PAGE | |---|---|---| | | Introduction by Wickham Steed | 5 | | | Author's Preface | 13 | | I. | Man and the State | 15 | | II. | RIGHT AND MIGHT | 25 | | III. | Athens and Sparta | 36 | | IV. | THE HISTORY OF FREEDOM | 48 | | V. | Democracy and the Parliamentary System | 60 | | VI. | THE CRISIS OF FREEDOM | 72 | | VII. | The Totalitarian State | 92 | | VIII. | THE SCALE OF STATE TOTALITARIANISM | 103 | | IX. | Totalitarian Man | 124 | | X. | THE FIVE CLASSES | 137 | | XI. | The Death of an Illusion | 157 | | XII. | THE FRATERNAL REVOLUTION | 178 | #### AUTHOR'S PREFACE Born of a European father and a Japanese mother, I have been accustomed since my childhood to interest myself in questions which transcend all differences of civilisation and race and move men and humanity. As the author of philosophical works I have always made it my object to seek out the primitive forms and forces which underlie life's manifold phenomena. As founder and leader of the movement which aims at a federation of the States of Europe I have had to grapple for a decade and a half with all the problems which are to-day uniting or dividing human beings. I have thus had occasion to discuss fundamental questions of modern politics, culture, and economics with men of all peoples and all classes; with Europeans, Asiatics, and Americans; with kings and presidents, dictators and democratic statesmen; with leaders of industry and finance, workmen and peasants; with clerical, military, and academic dignitaries; with philosophers and artists, inventors and teachers, journalists and writers; with Liberals and Fascists, Conservatives and Communists. This book is the distillation of such studies, ideas, #### THE TOTALITARIAN STATE AGAINST MAN and conversations. Its object is to introduce clarity into the confusion of demagogy and lying which to-day so obscures the grave problems of our time that even politicians can only with difficulty recognise the forces and ideas which underlie the events and changes of our day. Further, it attempts to indicate to all men of good will a way into a better and a clearer future out of the labyrinth of unsolved problems which vex our age. This book is therefore intended for all men and peoples who are seeking an answer to the riddle of our destiny. R. N. Coudenhove-Kalergi # Chapter I #### MAN AND THE STATE ${\\bf M}$ an is a creature of God. The state is a creature of man. It follows that the state exists for the sake of man and not man for the sake of the state. Men without states are conceivable—states without men are inconceivable. Man is an end and not a means. The state is a means and not an end. The value of the state is exactly the value of its services to human beings; in so much as it serves to develop man it is good—so soon as it hinders the development of man it is evil. The state can thus be either the friend or the enemy of humanity according as it stimulates or hinders man's freedom, security and development. The state is neither a living thing, nor an organism, nor an organ; it is rather a machine, a mechanism, a tool for the service of man in the struggle against chaos and anarchy. The making of a state is as artificial as the making of a flower-bed. As a gardener prepares a bed in such a fashion as to permit the individual flowers to develop better, so statesmen equip states to permit individual men to develop themselves better. But the bed remains an artificial arrangement of flowers, as the state remains an artificial arrangement of men. We can speak of the bed as blooming, smelling, or fading. In fact the bed does not bloom, nor smell, nor fade; only the flowers bloom, smell, and fade, and only the flowers live. In the same way men, individual men, live in the state. The state, however, does not resemble men, it does not consist of flesh and blood, or will-power and imagination, but of institutions and clauses. Its relation to man is not that of the plant to the blossom, but that of the bed to the flower. Man is a being, and the state is his tool—for good or for evil. The state is the house in which its citizens live This house is constructed of constitutions and laws, traditions and symbols. It must be continuously maintained and continuously improved, and thereby it becomes more and more habitable and more and more beautiful for those who now dwell or will in the future dwell in it. For this reason it can properly lay claim to the love and protection of its inhabitants. It would never occur to anyone, however, to conceive of a house as a living thing made up of the sum of its inhabitants—as a demigod or an idol. Everyone knows that it is created by men and for men. It is greater than many men and it survives many generations, and yet it is a lesser thing than any one of its inhabitants. For these inhabitants are #### MAN AND THE STATE lone have imagination, and they alone have spirit. t is for this reason that the most modest tenant is reater than the most magnificent house, the humblest citizen greater than the most powerful state fabric. If the state were the sum of its citizens, the break-down of the state would mean the end of its citizens. Not many years ago we witnessed the breakdown of a major state; but its citizens did not die as a result, they built instead new houses out of the fallen material. Many mourned for their old houses, but many feel better in their new and smaller houses. The state can also be compared to a ship in which its citizens are borne through the dangers of life protected against storms and pirates. Since a ship appears to move of its own volition, to steer itself, and eventually to die, it resembles in many respects a living creature. In reality, however, it is men who are responsible for its movement, men who direct it, men who strive in it; it does not die—it sinks. Human imagination can invest it with life, baptise it with a name, attribute a soul to it; all the same, it belongs to the lifeless world, the soulless world, the world of things. The state resembles a ship with its captain, its crew, and its passengers. Like the ship, it has only an appearance of life, being in fact only a machine, a puppet, a thing. It is built by men, maintained by В men, and directed by men; it is without a soul, without imagination, without character, and without spirit. Human imagination can transform it into a living thing, feel for it as a humanlike being, attribute a soul to it; all the same, it belongs to the lifeless world, the soulless world, the world of machines, and the world of things. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The state is useful like a machine and dangerous like a machine; so long as man controls the machine it enhances his power, his freedom, and his security. Just so soon as man loses the power to direct the machine it becomes an enemy, tramples him underfoot, and destroys him. All the same, it would be as unjust to blame the institution of the state because of frequent abuses of the state as it would be to blame the invention of the motor-car because of the commonness of accidents. The motor-car and the state are useful tools so long as man masters them, and dangerous enemies if they escape his control. The best analogy for the state is furnished by an insurance company. The citizens pay their taxes and undertake to observe the law. In return the state undertakes to protect them against criminals and enemies. It uses the proceeds of taxation to maintain on behalf of the taxpayers a bodyguard against criminals, namely the police, and a bodyguard against enemies, namely the army. It insures them against murder and personal injury, robbery and theft, fraud and blackmail. It accepts responsibility for transport and the postal services, for the maintenance of schools and prisons, for justice and administration. By all these means the insurance company increases the security of the assured and their opportunities for development in so far as they observe the conditions of the insurance policy, that is, the laws, and are regular in their payments of the premium. The state resembles not only a flower-bed, a house, a ship, a car, and an insurance company—but also an idol, a painted piece of wood which is pronounced to be a superhuman being demanding worship, unquestioning obedience, human sacrifice, and money offerings. Among civilised people the worship of beasts and stars as idols has ceased. But a much more dangerous idol has been called into existence—the state. For the state is no human being, and yet it desires to be more than a man. Since it is no god, it becomes an idol. Created by men, it demands their worship. This creature of man plays the part of an intermediary between God and man; this artificial machine sets itself up as a natural organism; this servant of mankind parades itself as mankind's master. Hecatombs of human sacrifice are made to this Moloch in time of war. But this is not all; man him- #### MAN AND THE STATE It is the personification of the state which is to be blamed for this idolatry. The state as a juridical person is conceived of as a physical person, furnished with human attributes, with a collective will, a collective understanding, the instinct of self-preservation, and an active striving for freedom and power. It demands the subordination of the individual will to its collective will, the subordination of the individual understanding to its collective understanding, the subordination of personal freedom to the sovereignty of the state, of self-preservation to the preservation of the state, of the individual's desire for power to that of the state. In reality the state possesses neither will nor understanding, nor character, nor the instinct of self-preservation; it neither longs for freedom nor strives for power, because it is not a living creature but a machine. All these qualities and aims are human qualities and aims, which the state has not and cannot have, but which are foisted upon it in the interest of individual men and groups. The personification of the state leads directly to its deification, for so soon as the state is conceived of as a person or a man, it at once ceases to be a man and becomes a superman, with millions of heads, bodies, and limbs, a collective being which embraces and transcends all individual beings. This collective person so completely transcends individual persons that it is converted not merely into a superman, but an idol. There is no cure for this idolatry except the recognition that in the human world there are only individual persons and no collective persons, that collective personalities, juridical persons, exist in law but not in reality, and that the state is thus no person, but a machine. Perhaps in the world of the ants and the bees there are collective persons; among men there are only single persons, only individuals—in-dividual, or indivisible beings. Cut a man in two, and you have two parts of a corpse and not two half men. For man is not divisible. Add two men together, and the result is not a double man or a superman, but still two single men, two individuals. Man is not only indivisible, he is also not susceptible of addition. Every man is a unique being, the only instance of his kind. Masses are capable of addition, but not beings; quantities, but not qualities. Two men weigh twice as much as one man, and have double the one man's strength, but not double his intelligence, and not double his goodness. You can add men together as soldiers, as artisans, as consumers, but not as personalities, nor as characters, nor as souls, nor as beings endowed with imagination, nor as values. As objects, yes, but not as subjects; for as subject and as being each man is a world in himself, a #### MAN AND THE STATE creature and the simulacrum of a world, infinitely greater than any machine, even than that machine which we call the state. The least of men is immeasurable and infinite, a true child of God. Only as object is man, even the greatest of men, small, a tiny speck on this earth, which is itself a tiny speck in the infinite ocean of the stars. The fundamental lie of the state is that it professes to be the sum of its citizens, while it is only their instrument. If a state of ten million people were really the sum of these ten million, it would be an incomparably greater being than each individual among the millions. But it is never in any circumstances the sum of these ten million, but only the form of their organisation. These ten million people are citizens of the state, but not only its citizens. They live and struggle, love and hate, dream, think, and work for the most part outside the province of the state. They belong in the first place to themselves, to their own cares and hopes, but also to their own religious sect, their own family, their own profession, their own party. Their citizenship fulfils only a fraction of their being, and for this reason they are neither the building material of the state, nor atoms, nor cells. They do not constitute the state, but they dwell in it and inhabit it. #### THE TOTALITARIAN STATE AGAINST MAN Every man constitutes a world for himself, lives his own life, and dies his own death. Love, friendship and loyalty can bind but not fuse one man with another. Two human beings always remain two individuals, two separate worlds, even if they are living in perfect marriage. Ten million human beings remain always ten million individuals, ten million separate worlds, even if they are living in the best of all states. For this reason the state as collective being, as superman, as God, is an invention, a myth, a dangerous lie. The state is an insurance company, raised to the rank of an idol by its beneficiaries. We would fight against this idolatry, but not against the insurance company; not against the state, but against the deification of the state, the most fatal heresy of our age. # Chapter II #### RIGHT AND MIGHT The state is no superman, no demigod, and no god, but the greatest creation of man. It gives a man more security against his fellow human beings and against natural catastrophes. It points the way out of the primeval forest of anarchy to personal freedom. For this reason is the state precious, not for its own sake but for the sake of man. Thanks to the invention of the state man has been able to struggle upwards out of the life of the beasts of the field and reach human stature. Only with the help of the state has the feeble race of man soared up to leadership over the earth. Two generations of anarchy, two generations of statelessness, would destroy our human civilisation and leave no trace of either science or culture. Man would once again have to fight with wild animals, as in the Ice Age. With the disappearance of the greatest of all inventions, the state, all other inventions would disappear. For this reason it is ridiculous to talk of the abolition of the state until humanity has become a community of saints. Until then the state is a necessity, <sup>1 Throughout this chapter the German word "Recht" has the double connotation of "right" and "law" which it is impossible to render accurately in English without an intolerable periphrasis. and a necessity for the development of man, for anarchy means the struggle of each against all, endless civil war, endless crime, and the destruction of all values. It means, not freedom, but the most complete absence of it and the most complete arbitrariness, and therefore the worst of states is better than statelessness or anarchy. That machine which we call the state produces two very different things—right and might. Both serve security. By right the state protects the individual and by might the community. The state in which right rules rests upon its laws and its judges; the state in which might rules, upon its arms and its soldiers. Let us call them for convenience of phraseology Right states and Might states. In the Right state the judge is the highest authority, and his function the highest service. In the Might state the war lord is the highest authority, and military command the highest service. In the Right state right is higher than might; in the Might state might is higher than right. In the Right state justice is the highest virtue, and in the Might state physical courage. The Right state makes use of might to secure that right shall prevail; the Might state makes use of right to maintain and confirm its own might. In the eyes of the Right state every human being is a subject of right; in the eyes of the Might state every human being is an object of might. The judge's main duty is to protect the individual against #### RIGHT AND MIGHT the arbitrary conduct of his fellow human beings and of the organs of the state, while it is the duty of the soldier to defend the state against external and internal enemies at the sacrifice of his own and other people's lives. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The judicial state has grown out of the family, and the military state out of the tribe. The mother is the first to exercise judicial functions over her children; she apportions food between them, she composes their quarrels, she praises and blames, distributes rewards and punishments. In the age of matriarchy the mother retained this natural judicial function even when her children and grandchildren had grown up. In the age of patriarchy the patriarch undertook the exercise of the judicial function over the family and the clan. The natural complement of this function was legislative and executive power. The decisions of judges became laws, and the judges had necessarily to be possessed of power to secure the validity of their sentences. Thus the judge was at one and the same time law-giver and ruler. The military state has issued out of the tribe. Its roots are to be found in the world of the higher animals; a pack of wolves combines in the common search of prey, a strong old wolf takes the leadership, and all others follow and obey him. Human tribes arise in the same way, from the most primitive head-hunters at one end of the scale to the armed bands of our own times at the other end. In every tribe discipline prevails, and the chief is lord of life and death. The most serious crimes are treachery, mutiny, and cowardice. Tribes have not infrequently become states when they have succeeded in completing their system of might by adding to it a system of right. In that case the judicial and the military states were combined as were right and might, clan and tribe, for only on a basis of law and order can a tribe be held together and organised for any length of time, and every tribe must have a military organisation as a protection against neighbours and robbers. Thus was the judge converted into a chief, and the chief into a judge. Out of their combination spring monarchy and the state. In spite of this early combination of civil and military power, of the judicial and military functions in the state, it has never yet been possible to bring about their complete fusion. Still to-day they are struggling for domination in the shaping of the state. The civil power gives its chief homage to the idea of right, and the military power to that of might. The army often constitutes a state within the state, the Might state within a Right state. Frequent conflicts arise between the representatives of the idea of right and the representatives of the idea of might, between civil and military authorities—conflicts which lead to revolutions and coups d'état. It was with a view to avoiding such conflicts that the ruler in a monarchy took his place at the #### RIGHT AND MIGHT head both of a Right state and a Might state. In his name judgment is given and war declared, and through this personal union the internal equilibrium of his state is assured. All the same, there always remains an element of tension between the Right state and the Might state, and the modern state has therefore, like the ellipse, two centres—the idea of right and the idea of might, the judge and the soldier. The state should be represented by the same symbols as justice, with the scales in one hand and the sword in the other; the former as a symbol of right and the latter as a symbol of might. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . At the present time England is the country which most nearly approaches the extreme judicial state and Germany the country which most nearly approaches the extreme military state. There is no European country in which the judge enjoys higher respect than in England, and none in which the soldier enjoys higher respect than in Germany. The conception of the state is rooted in England in the idea of right, and in Germany in the idea of might. That two related nations should have such entirely different attitudes is explained by geography. England was protected by the ocean from external enemies, and it was therefore easier for her to place the state's centre of gravity in the protection of the individual, in right and freedom; Germany, on the other hand, with open frontiers in the middle of Europe, had in the first place to protect herself against invasions, with the result that the idea of personal freedom and personal right had to yield precedence to the idea of the protection of the state through the exercise of might. The Right state and the Might state are both founded on the idea of order. But the basis of order in the Right state is justice, which protects the individual against the state, and in the Might state discipline, which protects the state against individuals. Discipline is a mechanical order, and justice organic order. Discipline is in conflict with freedom, while justice promotes it. The totalitarian state seeks to substitute discipline for justice, and the free state justice for discipline. Without justice there can be no culture state, and without discipline no army. The dualism of might and right is eternal because it is rooted in the deeper antithesis of power and form which is worked out in the whole of creation. This inherent dualism is expressed in the dimensional world as time and space, in the sexes as man and woman, in physics as dynamics and statics, in ethics as equity and justice, in æsthetics as energy and harmony. Might is a principle of power, and right is a principle of form. All right rests on equilibrium. It can be expressed geometrically as symmetry and arithmetically as #### RIGHT AND MIGHT equality. Every breach of right immediately offends our sense of equilibrium, our æsthetic instinct. We feel that the world order has been disturbed, and are immediately sensible of a desire to bring it back into equilibrium by re-establishing right. The active desire for might is an elemental force of power, an expression of the human striving for development, as the active desire for right is an expression of the striving for the creation of form. It is the essence of all form that it should try to limit power, as it is the essence of right that it tries to limit might. Form is the shaping of power, and right the shaping of might. Every state reposes upon might and right. Its essential element is might and its formal element right. It follows that might is valuable and right is valuable, and it follows further that it is senseless to demand that might should be replaced instead of completed by right. Might without right leads to arbitrariness and anarchy. Right without might is ineffective right, and equally leads to arbitrariness and anarchy. Without right there is no peace, no freedom, no state. But without might, also, there is no peace, no freedom, no state. These values can only be created and maintained if right is buttressed by might and might by right. Therefore might is as indispensable to the state as right. Every institution embodying right which has no might behind it must fail. It is for this reason that the League of Nations has failed. Every construction of might which is not buttressed by right must fail. It is for this reason that all dictatorships which did not succeed in creating new principles of right have fallen. The greatest exemplar for the union of right and might was the Roman Empire, won by the might of its legions and maintained by the justice of its judges. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Those who think of politics in terms of power picture the world as biological and dynamic, as a ceaselessly moving struggle between forces. In their eyes states, peoples, classes and parties are living beings which grow, blossom, and fade, which wage a fight for power and existence, the issue of which depends on their strength, their ruthlessness, and their adroitness. Thus such politicians continuously struggle to extend the power of the groups which they lead, in accordance with the law that nature allows of no armistice, but only of growth or decay, development or degeneration—the same law of nature that imposes a struggle for existence on beasts and plants. Those who think of politics in terms of law picture the world as architectural and static. They see states, peoples, classes, professions, and parties as given quantities, as material for building a political #### RIGHT AND MIGHT and social construction in accordance with the eternal laws of stability and harmony. The science of law is therefore related to architecture, mechanics, and mathematics. The jurist regards the state as built out of laws and clauses, constitutions and decrees, forms and formulæ, which import order into chaos and logic into the blind struggle for existence. Thus the politics of power are rooted in earthly laws, and the politics of law in heavenly laws. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . In the Right state peace is accepted as the natural condition which war disturbs and interrupts. In the Might state war is regarded as the natural condition which periods of peace disturb and interrupt. Law can be fully effective only in peace, and only in peace is the judge the supreme authority. Only in war can might be fully effective, and only in war is the soldier the omnipotent master. In peace right governs might. In war might governs right. It follows that the Might state is imperialistic and the Right state pacifist. The latter desires to create and ensure the right of the individual. The former desires to create and ensure the might of the state. In the eyes of the judge every individual human being is a person, a being with defined rights and duties. In the eyes of the soldier each individual human being is only a means to increase the fighting power of the army and the might of the state, a living weapon without rights against the state, but with a duty to display the strictest discipline, the completest self-sacrifice, and the most unquestioning obedience. A judge regards the state as composed of independent and responsible personalities; the soldier regards it as composed of human material. It follows that the Right state is individualist, and the Might state collectivist. The ideal of the Right state is the totalitarian man, the developed man, the free man. The ideal of the Might state is the totalitarian state, the powerful state, the free state. As a consequence of the World War there has been in Europe a revolution from the judicial state to the military state, from Right state to Might state. In the decades of peace which preceded the Great War political development was directed towards the construction of the Right state and an increase in personal freedom and security. It was during the War that nations first recognised that in the life of the state the principle of might was at least of as great importance as the principle of right, which has its foundation in a different kind of organisation. The Roman Empire provided in its constitution for a dictatorship in time of war, for #### RIGHT AND MIGHT the concentration of the whole power of the state in the hands of an individual for a specific period of six months. Without this provision for what we may call totalitarianism of the state in time of war Rome could never have founded its empire, for in war the whole state constitutes an extension of the army, and must be organised in accordance with military considerations in order to be victorious. It was for this reason that the great Western democracies became practical dictatorships in the last years of the War, with Wilson, Lloyd George, and Clemenceau at their head. The post-War period has been dominated by fear of war and by preparation for war. Such a condition fosters the idea of a totalitarian state, owing to the realisation that a totalitarian state lives in a continuous state of war and can spring a surprise campaign without any considerable transformation. The idea of right has therefore ceded ground to the idea of might, and right has only been allowed as much room as seemed good to might. Unlike those of the Roman Republic modern dictatorships are not limited in duration, but unlimited, and therefore more closely resemble Greek tyrannies. # Chapter III ## ATHENS AND SPARTA The ideas of the totalitarian state and the totalitarian man confronted each other at the beginning of European history in the shape of Sparta and Athens. Sparta was a communist aristocracy, Athens a capitalist democracy. The Spartan ideal was a totalitarian state. The Athenian ideal was totalitarian man. In Sparta man lived for the sake of the state. In Athens the state lived for the sake of man. Sparta was the ideal military state. Athens was a judicial state long before it became a great power, when Orestes, hunted through Greece by the Eumenides, had to seek for right in Athens in order to be purified from his guilt before the Areopagus, the highest tribunal. The statue of Pallas Athene on the Athenian Acropolis was the ancient world's statue of Liberty, for Athens was the vanguard of democracy, the guardian of personality, and the protector of freedom. While all the world about her was sunk in barbarism and despotism, Athens kindled the torch of freedom, the light of which to-day illuminates the greater part of our world. Athens overthrew her tyrants and created a government under the control #### ATHENS AND SPARTA of the governed, a government which defended the right of the individual against the might of the state, which clung to a division of powers and banished every citizen who fell under the suspicion of striving to set up tyranny. In this atmosphere of freedom Athens created the first civilisation of individualism, of personality and of the human being, a civilisation of beauty and intellect, art and science. The essential conception and aim of this first European civilisation was the complete man, the totalitarian man, the developed personality. It was fashioned in accordance with the Hellenic ideal, expressed in the word *kalokagathia*, of courageous beauty, of the full development of body, mind and soul, of the union of heroic and æsthetic values in a natural system of morals. By cultivating this ideal Athens was able to give birth to a large number of unique personalities who laid the foundation stone of the edifice of Western civilisation—artists and heroes, poets and thinkers, soldiers and statesmen, writers and historians, courtesans and athletes. This small city, this citadel of freedom, has enriched humanity with more genius than all the rest of the ancient world together. Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides were the creators of tragedy. Aristophanes was the creator of comedy. Even to-day European ethic draws its sustenance from the ideas of Socrates and metaphysic from those of Plato, natural science and logic from those of Aristotle. Pheidias remains the eternal pole star of the plastic arts, and the Parthenon the eternal criterion of architecture. Demosthenes was the greatest orator of all times, Pericles one of the greatest statesmen, and Themistocles one of the greatest generals. Even if all the geniuses of Athens were not born Athenians, it was the freedom of that city which bred and shaped them. So Athens became the mother of Western civilisation, of its art and its science, its drama and its philosophy, but above all of its twofold ideal—freedom and personality. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . On the other hand Sparta enriched posterity with no genius, no work of art, no creative idea. In Sparta man was stunted to the stature of the state, his mind was stunted by a one-sided cultivation of force, his imagination by a one-sided training of the body, art by the exclusive claims made by military equipment, and culture by an ascetic communism. To the Spartan, personal freedom, personal property, personal culture, and private life were all unknown. He was completely incorporated in the state. Sparta was a camp, its men soldiers, its children future soldiers, its women factories of human war material. Torn from their mothers in early childhood, the boys were tortured and ill-treated by the state to inculcate endurance of pain and fit them for future wars, with the result that they #### ATHENS AND SPARTA became nothing more than efficient fighters and obedient servants. They were the enemies of art, of property, and of culture. For the sake of the state and the development of its power they scorned luxury and enjoyment. Their highest happiness was to live for the state and to fight for it, their highest ideal to die for it. It is no accident that this totalitarian state was communist, for in all ages private property has been an essential element in liberalism, a bulwark of personality against the omnipotence of the state and a stimulus to seek comfort and culture, while the totalitarian state was only to be attained through state socialism. For two centuries Greece was the battlefield in the duel between Athens and Sparta, between individualism and socialism, personality and the cult of the state, freedom and totalitarianism. If this duel lay in the future rather than in the past, all supporters of the totalitarian state would prophesy that, while Athens might create higher cultural values, Sparta would perform greater feats in the world of politics and war, that it would conquer Greece with its heroic army and ensure its independence, that, above all, it would easily succeed in conquering the effeminate Athenians and subduing them to its yoke. History took another course. Facts speak louder than theories. The Athenians proved that both in the political and in the military sphere they were as great as the Spartans. Not Sparta but Athens was the leader in the Hellenic wars for freedom, first against the overwhelming power of the Persians and finally against the overwhelming power of the Macedonians. The armies of Athens had as many victories and as important victories as the armies of Sparta. The Athenian fleet created an empire which was larger and more powerful than that of Sparta. Sparta produced no statesman as great as Pericles, and no general as great as Themistocles. In the Thirty Years War which decided the hegemony of Greece Athens eventually went under, not because the Spartans were braver, but because the Athenian fleet was surprised in an unguarded moment in the Dardanelles. The decisive stroke of Sparta against Athens, the destruction of the Athenian army in Sicily, was inspired by the brain of an Athenian emigrant and genius, Alcibiades. Only a few years passed and Athens recovered from her defeat in the Peloponnesian War and shook off the hegemony of Sparta. Both politically and militarily the duel between Athens and Sparta remained undecided. History teaches us that in Sparta personality succumbed to the totalitarian state. In Athens, on the other hand, the state did not succumb to the totali- #### ATHENS AND SPARTA tarian man. On the contrary, her personalities enabled her to grow in stature and strength. The miracle happened: in spite of her individualism, her capitalism, her joy in life, her luxury, her erotic life, her refined culture, her art and philosophy, Athens remained the equal of the Spartan warrior state in political and military fields, while all Sparta's sacrifices of joy in life, of freedom, of beauty and of mind were futile, since the military and political successes of Athens were attained without these sacrifices. It was indeed precisely the idea of the totalitarian man which prevented the Athenian from becoming a one-sided epicure, a one-sided intellectual, a decadent æsthete, and enabled him to remain at one and the same time realist, fighter and hero. He was a full dimension richer than the Spartan, whose soul was flattened out under the pressure of the state. His versatility, his artistry and his heroism were born of freedom. Freedom and personality made Athens great and immortal, so great that the feats of Sparta are as nothing in comparison. And had Athens not fought for the freedom and development of man, the last echoes of Spartan history, of its communism, its cult of the state, and its courage, would long since have died away; but the light of Athens, still burning after twenty-five centuries, was so bright that one of its beams fell upon Sparta and snatched the history of this city from the night of the ages. 41 #### THE TOTALITARIAN STATE AGAINST MAN So we are enabled to-day in the light of this great historical experiment to measure the idea of the totalitarian state against the idea of the totalitarian man, the ephemeral nature of Sparta against the immortality of Athens. For Athens remains immortal because she first made man the measure of all things, and even the measure of the state, because the aim of her state was the development of man, because she was the first to profess the faith that the free man is more and can do more than the unfree, and finally because she had the enterprise and hardihood to realise and prove this faith. Therefore it is no accident that Athens was at one and the same time the mother of freedom, personality, art, and science. Only freedom could have given birth to those personalities whose deeds and works were decisive for thousands of years of human development. To-day, when freedom is again in danger, it is impossible to place too much emphasis on these associations, for once more Europe is faced with the necessity of deciding whether it will tread the road of Sparta or the road of Athens, the road of the omnipotent state or the road of the free man. Since the days of Athens the highest political value for which the Western world has been strug- #### ATHENS AND SPARTA gling is not security, not peace, not power, and not equality, but rather freedom. The value of freedom is greater than that of life itself, for the instinct of every living thing is not self-preservation, but selfdevelopment. The instinct for self-preservation is only a part of the desire for development—of the desire for development in the dimension of time. When there is a conflict between self-preservation and self-development, between life and freedom, small natures decide in favour of preservation and big natures in favour of development, determined to give up their lives for freedom. Noble nations, too, have always preferred to fight for freedom rather than to pass their lives in the safety of servitude. The heroes of freedom have always and everywhere been the greatest ideal figures in the world of politics, and the poets of freedom have been their helpers and preachers. Only crassly stupid men are insensible to the magic of the rays which stream from the idea of freedom. The desire for security is rooted in the desire for freedom. Security should serve as the basis for the development of man, as the earth does for the development of the flower. The desire for power is rooted in the struggle for freedom. When and where there is a want of freedom only the powerful man is free, and power is the prerequisite condition of development and freedom. Equally, the desire for equality springs from the desire for freedom. Servitude must disappear in order that all men may become free. All human longing is a longing for development, for the sake of which man grows, loves, dreams, fights, works, thinks, and educates himself. In this longing are rooted the stimulus to seek sustenance, the sexual instinct and the instinct of movement, the wish to fashion, to work, to help, to apprehend. The crystal is formed in the freedom of surroundings which are fluid, and not in the constraint of surroundings which are stagnant. A tree can only develop its branches when its freedom is not hampered by neighbouring trees. Likewise the perfected totalitarian man expands only in an atmosphere of freedom. This is true of Athenians, of Romans in the time of the Republic, of the knights of the Middle Ages, of the contemporaries of the Renaissance, and of the gentleman of modern times—the finest flower of English freedom. A man who is enslaved can never be perfect even if he has the greatest talents, since he lacks the prerequisite for development and perfection, which is freedom. The man who cannot develop himself becomes stagnant. Most men are stunted fragments of themselves, oppressed by the world around them, downtrodden with misery, broken by care, enslaved by work and often by the state. They are scarcely even a dull reflection of what they might have become in #### ATHENS AND SPARTA an atmosphere conducive to freedom and development. Very seldom do we meet developed men, totalitarian men, personalities. The inner meaning of freedom is not freedom to produce chaos or anarchy, but freedom to develop according to form. Where there is freedom it is not arbitrariness which prevails, but the inner law. Only a free man can promote his conscience to be the law of his conduct. An unfree man must act in accordance with the commands of others; a free man can live in accordance with the laws of his own soul instead of the laws of other men's souls. But all the same he remains bound by laws; even he cannot do what he will, but rather what he should. Whoever confuses freedom and arbitrariness soon loses freedom, which he neither deserves nor can carry. The pressure in all beings to develop is a pressure to seek form and beauty. Its inner formal law bids the apple take on the form of an apple, and a pear the form of a pear. Every mineral has its own law of crystallisation, and obedience to this law constitutes the highest form of mineral freedom. The stone which is half-free becomes crystalline, and that which is unfree becomes amorphous, without shape, form, or being. Plants and animals will also develop in accordance with their own inner formal laws into their specific types of beauty. All life, all growth, all production is only a reaching-out after beauty, after individual form, after individuality, for nature splits itself into individuals, each of which carries within itself its own formal principle which will mould it in as much freedom as it can find. No two crystals in the world are completely alike, no two plants, no two animals, no two human beings. The law of beauty is the law of individuality The law of freedom is the law of personality. As the crystal is the totalitarian stone, so personality is the totalitarian man. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . There is no place for free men in an enslaved state. An upright character can no more live without freedom than can a man without air. Since the aim of the state is man and his development, the totalitarian state fails in its very *raison d'être*, inasmuch as it prevents man from developing. A man cannot develop in anarchy because he is always colliding with the arbitrariness of his fellow men, and he cannot develop himself in the totalitarian state because he is always colliding with the arbitrariness of the state. If anarchy is the worst of all conditions for the formation of personality, totalitarianism in the state is the second worst, since it equally deprives men of the freedom to develop into personalities in accordance with their own inner law. The world is not threatened by anarchy to-day, #### ATHENS AND SPARTA but by totalitarianism. The totalitarian state has become the deadly enemy of the free man. If this process continues there is a risk that the light which Athens kindled will be extinguished—the light of freedom, of personality, and of Western civilisation. # Chapter IV #### THE HISTORY OF FREEDOM ${\\bf T}\_{\\rm HE}$ history of the Western world is the history of the human struggle for personal freedom. This struggle began with the victory of the Greek cities under the leadership of Athens over the overwhelming power of Persian despotism in the naval battle of Salamis (480 B.C.). This victory preserved the freedom of Greece, and marks, in fact, the hour of Europe's birth. For the contrast between Perso-Asiatic civilisation and Helleno-European civilisation consisted in this, that the Persians and the other peoples within their Empire were subjects of the Great King, while the Greeks were citizens of their city states, that the Persians were political objects, the Greeks political subjects. In this sense the victory of the Greeks was not one of civilisation over barbarism, since the Persians were a people who had themselves reached a high stage of civilisation, but a victory of freedom over despotism, and of Europe over Asia. Greece remained the island of freedom until it succumbed to the Macedonian invasion. It is true that Alexander the Great, a pupil of Aristotle, was himself a great Hellene, who carried the Greek spirit and the Greek form of life as far as India and Turkestan. But his successors, the Diadochi. fell #### THE HISTORY OF FREEDOM victims to the Asiatic conception of monarchy; in their Hellenism they were adherents of Greek civilisation, but not of Greek freedom. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Roman Republic rose against this new world of Asiatic despots. The torch of European freedom passed from Athens to Rome, for the Roman Empire was a republic—res publica, a public affair, and not the private affair of a king. Rome was the protector of the Hellenic idea of freedom, of the rights of personality against servitude and the arbitrariness of Asiatic despotism. It elected its servants in war and in peace. It created a system of law which is even to-day the fountain of European law. It hurled everyone thought to entertain tyrannical ambitions to his death from the Tarpeian rock. "Civis romanus sum—I am a Roman citizen," was equivalent to: "I am not the slave of a tyrant or despot, but a citizen of the Roman Republic and a free man." Rome conquered the Hellenic succession states of Asia, but this Asiatic world gradually stifled the spirit of Roman freedom, and so Rome, having coerced and conquered all despotic powers on the shores of the Mediterranean, itself became a despotism modelled on that of the Great King. The process was gradually extended from Sulla to Diocletian. For some centuries the Roman Cæsars ruled in $\\mathbf{D}$ association with the Senate, which had to confirm their election, but this was only a transition to absolutism, to tyranny, and to the totalitarian state. The banner of freedom thus fell from the hands of Rome, which had forfeited the freedom inherited from the Hellenic world. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . At this moment, when the European conception of freedom seemed to die and Roman citizens were converted into subjects of the Cæsars, glad tidings broke upon the world from Palestine: in order to redeem and liberate an enslaved and despairing humanity with a new gospel God was descended from heaven and become man in the form of Jesus of Nazareth. Early Christianity began a stupendous war for freedom against the totalitarian Rome of the Cæsars. Its faith in personality was firmly anchored in the idea of the fatherhood of God, its faith in freedom in the idea of the direct relation of man to God. The gospel brought the glad tidings that each human soul comes into existence once, is unique and immortal, that the will is free and through its actions can take the road either to heaven or to hell. It preached that it was the aim of man to save his soul and not to found empires; that conscience was independent of the state and the emperor, and morals independent of law and constitution; that man owed more obedience to God than to human beings, #### THE HISTORY OF FREEDOM to the church than to the state; and finally, that Christ and not Cæsar was king of the earth, symbolising not might and political power but goodness and humanity. The idea of man, of freedom, of personality, was re-awakened by Christianity just when state omnipotence had reached its highest development. Freedom had shifted its front, but was saved. The totalitarian state of the Cæsars paled in the eyes of the early Christians into a necessary evil, a temporary institution which would disappear with the coming of the Kingdom of God founded upon love for one's neighbour, justice, peace, and voluntary obedience. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . This new fight for freedom in the Western world lasted three centuries—a contest waged between the new human ideal of personality rooted in God and the despotic world power of the Cæsars. Unarmed Christianity was victorious against a world in arms. The individual heroism of the martyrs was mightier than the cruelty of their persecutors. Thus both idols, emperor and state, were overthrown with the other idols of the heathen faith. The new religion of humanity undermined and conquered the Roman Empire with spiritual and moral weapons. Scarcely had the Christian idea of freedom miraculously won this decisive victory when freedom was confronted by a new danger in the Western world, Cæsaro-papistry, the synthesis of empire and papacy designed to secure complete command over the bodies and souls of its subjects, a system of more blatant negation of freedom than the Cæsarism of the heathen age, which was after all fundamentally tolerant. In Byzantium this danger became reality and created the most totalitarian state of Christendom, which lasted throughout the Middle Ages. In Europe it was avoided, thanks to the struggle for power waged between the state and the church: the state did not obtain command over conscience, and the church did not obtain command over the machinery of the state. Between these two rival forces scope was left for personal decision and personal freedom. • • • • • • Mass migrations destroyed the civilisation of the ancient world, but at the same time planted the germ of modern freedom. For the Roman Empire was not conquered by Asiatic despots but by Germans, that is to say, by tribes for whom freedom transcended everything else in importance. The successors of the free warriors of the migrations became knights. For centuries a condition of semi-anarchy filled the place of the Roman Empire—an endless struggle between political entities which scarcely deserved the name of "state". Every knight was sovereign in his own castle, jealous of his freedom, his honour, and his property, which he de- #### THE HISTORY OF FREEDOM fended sword in hand. State and nation were for him empty concepts. What he knew was the tie between man and man, between liege-lords and the vassals who had sworn allegiance to them. His personal honour was more important than the state, the nation, or the king. The knight was the purest individualist, not the enemy of the state but ignorant of it. If he served the state, his service was given not to this abstract concept but only to the person of his highest liegelord, the king. Throughout the Middle Ages emperors and kings sought to break down the intractable freedom of knighthood and to strengthen the power of the state after the Romano-Byzantine model. All these attempts failed because kings had not sufficient strength with which to oppose the feudal power of the knightly soldier caste. It was not until gunpowder was invented that they could recruit vassals and subdue the knights and enforce political obedience upon them. Just as Athenian freedom was a freedom of the citizens and not of the slaves, so the freedom of the Middle Ages was only a freedom of the knights and not of the citizens and peasants who had fallen into dependence upon them. A new fight for freedom started, the fight of the citizen and the peasant against the dictatorship of the knight. In Upper Italy, where a memory of the ancient polis and its autonomy had survived the waves of migration, a struggle for freedom was initiated by the townsfolk and the cities. Thus a series of free city republics came into existence such as Venice, Genoa, Pisa, and Florence, and in a certain sense Rome also became a city republic, with the elected pope as its doge. This Italian example found imitators in Germany, where also autonomous city states were set up which combined in city leagues, the most outstanding being that of the Hansa. The peasants were less lucky than the townsfolk in their attempts to win freedom. These attempts were cruelly suppressed in the Middle Ages and in the early centuries of the New Age. In most parts of Europe the peasants remained serfs, that is, half-slaves. It was only in a few Alpine valleys that the peasants succeeded in winning and maintaining their freedom, so that the first peasant republics of Europe were set up in what was originally Switzerland and in the country of the Grisons. They owed the maintenance of their freedom not only to their desire for it and their courage, but also to their native mountains, which were scarcely accessible to the cavalier armies of the Middle Ages. Out of their wars for freedom sprang the first republic of Central Europe, namely Switzerland, which has ever since continued to be an asylum of European freedom. Towards the end of the Middle Ages the tran- #### THE HISTORY OF FREEDOM sition from the European anarchy of the knights to regular territorial states was gradually completed. The extreme individualism of the knight found an opposing factor in the conception of the state entertained by kings and princes, which was strengthened by the teaching of Roman law. A struggle which was to last for centuries began between feudalism and absolutism. The first phase of these struggles led to constitutions which rested upon a division of the new power of the state between the king and the estates. The first and most famous of these European constitutions was Magna Carta, the origin of English freedom and of the English parliamentary system. These first impulses for the institution of European parliaments were not democratic but aristocratic. Representation of the estates was to be representation of the nobility, although here and there townsfolk and peasants were represented. Their most important right was the approval of taxes, which gave them control over the administration. At the turn of the Middle Ages three spiritual currents, which partook of the character of movements for freedom, passed through Europe—the Renaissance, Humanism, and the Reformation. While the Renaissance and Humanism gave new life to the classic ideals of personality and humanity and created a great epoch in art and science, the Reformation represented an attempt to release Christian laymen from the tutelage of the priestly caste and bring them into direct relation #### THE TOTALITARIAN STATE AGAINST MAN with God. This religious movement for freedom was instinct with democratic tendencies directed against the spiritual absolutism of the papacy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The struggle between the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation remained without issue. Protestantism conquered in the North and Catholicism in the South and West. England became the bulwark of Protestantism and Spain of Catholicism. While the parliamentary system and the idea of freedom were developing in England, Spain created the first absolutist state to exist in the Western world since the downfall of the Roman Empire. This totalitarian Spain of Philip II was closely allied with the Catholic Church through the Inquisition. Half for political and half for religious reasons the small nation of the Netherlands rose against the Spanish world monarchy and won its freedom. The wreck of the Spanish Armada on the coasts of England was, in its effect on the development of the Western world and its freedom, a second Salamis. In most parts of Europe absolutism had the upper hand for three centuries. The freedom of the knights disappeared in face of the court despotism of kings supported by mercenary armies and officials. France and Austria, like Spain, became great despotisms, while Germany and Italy were divided up among a crowd of lesser despots. Even in England the Stuarts made an attempt to #### THE HISTORY OF FREEDOM override the constitution and set up an absolutist state. This attempt cost Charles I his life and James II his throne. The nobility and the bourgeoisie of England joined forces against the danger of absolutism, and so preserved the freedom of their island. Since that time England has remained the shield of the parliamentary system and of liberalism, the lighthouse of European liberty, and the heir of Athens . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The triumph of absolutism over the idea of personality led in Europe to a new movement for freedom in what we know as the age of enlightenment. As the early Christians fought without arms against emperors bristling with weapons, so the boldest and clearest heads of Europe fought with weapons of the spirit against the arbitrariness of European despots. In the name of man the European spirit demanded a regime of freedom, of humanity, of toleration, of responsibility, demanded equality before the law, the abolition of the rack and gruesome executions, release from servitude, the emancipation of the Jews, freedom of conscience, division of powers, and control of governments by representatives of the governed. This spiritual current was strong enough even to affect some of the European despots, who became the executors of many of the ideas of the age of enlightenment, just as once upon a time the Emperor Constantine had been an evangelist of Christianity. They could not, however, succeed in bridging the gulf which divided the principle of absolute state power from the system of parliamentary freedom as practised in England, for it was the example of England which was the strongest ally of continental enlightenment. It is paradoxical that the first triumph of the ideas of enlightenment was gained at the expense of England and not under its guidance. The constitution of the United States of America, a country which had revolted from England, was a much more perfect realisation of the ideas of enlightenment than could be found in any European country. It was democratic, federal, liberal, and tolerant. This victory for the conception of freedom in America had its repercussions in Europe. The great French Revolution was the herald of the rights of man and of the great principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity. With it the age of enlightenment triumphed over absolutism and the idea of freedom over the despotism of kings. The French Revolution was followed by the attempt of Napoleon to stifle part of its ideas, and with another part to conquer Europe. When this attempt broke down in a sea of blood, Metternich sought to re-establish absolutism throughout the continent. The Holy Alliance was to be a weapon forged in the name of peace against the movement for freedom. Fear of the terror of the French Revolution was abused in order to stifle the ideas with #### THE HISTORY OF FREEDOM which the age of enlightenment had so richly endowed the world. This resurrection of absolutism in Europe lasted but a short time. The whole American continent had already been converted to democracy. In the two revolution years of 1830 and 1848 the *bourgeoisie* of Europe arose against the totalitarian police state and wrested constitutions and freedom after the English model. The conception of freedom had, indeed, even attacked Asia. Japan became a parliamentary country, and China a republican one. After the unlucky war with Japan even the Tsar found himself forced to grant a half-democratic constitution, while the Young Turk revolution converted the Ottoman Empire into a constitutional monarchy. Thus it came about that before the War the age of enlightenment had conquered absolutism throughout the world. Democracy had triumphed over despotism and freedom over servitude, the idea of the totalitarian man over the idea of the totalitarian state. # Chapter V # DEMOCRACY AND THE PARLIAMENTARY SYSTEM ${\\bf F}$ кеером is an ideal. Democracy is a principle. The parliamentary system is a method. To interchange these three concepts leads to incurable confusion. England is free and has a parliamentary system. Its constitution, however, rests only partly on democratic principles, since the monarchy and the Upper House are certainly undemocratic institutions. Russia, Germany, and Italy are not free, although their constitutions are founded on the sovereignty of the people and the principle of majority rule, and are therefore largely democratic. The United States and Switzerland are free and democratic, but not parliamentary, since their governments cannot be upset by a parliamentary vote of no confidence. Japan has a parliamentary system, but is not democratic because its constitution is not based on the conception of the sovereignty of the people but on the creed that all sovereignty derives from the Emperor, who by a voluntary act shares his sovereignty with the parliamentary government. It is just as possible to conceive of rule by a tolerant minority which respects personal freedom as it is to conceive of rule by an intolerant majority which limits all rights of freedom. The informing spirit is more important than the constitution. Whenever faith in man and respect for personality disappear, even universal suffrage can lead to despotism, for tyrants and demagogues are not opposites but counterparts. • • • Democracy rests on faith in the sovereignty of the people and the conviction that it finds its expression in the principle of majority rule. The establishment of this majority makes voting necessary. The most democratic form of suffrage is the plebiscite, in which the sovereign people directly decides questions affecting the country's fate without the interpolation of people whom it has elected as its trustees. The next most democratic stage is direct election by the people. The elector nominates his trustee as member of parliament, who shall in his name pass and repeal laws, approve and reject taxes, form and upset governments. There is already an aristocratic element present in this democratic method. The choice of members is intended to be not merely a means by which the will of the electors can be expressed, but at the same time a method by which an elite capable of guiding the fortunes of the state can be raised up out of the mass of the people. #### THE TOTALITARIAN STATE AGAINST MAN This aristocratic principle of selection is still more active in indirect election, in which the function of the people's representatives is that of electors who shall choose and nominate the leaders of the people. Most parliaments are based on direct election, most parliamentary governments on indirect election. Two inventions are to-day the strongest guarantees of democracy—powder and printing. Powder destroyed the privileges of the nobility, since a mercenary with his firearm incorporated greater military value than a knight with his steed and armour, and since castles could not withstand artillery. From that time onwards the noble lost the privilege of being the only bearer of arms. The number of firearms and soldiers became more and more decisive, until universal military service replaced the mercenary by a popular army. Universal military service, which originated in the French Revolution, is as democratic an institution as universal suffrage. The citizen into whose hand a firearm has been pressed is in a position to insist that a voting paper should accompany the weapon. So long as only one class was armed and only one commander could dispose of mercenary forces, it was not necessary for them to pay much attention to the views and demands of unarmed citizens. When once, however, the people and the army are com- posed of the same men, the government can no longer completely override public opinion. It can hoodwink it and mislead it, but not disregard it. The popular army of to-day which has sprung from universal military service is therefore one of the strongest supports of the democratic principle against a return of absolutism, that is to say, against tyrants who are not at the same time demagogues. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The invention of printing was almost as significant for democracy as the invention of gunpowder. The one makes a popular army possible and the other popular education. Until printing was invented, reading and writing were as great a privilege as riding and fighting, a privilege of monks and of an elite of knights and citizens. Only through printing did the citizens, and later the peasants and the workers, overcome their illiteracy. Thenceforth they were capable of being "subjects" of politics and of interesting themselves in political questions beyond their own narrowest horizon. This development was crowned by the introduction of obligatory school attendance—a democratic institution of the first importance, as important indeed as universal suffrage and universal military service. On the continent the greater part of the people only came of age with the abolition of illiteracy. As soon as every man can read and write, shoot and throw bombs, no government can continuously govern in opposition to public opinion, no government can abolish the fundamental principle of democracy. . . . . . . . The strength of democracy lies in the dependence of governments on the governed. Under feudalism and absolutism governments were not required to pay any regard to the governed. They could rule justly and humanely, but they were not forced to do since there was no one who could call them to account. Democracy brought this state of affairs to an end. A democratic government cannot govern in opposition to the people and public opinion. It must always attempt to persuade the electors that its measures are reasonable and just. Through the spoken and the written word it must promote the political education of the electors in order that they may appreciate the necessity for decisions which may injure the interest of isolated groups but serve the interest of the state, or of decisions which involve momentary sacrifices in order to obtain assured future advantages. Democracy has, therefore, every interest in raising the standard of popular education. On the other hand, it is of the greatest importance for the education of the people that every citizen should feel that he shares responsibility for the political fate of the state, that he is not merely an object but a subject of politics, that in certain circumstances his vote can be decisive in the election of a member and indirectly in the choice of a government. A further advantage of democracy is that it gives every dissatisfied citizen a chance to express his opposition to the government with a voting paper instead of a bomb. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Democracy and liberalism are not identical. Many countries are more democratic than England with its monarchy and feudal Upper House, but there is no country which is more liberal or shows a greater respect for the personal freedom of the individual. In its essence the idea of the omnipotence of the majority is democratic but anti-liberal, for a democratic majority has the legal right to decide that a minority shall be exterminated and to carry out this decision without infringing the principle of the sovereignty of the people or the rights of the majority. The minority remains impotent and at the mercy of the majority, because the majority alone represents the state and is omnipotent. The potential importance of a minority in a democratic country consists in this, that it can become the majority, and therefore the decisive power, in the next election. This possibility always exists in the case of political minorities, but not in the case of most national and religious minorities. The situation of these minorities under the dictatorship of an intolerant and anti-liberal majority is no more favourable than under a similar dictatorship of a minority. 65 The anti-liberal character of inflexible majority rule is not sufficiently recognised, just because the liberal idea of the rights of man accompanied and supported the democratic struggle against absolutism. In each of the last two centuries the protagonists of democracy were at the same time protagonists of humanity. In practice they united the demand for rule by the people with the demand for individual rights. It thus comes about that respect for the individual is, indeed, not so much an element in the principle of democracy as a sacred democratic tradition, and in our own days as well the great democracies are at one and the same time protagonists of personal freedom and of the rights of man. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The democratic opposition plays a much more important role than majority rule in securing respect for the rights of man. It prevents democracy from building up a structure of state totalitarianism. Relentlessly criticising every mistake of the government majority in order to overthrow and replace it at the next elections, it is the most important controlling organ of the state. If a prisoner under remand is tortured to-day in a democratic state he can make his complaint through his lawyer to a member of the opposition. A question in Parliament can then lead to a political scandal, to the dismissal of the guilty official and the compensation of the victim, who would be supported by the overwhelming majority of the public as represented in the press and public opinion. An unsatisfactory answer to the question in Parliament can lead to the downfall of the Secretary of State for Home Affairs or of the government. Should a similar case happen in a state which tolerates no opposition and no freedom of the press, and should the victim be unlucky enough not to belong to the government party, he is generally impotent. The authorities have every interest and every chance to hush up the matter. If, nevertheless, the victim complains, he runs the risk of being tortured again or put out of the way. Thus the democratic system even to-day constitutes the best guarantee there is against arbitrariness and injustice on the part of the authorities and the best guarantee for the protection of the individual's legal status and personal freedom—in short, for the protection of man against the state. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The essential distinction between a parliamentary regime and other forms of democracy is that parliament is entitled not only to elect or to confirm the government, but also to dismiss it at any time without notice. Unparliamentary democracies, on the other hand, such as the United States and Switzerland, must wait until fresh elections fall due in the normal course if they wish to change their governments. This instability of parliamentary governments has been freely and justifiably criticised, for, at a time when it is necessary to make plans for several years in order to solve a great economic problem, it is a paradoxical inconvenience that ministers must daily reckon with the possibility of their overthrow, and therefore be forced to give at least as much of their time and strength to parliamentary intrigues as to the duties of their departments. The consequence is that the real government is transferred to the higher officials, while ministers are degraded to the rank of parliamentary spokesmen of their departments, for only the leading civil servants have at the same time the knowledge, the experience, the peace, and the permanence which are necessary for preparing and executing large-scale government plans. A further fundamental fault in the parliamentary system is that it is particularly difficult for its governments to put into effect unpopular measures which are necessary in the interest of the state. So long as unstable parliamentary majorities determine the policy of the government, every unpopular measure endangers the ministry, because the members are afraid by their connivance in it to lose votes. The Front Bench becomes a dock and the members a jury. Ministers are menaced with instant dismissal without compensation if they disobey the will of the majority in the slightest respect. Since in most cases ministers have high salaries but no pensions, this dismissal is equivalent to a sensible fine. As ministers tremble before the members, so members tremble before their voters, whose voting papers determine their political future. This dependence of the elected on the electors is an element of all democracy. With all its disadvantages, however, it remains better than any system which rests on the one-sided dependence of the governed on the government. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The parliamentary system functions best in the home of parliamentary government, namely England. In this country changes of government within the electoral life of a parliament seldom take place, because the governments are committees of the majority, with which they stand and fall. The deeper ground for the success of British parliamentary government in comparison with the failure of parliaments in many other parts of the continent lies in the unwritten laws of the system, the recognition of which alone makes it possible. The written law of democratic constitutions invests the majority, or the necessary majority, when a bare majority does not suffice, with unlimited rights, while the unwritten law limits them appreciably. The future of all democracy depends on the observance of the rules of the parliamentary game. The rules demand fair play for opponents even when they are defeated. They forbid such unlimited exploitation of electoral victory as involves the annihilation of the defeated opposition, and demand instead that the opposition should have a chance of being victorious at the next elections. The defeated government must yield power to the victorious opposition without attempting to restrain them by force. Complaints and criticisms may be freely voiced in the electoral conflict, but no slanders and no insults. This attitude of mind demands chivalry. It is found among gentlemen, but not among gangsters. In gangster ethics it goes without saying that power won in an electoral conflict should not be surrendered except under compulsion. To this end some pretext or other will be found to prevent elections, or the results will be falsified, or a majority will be secured by blackmailing threats. All the forces of the state will be set in motion to intimidate or annihilate the opposition until it gives up the struggle for power. In the eyes of the gangster any other behaviour is inconceivable, foolish, and cowardly. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The downfall of parliamentary government in Germany may be explained by the fact that it found room on the parliamentary match-ground for two parties who were so far from recognising the rules of the game that they openly strove to set up a dictator-ship—determined if the necessity arose to use bombs to give point to their voting papers. The German parliament would, of course, have been justified in excluding both these dictatorship parties, the communists and the national socialists, from the parlia- mentary game, the rules of which they refused to recognise, just as an umpire would have to exclude an Association football team which was determined to use its hands to the ball. No such provision is necessary in England. A party leader in this country who in principle rejects the unwritten law of fair play earns popular contempt and loses the confidence of his electors. English democracy and the British ideal of the gentleman are only two aspects of the same spirit. You can have dictatorship at every stage of civilisation, and even among savages. Democracy requires a high moral level, a strong sense of chivalry. Because England has adopted the ethics of the gentleman and of modern chivalry, the crisis which democracy has been going through has passed over this country almost without touching it. The totalitarian state is no part of England's aim, because the roots of her political system are found in totalitarian man. English freedom was created by gentlemen and for gentlemen, and for this reason it is immune from the dangers of dictatorship and state totalitarianism. # Chapter VI #### THE CRISIS OF FREEDOM The short period of freedom which filled the second half of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century was a golden age in the history of mankind. The standard of comfort rose, in pace with the progress in most spheres of science and civilisation, incredibly. Personal and intellectual liberty, economic freedom of movement, and the reign of law were promoted in a degree unknown in the history of the world. At last it seemed that in the democratic system a way had been discovered which should lead out of the darkness of centuries of feudalism and despotism into a future of freedom, of common education, of humanity and liberty. At first it seemed that the World War had hastened rather than interrupted this process. Its issue was a triumph of the Western democracies over the four empires of Russia, Germany, Austria, and Turkey, on the ruins of which a series of democratic republics arose. It seemed as if Mazzini's dream of Europe as a democratic system of republican national states had been realised. The world triumph of democracy was to have been crowned by the foundation of the League of Nations, which transferred democratic principles to #### THE CRISIS OF FREEDOM international life in order to usher in a magnificent period of world peace. A shadow fell on the feast to celebrate the victory of democracy. A year before the victory of the Western powers Lenin had overthrown Kerensky's democratic republic, and proclaimed in Russia the anti-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat. A new ideology of dictatorship laid claim to the heritage of democracy. It confronted the ideal of freedom with the ideal of equality, private property with communism, the parliamentary with the Soviet system. A part of the most progressive elements in every nation forsook the democratic camp and embraced the ideas of Lenin. The crisis of democracy followed hard upon its greatest triumph. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Future historians will rack their brains to know how it could have been possible that, in spite of all its incomparable triumphs, democracy was abandoned in great parts of Europe after a few decades. The solution of the riddle is to be found in the class conflict. The class conflict is no modern European invention. It is as old as human civilisation. Plato already had observed in his greatest political work that the state was composed, in fact, of two states, that of the rich and that of the poor, which were in conflict with each other. Ever since there have been haves and have-nots, members of the possessing classes have been masters of the state, alike in the ancient world, the Middle Ages, and in modern times. The haves have always been in a minority, and yet have succeeded in capturing power and possession. Throughout the great popular migrations, wars, and revolutions, power has continually changed hands, but it has always remained in the hands of the possessing minorities, while the majorities without possessions have been disinherited. These minorities were the creators and the transmitters of every civilisation which has yet appeared. Their possessions gave them the time, the power, and the freedom to devote themselves to the cultivation of art and intellect. When children of the propertyless class found a way to be educated, they sought assimilation by the possessing class and co-operated with it in the construction of its cultural world. In pre-democratic times this privileged position of the possessing classes was taken for granted, and even the dawn of the democratic era made little difference in this respect. The French Revolution was a struggle for power between two groups of property owners, between the *bourgeoisie* and the nobility. The *bourgeoisie* conquered in the name of democracy, but the poor remained disinherited, miserable, and impotent even when they were given the vote. The French Revolution inscribed upon its banner the three words, "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity." Liberty for the poor, however, meant that they became galley-slaves of the new machines, threatened #### THE CRISIS OF FREEDOM with death by hunger for every outspoken word against their slave-drivers. Equality meant that some lived in the luxury of palaces and others in the squalor of unheated suburban rooms. Fraternity meant that the haves generally found it beneath their dignity even to stretch a hand to the have-nots. Meanwhile, thanks to technical discoveries and the introduction of machines, there arose a new class of have-nots, the industrial proletariat. The sons and daughters of peasants and agricultural labourers streamed into the towns to become machine workers. Their work was merciless, their misery indescribable. While the prosperity of the possessing classes grew, the industrial proletariat came to constitute a new class of slaves, in spite of all democracy, exploited and deprived of their rights by the entrepreneur. Soon cities were split into two social classes, a bourgeoisie of haves and a proletariat of have-nots. The eternal class conflict took on a new and concrete aspect. It was converted into a struggle between a liberated bourgeoisie and an enslaved working class. • • • • • • A new movement for freedom directed against the bourgeoisie arose in the shape of socialism. Its aim was to continue the great Western struggle for freedom until the last form of European slavery had been destroyed, as had been the penultimate form, which was serfdom. The socialists demanded that equality of rights in the political field should be completed by the same equality in the economic field. They demanded the abolition of the domination of the *bourgeoisie*, the dispossession of the rich, and the distribution of their property among the poor, the socialisation of the means of production, and the creation of equal educational facilities for all. These demands were democratic, for they sprang from the equality of all men, not only before the law, but also before property, and from the fact that in a democratic state the minority of haves should no longer have a right to command and exploit the majority of have-nots. In order to realise their demands industrial workers began to organise themselves in the name of Marxism. Isolated they were impotent, and could only attain political power through union. Their first objects were to secure universal suffrage and to unite all the have-nots in the heart of the industrial proletariat against the haves, in order to reverse their respective strengths in parliament and dispossess the ruling majority. . . . . . . . . . In the face of this growing danger the bourgeois class mobilised all its forces and allies to prevent the workers from achieving a democratic victory. It had not fought for democracy in order to be ruined by it. For this reason it took up the class conflict against Marxism along the whole front in defence of private property: by financing anti-socialist newspapers and parties; by propagating nationalism and imperialism in preference to socialism, and national hate in preference to class hate, by concluding an alliance with the powers of conservatism, the crown, the church, the nobility, the bureaucracy, and the peasantry; by entering into social and business associations with governments and parliaments. The anti-Marxist front was not composed solely of haves. A large part of the have-not intelligentsia, artists and scholars, professors and students, fought against Marxism from conviction and from fear that the abolition of private property might lead to the breakdown and even the annihilation of Western civilisation, for the Marxian aim of a classless communistic order of society had no example in world history. Imagination, therefore, had free scope, and could dream of it as a paradise—or as a hell. No one could know what form of life would succeed capitalism. Many men who suffered under capitalism, therefore, preferred to bear the evils that they knew than to venture a leap into the unknown—the future realm of Marxism. Capitalism succeeded in preventing the establishment of a single parliamentary front of the have-nots against the haves. It disrupted the have-nots and cut them off from the socialist army of electors by the use of ecclesiastical and national slogans. Nobility and priesthood, the leaders of which belong to the possessing class, swallowed their distaste for the bourgeoisie in order to make an alliance with it against the advance of Marxism. Marxism had committed the fatal error of adopting as a complement to its political struggle with the bourgeoisie an ideological struggle against Christianity, instead of attempting to link itself up with primitive Christian tendencies and to win the goodwill of the Christian masses for its programme. Through this ideological struggle waged under the colours of materialism and atheism Marxism drove into the camp of its opponents not only the Christian peasantry, but also the greater part of the agricultural labouring class, which should have been its natural ally and its strongest army of reserves. It thus happened that Marxism did not become the party of the have-nots, but only the party of the industrial workers, that in this fashion it constituted a strong minority everywhere but a majority nowhere, that finally, in spite of the introduction of universal suffrage, it lost the parliamentary game. The great army of freedom which a few decades earlier had overthrown absolutism was split by the class conflict into two hostile camps, the liberal camp of the *bourgeoisie* and the socialist camp of the proletariat, in a life and death struggle. Both sides felt that they were the legitimate heirs of the freedom movement. The liberals held fast to the institution of private property, declared even in #### THE CRISIS OF FREEDOM the French Revolution to be one of the most sacrosanct rights of man and regarded as the Palladium of freedom in opposition to the idea of an omnipotent state socialism.1 The socialists refused to recognise private property as a right and represented the view that the disappearance of this undemocratic privilege was an inescapable necessity if real freedom and justice were to be established. The idea of freedom paled into insignificance as compared with the question of private property. The socialists were ready to dispense with democratic freedom if it were possible to exchange it for socialistic equality. The possessing classes were inclined to prefer a reactionary regime that ensured their property to a democratic regime which confiscated it. Thus on both sides conditions existed which were favourable to a retreat from the ideal of freedom, which lost its power of attraction after it had been attained. Generations which had grown up in a regime of freedom and the rights of man were no longer conscious of them as benefits wrung by bitter struggle, but as matters of course on the value of which they never further reflected. It seemed no longer worth while to fight for freedom, but only for the distribution of private property. Thus freedom's front broke up. The seventeenth paragraph of the famous Declaration of the Rights of Man reads as follows: "Since property is an inviolable and sacred right, it should be taken from no one unless obviously required by public necessity established by law, and then only on the condition that there is just compensation paid beforehand." Before the War the bourgeois camp, conscious of the parliamentary advantage it had over socialism, was democratic. Within the socialist movement in the same way democratic tendencies predominated, though there were always lively currents which were distrustful of the evolution of democracy and anxious to obtain power by revolution. It was the World War which brought about a split in the socialist front, a split between the social democrats, who had allied themselves with the *bourgeois* parties in their national struggle for existence, and the revolutionary communists, whose aim was the international dictatorship of the proletariat and the extermination of the *bourgeoisie*. Lenin broke with democracy because he recognised that socialism had once and for all lost the parliamentary game. The fact that he was a Russian was a decisive factor. In Russia the industrial proletariat was a small fraction in comparison with the agrarian population, composed for the most part of conforming believers. A democratic parliamentary victory of Marxism in Russia was out of the question because any democratic regime would necessarily bear an agrarian character. Above all, a democratic regime was problematic in a state in which the majority of the population was illiterate, and therefore a tool in the hands of plutocracy and reaction. Moreover, Russia had not had two thousand years of the cult of freedom, which had remained a living thing in Europe even in the darkest ages of abso- #### THE CRISIS OF FREEDOM lutism. In that country all the necessary conditions existed for passing right beyond the idea of freedom and bringing about a revolution based on equality in one bound. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The defeats of the Tsar's army in the World War and the failures of the democratic Kerensky republic created the conditions necessary for Lenin's victory. His programme of peace at any price and the immediate expropriation of the large landowners won him the sympathy of the soldiers and peasants. Even so he could only base his power on a small minority of the Russian nation, a minority prepared, however, to stick at nothing. Since it appeared impossible to bring Russian socialism into being by democratic methods, Lenin demanded revolution by naked force instead of with the voting paper. He pronounced bourgeois democracy to be deformed by capitalism. It was no good therefore to wage the class conflict on the terrain of parliamentary democracy; the first thing to be done was to destroy in bloody revolution the forces which opposed the proletariat—bourgeoise, nobility, the church, capital, large land-holdings, bureaucracy, bourgeois intelligentsia—and establish the true democracy of the classless state on their ruins. The class-conscious proletariat as the vanguard of all propertyless and dispossessed strata of the population could alone construct this new state. Thus the dictatorship of the proletariat appeared F 81 to be the indispensable preliminary to the realisation of the socialist order of society. Scarcely had Lenin achieved power by a coup d'état when he began to exhibit an utter contempt for personal freedom and human rights and set up a dictatorship of power and terror. The extermination of all opposing political forces through murder, robbery, torture, and extortion was his declared aim. This war of extermination was directed not only against the bourgeoisie and its allies, but also against every element of the proletariat and of socialism which did not accord him unquestioning obedience. The so-called dictatorship of the proletariat was in form a dictatorship of the Communist party. In actual fact it was a personal dictatorship of Lenin and his closest collaborators, a return to absolutism with different mottoes, but with greater cruelty, arbitrariness, and violence. • • • While up to this point Marxism had appeared as the champion of freedom and equality, Lenin now completely abandoned the ideal of freedom in order to place his revolution at the exclusive service of equality. His famous remark that "freedom is a bourgeois prejudice" is something more than a witty phrase, for the kernel of the Bolshevist revolution was the struggle against individualism, personality, freedom, and the "gentleman" ideal—against the totalitarian man. #### THE CRISIS OF FREEDOM In their stead we were to have a totalitarian state furnished with unlimited power, master of all bodies, souls, and property, a collective organism in face of which the individual was impotent and outlawed. The ideal of freedom was transferred from the present to the future. After a proletariat dictatorship of undefined duration and the extermination of every trace of bourgeois culture and mentality, a beginning was to be made with the demolition of the state and the construction of personal freedom. For the present the only things which could serve were the ideal of equality, the dictatorship, and the reign of terror, while freedom was banished into a paradise of the future. In substitution for the parliamentary regime Lenin created the system of soviets. Factories and local areas became cells in the council hierarchy which culminated in the Soviet government. This council system, in which there were never free elections, was in practice nothing more than the façade for the dictatorship of Lenin and the Communist party. Lenin was not satisfied with the conquest of Russia, but immediately proclaimed the world revolution. In all parts of the world the proletariat was to gather round the Communist International, follow the Russian model in overthrowing the bourgeois governments, and enter the Soviet Union. A great part of the younger and more active elements of the labouring classes and of the proletarian intelligentsia of all nations answered this summons to world revolution. Under the leadership of the Third International, which used Russian gold to throw a revolutionary net round the world, there broke out in all five continents a series of revolutions, revolts, and conspiracies to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat. But nowhere could power be achieved, except for a time in Hungary, Finland, and Bavaria. At the same time, the class conflict had entered upon a new phase. Where the voting paper had failed, bombs and machine-guns were to be successful in bringing about the overthrow of bourgeois society, the expropriation of capital, the dictatorship of the proletariat, and the end of individualism. The ideological propaganda which accompanied this struggle for power used every means to depreciate the ideal of freedom in contrast with the new ideal of equality. Liberalism was ridiculed, the parliamentary system derided, democracy held up to contempt. In the younger generation there was a change in political valuation in favour of collectivism and to the disadvantage of individualism, democracy, and freedom. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Lenin's world revolution misfired because the national feeling of solidarity in war-time infected all conservative elements of socialism with a national ideology and led them to reject communism, which was anti-national, for sentimental reasons. They preferred to combine with the democratic elements of the *bourgeoisie* to form coalition governments of an anti-communist character. For the time being, therefore, the social democratic labour party, above all in Central Europe, saved *bourgeois* society and Western culture from the communist world revolution. The threats of world revolution had a much more powerful effect on the bourgeoisie of Europe than on the working classes. Fear of a communist reign of terror such as prevailed in Russia stirred wide circles of the bourgeoisie and the bourgeois intelligentsia out of the political lethargy into which they had fallen after the conquest of democratic freedom. Defence against world revolution now became the chief aim of their policy. When once the communist proletariat had overridden the rules of the parliamentary game, part of the youth of the bourgeoisie determined to have recourse for their own part to violence and to take up the struggle for command of the streets and political power with weapons in their hands. Gradually there ripened in the bourgeois camp the idea that a bourgeois dictatorship should confront the communist dictatorship and use violent means to protect private property and the existing foundations of Western culture against the onslaught of bolshevism and atheism. The trembling ground of democracy was lightheartedly deserted on the bourgeois side as well. Thus a second front of battle was #### THE TOTALITARIAN STATE AGAINST MAN constructed against individualism and freedom—in the name of nationalist collectivism. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The bourgeois counter-revolution against the world revolution began in Hungary and Bavaria after the overthrow of the communist governments in Budapest and Munich. Their first decisive victory, however, was gained in Italy, where the role of leader had been undertaken by a foeman worthy of Lenin's steel in the person of Mussolini. This former socialist leader created the Fascist movement and ideology, which broke with the ideals of democracy and the parliamentary system in order to meet the Bolshevist danger with Bolshevist methods—terror with counter-terror, propaganda with counter-propaganda, the communist brand of party dictatorship with the fascist brand. When the Third International threatened Italy with the dictatorship of the proletariat and the parliamentary system proved itself too weak to destroy this creeping revolution, Mussolini created for himself an armed party army in order to put an anti-Marxist dictatorship in the place of Italian democracy. His hypnotic personality, his appeal to youth, to their heroic instincts, to patriotism and national sentiment, quickly secured him a large and energetic following. While a weak government strove to maintain neutrality in the street warfare between bol- #### THE CRISIS OF FREEDOM shevism and fascism in the hope that the two movements would in the end destroy each other, the sympathies of capital, of conservative circles, of the army, and of the Royal House favoured fascism, not indeed as a system, but as the strongest anti-Bolshevist force. Supported by the sympathies of these forces, Mussolini succeeded by a coup d'état in seizing power and setting up the Fascist party state in the framework of the Italian monarchy. . . . . . . . Although Mussolini's philosophy of life was strongly influenced by the individualism of Nietzsche, he fashioned the Fascist state into a system of nationalist collectivism. He opposed the idea of class war with the idea of national war and imperialism, the idea of a class community with the idea of a community of the people and of nationalism. He opposed class consciousness with national consciousness, liberalism with collectivism, democracy with hierarchy, and the parliamentary system with the principle of leadership. In place of the motto of the French Revolution, "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity," he set up the Fascist motto, "Order, Authority, Discipline." He promoted the nation to the position of an idol, and himself to that of its symbol. He did not speak in the name of a majority or a minority, but as the exponent of the highest national values and traditions, as the conscious heir of the Empire, the Cæsars, and the leaders of the Renaissance. Class warfare was not fought to a finish, but forbidden; the state became umpire in the wage conflict. Marxism and the remains of liberalism were ruthlessly persecuted. Fascism took its stand also against plutocracy, large capital being placed under the strictest state control and forced to accept social measures which the liberal state had never been able to carry through. He crowned his reforms by the reconciliation of Italy with the Papacy, thus uniting a conservative cultural policy with a social economic policy and an imperialist foreign policy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mussolini's work had the same kind of influence upon the international *bourgeoisie* as Lenin's upon the international proletariat. The bourgeois world split into a liberal and a fascist wing. A large part of its youth flocked to fascism, which they declared to represent the true spirit of their generation in contrast with the out-of-date ideals of freedom, liberalism, and democracy. Almost half of all European countries followed more or less closely the Fascist example, which thus showed itself more successful in world revolution than bolshevism. The greatest triumph of world fascism was its The main ideological difference distinguishing it from fascism is that it does not proceed from the cultural idea of the nation, but from the mystic biological conception of the race, from the belief in a common Aryan blood stream, creating a common national body of all Germans which no artificial frontiers can divide. While bolshevism destroys the traditional cultural values of the Western World in order to create a new proletarian form of life and a new world order, and while fascism retains Western cultural values and protects them from destruction, national socialism takes up a position in the middle; from the cultural standpoint it is less revolutionary than bolshevism but less conservative than fascism. It is not atheist, but it is anti-clerical and in part anti-Christian. Its aim is a new world-order under the leadership of the German race, the chosen people of the national socialist gospel. When Germany abandoned democracy, she was the third of the seven world powers to renounce the ideal of freedom. For whatever the differences between bolshevism, national socialism, and fascism, they have a common meeting-ground in the cult and the omnipotence of the state on the one hand and the degradation and impotence of the individual on the other. The counter-attack had been made against the individualist revolution based on enlightenment, freedom, and personality; the state had risen against humanity, and the watchwords equality and order confronted the ideal of freedom. The three great world powers, however, England, the United States, and France, which for a century had carried the banner of freedom, did not capitulate to this revolution of collectivism against humanism. They are determined to maintain the great tradition of personality to which they owe their existence, their freedom, and their culture. They show by their economic and social reforms, as well as by their recent military development, that the democratic idea is not outstripped and outdated, but has sufficient strength and vitality to rule over more than #### THE CRISIS OF FREEDOM half of the world; that the lot of their citizens is in no way inferior to that of the subjects of dictatorships, but that on the contrary their citizens enjoy a whole series of advantages—in the first place, personal freedom and security. Their economic situation, too, is decidedly happier, and this is true not only of the rich and spacious democracies with colonial empires but of small democratic states such as Scandinavia and Switzerland. In face of a contrast thus favourable to democracy, there can be no talk of a world triumph for the ideal of a totalitarian state. It cannot be gainsaid that there is to-day a crisis of freedom, but the issue of this crisis is undecided. For the crisis of democracy is matched by an equally grave crisis of dictatorship. The democratic powers are still stronger and richer than the totalitarian powers. They are still ready to recruit and fight for their ideals. Faith in personality and freedom is still a living faith on both sides of the Atlantic—in England as in the days of the glorious Revolution, in America as in the days of the War of Independence, in France as in the days of the great Revolution. This ideological world struggle transcends military and political alliances. Three world powers preserve the tradition of freedom against three other world powers who have abandoned it. Again Sparta and Athens confront each other. The totalitarian state confronts the totalitarian man. # Chapter VII #### THE TOTALITARIAN STATE The totalitarian state of the twentieth century is the child of the civil war between the *bourgeoisie* and the proletariat. It is therefore in its essence a military state, which only secures internal freedom and suppresses its defeated adversaries through a continual military occupation of the country. Bolshevism was the product of the struggle with capitalism, fascism of the struggle with Marxism. Their parties are civil war armies. Even after their victory they have maintained their military character in order, if necessity arises, to defend their party state vi et armis against any attempt to overthrow it. They cannot demobilise so long as there is any danger that the class war will flare up anew, in Russia through a bourgeois attempt at restoration, in Germany and Italy through a Marxist rising. To justify the totalitarian state within the country permanent mobilisation against the internal enemy is, however, not sufficient. The whole nation must continuously feel itself threatened by external enemies if it is to conceive the necessity for a dictatorship. A permanent war psychosis must summon all national forces to defend the threatened state, and thereby determine all patriots without exception to #### THE TOTALITARIAN STATE place themselves with one set purpose behind the leadership of the state, even if they disapprove of its internal policy. From earliest childhood all thoughts and wishes must be directed to war and the defence of the threatened fatherland. Only thus is it possible to lead the individual to sacrifice his claim to personal freedom upon the altar of the nation. The totalitarian state as a military state becomes a single camp of barracks. The dictator becomes fieldmarshal of the nation with that absolute dictatorial power which is necessary in war. The outbreak of war is not in the interest of the totalitarian state, although it has a start over nontotalitarian states. It runs the risk of breaking into pieces in the moment of defeat, like the empires of Napoleon I and Napoleon III. What it requires as its vital element is a warlike foreign policy, a permanent atmosphere of war without war, the kind of condition which has prevailed in Europe since the World War. An organised permanent peace would deprive it of the better part of its *raison d'être*, and therefore it must be militarist, imperialist, and anti-pacifist. This moral state of war leads to a war economy. In order to be economically equipped for war, the totalitarian state must produce as much as possible in its own country. It must therefore be in favour of autarky and opposed to free trade, which implies dependence upon foreign countries. The economic is thus a necessary consequence of the political state of war. Military requirements must take precedence of social requirements. • • • • • The permanent state of war in which the totalitarian state lives internally and externally determines its political ethic. The supreme law is the determination to maintain and enhance the power of the state, the state party, and the dictator. Machiavellianism is the declared state ethic of the totalitarian state. The conceptions good and evil are replaced by the categories advantageous and injurious for the party and the state. Here again the moral state of war prevails; the end justifies the means. Justice is replaced by discipline, freedom by authority, and conscience by obedience. Every man must obey those above him and give orders to those below him. Opposition is mutiny, criticism is treachery. The man who places his honour above the interest of the state and his conscience above the party is a criminal. What for a gentleman, for the totalitarian man, is the lowest form of conduct, to give up a friend to the state, to denounce him, becomes his most sacred duty. For every good patriot is a volunteer police reservist in the totalitarian state; the most detestable deed which is performed for its sake is transfigured and beautified. #### THE TOTALITARIAN STATE All duties of the individual to God, to his neighbour, and to his own soul pale into insignificance before his duty to the deified state. Because the totalitarian state is a war state it requires a unification of powers. This signifies a return to the most primitive form of the state, in which all powers are united in one hand, in the hand of the chief, who is at one and the same time war-lord and high priest, judge and law-giver, head of the administration and the police, master of the property of his subjects and of their consciences. As culture and civilisation grow this state power is divided, as the original cell is divided in the course of development. The church is separated from the state, and private from state economy; the executive is separated from the legislature, and there come into existence an independent judiciary, free science, and free art. This separation of powers secures the individual's personal freedom; private property, as well as freedom of conscience, an independent judiciary and legislature, free art, and free science are all bulwarks of personality. By the unification of all these powers in one hand the totalitarian state of our days annuls all these forms of liberty, and therewith reverts to the primitive form of the earliest military state. It suppresses free private economy and liberty of conscience, unites in the hand of the ruling party and its leader the executive, the legislature and the judiciary, and tolerates no free art or science, but places them under the control of the state. Thus the free atmosphere necessary for the unfolding of personality disappears. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The totalitarian state is omnipotent in all spheres. It is lord of the private possessions of its subjects, which it can either ban or confiscate at any time. It is lord of their consciences. It brooks no law which limits the arbitrary nature of its power over subjects in opposition, and no judge who places right above the state. Science, too, becomes the handmaid of the state. It may criticise neither the state's Weltanschauung, nor its economic system, nor its politics, nor its ethic, but is bound in duty to justify and defend them by every means. Statistical science is bound in duty to publish only such figures as serve the interest of the state. Should it reach other results, it must suppress, veil, or falsify them in favour of the state. Art becomes an instrument of national propaganda, and may develop only in the direction which pleases the state. Thus the totalitarian state becomes lord with unlimited powers over all spheres of life; it recognises no private sphere, because the whole life and work of its subjects belong to the public sphere. The ideal of personal freedom is extinguished. #### THE TOTALITARIAN STATE Hitherto every state has had four tasks: to protect men against their fellow men; to protect the state against men; to protect the state against other states; to protect men against the state. The totalitarian state has suppressed the fourth task, for when the right of the individual conflicts with that of the state it is forfeited. For this reason the state may in the public interest kill, torture, plunder, imprison, or banish the individual without proving his guilt, for there are only state rights and no human rights. Human rights are a liberal illusion overridden by the totalitarian state. All right and all might lie in the state, and the individual human being is therefore rightless and mightless. The totalitarian state regards itself as trustee for the individual rights of its subjects, over which it has sovereign power of administration, as a bank has over the deposits of its clients, but it tolerates neither a withdrawal of the deposits nor a control over them, because it demands unlimited trust regarding their rightful disposition. The totalitarian state regards itself less as a representative of the individual interests of its subjects than as guardian of a mission for which it is prepared if necessary to sacrifice those individual interests. This state mission is based in Russia on the class ideal, in Germany on the racial ideal, and in Italy on the national ideal. G The structure of the totalitarian state is the one-party regime. Every democratic constitution is capable of being converted at a stroke into a totalitarian system if only one party has the monopoly of government and all others are forbidden. It makes, therefore, not the slightest difference whether general elections are held in Germany and Russia or not, for once there is only one leading party real power lies not in constitutional bodies, the meetings of which become theatrical performances, but in the management of the state party. It is a matter of indifference who is elected to parliament. The only thing that matters is who belongs to the party executive; the democratic constitution becomes a façade even when it is supported by a genuine majority of the people. A state founded on personality differs from the totalitarian state not so much in the composition of the government party as in the position of the opposition. Where there is opposition there is no totalitarianism. Where there is totalitarianism there is no opposition. The principle of opposition is in a democratic state what the principle of competition is in private economy—a standing control and a spur to better performance. In the totalitarian state the democratic organ of control represented by the opposition is lacking. The leadership of the state is exposed neither to parliamentary nor to journalistic criticism, nor to the danger of overthrow in new elections. Since the leaders of the state parties are men and #### THE TOTALITARIAN STATE not angels, they are seriously tempted to abuse their unlimited power. This leads to arbitrariness and injustice, to favouritism and corruption, even when these leaders are men of outstanding morality. But if a ruthless criminal nature is at the head of the state party, the nation which it governs is poisoned and infected in its very roots until it is rescued from its tyrant by an attempt on his life, by a revolution, or by a coup d'état. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The state party must carry on the same struggle internally to prevent the emergence within its own ranks of opposition groups which will destroy its unity. For this reason the state party must be constructed in accordance with the principle of military leadership. This principle of leadership can rest only upon personal authority or ruthless power. The personal authority of Lenin and Mussolini was always so great that no one dared to form opposition groups. It is well enough known with what Draconic violence Hitler and Stalin have exterminated party opposition in order to maintain party unity, for so soon as the state party splits, an opposition is born and the totalitarian state is dead; with the opposition appear criticism and discussion; there is an end of dictation, and negotiation has taken its place. The necessity for the authority of a leader is a burden upon the future of the totalitarian state. So long as the founder generation of the state party is living the question of succession to the leader is soluble, for there will always be men of revolutionary *élan*, with a certain authority in the party which they have helped to create. In the second generation the solution of the problem is more difficult. Under the democratic system of free competition future party leaders are developed in the struggle with the opposition. In a state conducted by a Fuehrer or leader the man who #### THE TOTALITARIAN STATE is most successful in enlisting the favour of the leader has the best chance of succeeding him, and for this, diplomatic qualities are more useful than qualities of leadership. But if the successor lacks the authority of his predecessor, opposition breaks out and totalitarianism is at an end. To obviate this danger state parties seek to elect an élite from the coming generation and breed them as future leaders; for in the second generation membership of the party is not the expression of a conviction, but the consequence of the existing disposition of forces, and in consequence the choice of a leader must be determined by other considerations than subscription to the party. The totalitarian state has much greater need of leaders with personality than a democracy, since its whole existence depends on the efficiency of a leader who cannot be deposed. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . No atmosphere is less adapted to breeding personalities capable of being leaders than the totalitarian state. You cannot at one and the same time crush human personality and educate it. Successful dictators must be strong, independent and self-willed natures. Such characters need for their education and development freedom, struggle and opposition. It is just such personalities who cannot fit into a dictatorship uncritically or flatter the whims of a dictator; you cannot make a personality out of a man who has no personality, or a master At all times the strongest and best elements of youth are in opposition to the older generation, but most of all under dictatorships, when weak natures seek union with power while strong natures oppose it. Had Lenin grown up in a communist and Mussolini in a fascist party state, they would certainly not have been prize pupils of the party youth, but respectively an anti-bolshevist and an anti-fascist. The totalitarian state will not find the future leaders which it seeks and needs because it kills that freedom which is the one breeding ground of personality. Should a personality, the fine growth of a totalitarian man, be developed by some chance miracle on the stony ground of a totalitarian state, he will not inherit the dictatorship, but overthrow it —in the name of freedom and humanity. Thus the question of the future of dictatorship remains a question without an answer. # Chapter VIII # THE SCALE OF STATE THE totalitarian state is an extreme reached in only one case, namely the Soviet Union. It alone embraces all three of the dimensions in which the life of man functions—politics, intellect, economy. A perfectly totalitarian state must refuse to recognise not only any political freedom, but also any freedom of conscience and any private property. Freedom of conscience is pre-eminently a liberal and individualist principle, wrung from the feudal and absolute state after centuries of strife. Private property is pre-eminently a liberal and individualist principle, a bulwark of personal freedom and private security against the omnipotence of the totalitarian state. Whoever, therefore, after full deliberation demands a totalitarian state must be intolerant and communistic. He can be satisfied neither with national socialism and its private economy, nor with fascism and its toleration. He must go to Moscow to experience the totalitarian state in all its purity—the political, intellectual and economic dictatorship which leaves no man with a private or personal sphere as an asylum from it. Compared with the Bolshevist state economy, the private economies of Germany and Italy are liberal. Compared with the religious intolerance of bolshevism and national socialism, the religious toleration of fascism is liberal. National socialism and fascism are bridges between the Bolshevist coercive state and the Anglo-Saxon free state, lying between these extremes in the relationship which they establish between men and the state. A convinced Fascist can with a good conscience be a believing Christian and an efficient capitalist. A convinced National Socialist can with a good conscience be an efficient capitalist, but not a believing Christian. A convinced Bolshevist can with a good conscience be neither a believing Christian nor an efficient capitalist. For the totalitarianism of fascism is of one dimension; it is limited to politics, while extensive liberty prevails in questions of conscience and economics. The totalitarianism of national socialism is of two dimensions; it embraces a man's Weltan-schauung as well as his political views, while maintaining a system of private economy. The totalitarianism of bolshevism is of three dimensions. It dominates politics, *Weltanschauung*, and economics. In spite of all the points in which they are related, there are great differences among these three systems. They constitute a group only on the political plane. On the economic plane Germany and Italy belong to the capitalist world, like France and the Anglo-Saxon powers. On the cultural plane Italy belongs to Western civilisation, like France and the Anglo-Saxons, while on the other hand not only Russia but also Germany have detached themselves from the three foundations of Western civilisation—a classical education, a Christian philosophy of life, and a chivalrous outlook. These differences as between the three totalitarian systems are not rigid. On the contrary fascism shows a growing tendency to convert its private economy into state capitalism, and thus more nearly approach the Russian economy, and a further tendency lately to adopt the National Socialist *Weltanschauung* by imitating its racial creed. Thus the points of difference between the three systems steadily diminish, while their common ideological opposition to the Western democracies increases. . . . . . . The Bolshevist and National Socialist states are each the representation of a *Weltanschauung* or philosophy of life. Bolshevism is not only a state and a trust, but the fourth world religion, alongside Buddhism, Christianity and Islamism. The number of its believers in the world as a whole must be almost equal to the number of Mohammedans. For this great aim bolshevism fights with intellect and violence, with propaganda and terror. The church of this new world religion is the Communist International, and its head Stalin. The founder of the Bolshevist religion is Lenin and his forerunner Marx. Trotskyism was its first schism, countered by heresy trials and an inquisition. The Soviet Union is nothing but a clerical state of this Bolshevist church, sustained by the Russian nation in the same way as early Mohammedanism was by the Arabs. As the party is a function of its Weltanschau- ung and the state a function of the party, so is the Soviet economy a function of the Soviet state. The first attempt of the Soviet Union to establish a communist economy failed. Its place was taken by state-capitalism, which works with capitalist methods but has converted the whole state into one gigantic trust. This trust, which for practical purposes is in the hands of the Communist party of Russia and its general secretary, Stalin, is incomparably richer than all the private trusts of America. For it embraces one-sixth of the inhabited world, with invaluable resources above and under the earth, with over one hundred million workmen, with factories, railways, rivers, cities of millions of inhabitants, and a climate extending from the North Pole to Turkestan capable of producing everything man wants for his living. In this land of riches the human beings are poor as beggars and may possess only a minimum of private property so as not to encroach upon the omnipotence of state capitalism. Thus one hundred and seventy million human beings live as beneficiaries and employees and semi-slaves of this gigantic trust, in complete and unconditional dependence on their state, their party, and their dictator, Stalin. While the kernel of the Bolshevist outlook on the world is a national economic one, the kernel of the National Socialist outlook is biological. Its centre of gravity is not to be found in the idea of class, but in the idea of race. The final and the highest aim of the National Socialist party and its country is the cult of the Aryan race, its purity, breeding and domination. Comte Gobineau, a Frenchman, and Houston Stewart Chamberlain, an Englishman, were the forerunners of this Weltanschauung. Alfred Rosenberg is its theorist, and Adolf Hitler its prophet. This faith rests on a biological legend. According to this legend humanity constitutes a hierarchy of races in which the lowest rank is held by the black man, who is a link with the anthropoid apes and the animal world. The highest rank is incorporated in the fairest-haired man, the blonde man, the Aryan. All other races are mongrels, intermediate ranks between these two extremes. Thus the Nordic blond, blue-eyed man comes to be creation's crown, the possession of all great qualities of mind and character, the creator of all works of art, all inventions, and all types of culture. This Nordic super-race appeared thousands of years ago in Western Asia to found the Indian and Persian civilisations; it created the art and philosophy of Greece and the Roman Empire. By mingling with dark and inferior races it degenerated, and with it degenerated ancient civilisation, until the mass migrations carried to the West a fresh unmixed stream of Aryan blood, which seized power, renewed the European race and created a new order. Thus civilisation blossomed anew in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Even then it was not possible to maintain Aryan blood in its purity; again it mingled with darker and poorer blood which to-day threatens our civilisation with chaos and disaster. At this turning-point in the history of the world we are to suppose that the National Socialist Weltanschauung resuscitated Aryan consciousness, and thereby saved civilisation from the fate of late antiquity. Its aim is to breed Aryan German blood in the greatest purity in order that it can fulfil its eternal mission to ennoble, to put in order, and to dominate the world. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . This race belief is a falsification of anthropological and historical facts. When the cultural achievements of the Nordic race, which to-day stands in the person of the Anglo-Saxons at the head of humanity, are recognised to the full, it remains probable that the non-Nordic races of Western Asia and North Africa were the creators of our civilisation. Even the Greeks, and in particular the Athenians, who according to Herodotus were of Pelasgian origin, were the result of a cross between the dark inhabitants of the Mediterranean and Nordic immigrants. The greatest cultural achievements of Europe were the work of men and peoples produced by a cross between Nordic and Mediterranean, blond and dark elements of blood. The great civilisations of Eastern Asia, with their heroes, their saints, their wise men, and their geniuses, betray scarcely a trace of a Nordic admixture of blood, so that it is absolutely childish to speak as if the Nordic race had a monopoly of civilisation. At the same time the attractiveness and effectiveness of this teaching in Germany are great, because it presents every German with a patent of nobility, a great tradition, and a great mission. As a first step in this Aryan mission to renew the world, the National Socialist Weltanschauung proclaims the suppression of Jewry, identified with bolshevism on the one hand and capitalism on the other. In maintaining such a paradoxical thesis, this teaching will not allow itself to be led astray by the facts that Lenin was a Russian and that Stalin is a Georgian, while only in isolated instances are Jews at the head of the Soviet Union, and that on the other hand American capitalism, which is the leading capitalism in the world, is almost exclusively in Anglo-Saxon hands. In defiance of these facts, national socialism declares that the Jewish race is the adversary and rival of the Aryan race, and that a fanatical hatred of Jews is the categorical imperative of national socialism. Holding this thesis and making this demand, national socialism came into conflict with the Christian Church, since it slanders the Jewish blood of its founder and redeemer, of his Holy Mother, and of all his apostles and disciples, and thus is blasphemous in the eyes of Christianity. Its demand for the extirpation of every trace of Jewish mind does not stop with the philosophy of Spinoza, psycho-analysis and the theory of relativity, but turns even against the Old and New Testaments because of their Jewish authors. Thus a struggle of life and death begins between the National Socialist and the Christian Weltanschauung, the ethical and dogmatic teachings of which are irreconcilable. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Both the Bolshevist and the National Socialist Weltanschauung are imperialistic. Their aim is to create a new world order by violent means. Bolshevism desires to use the enormous income of its state trust, which can be arbitrarily increased without limit at the cost of the standard of living, to obtain the military and propagandist means to carry out the world revolution. Reposing upon this military power, upon the world propaganda of the Third International, upon the discontent of the working classes and the hatred of suppressed colonial peoples, it desires to link the whole world to the Soviet Union after a bath of blood such as has never been seen in order to have a unified government over a communist world federation in accordance with the ideas of Lenin. National socialism strives to secure the world domination of the Nordic race over the Roman peoples, Slavs, Semites, and all coloured peoples. It sees biologically equal partners of the Germans only in the Germanic stocks of the Anglo-Saxons, the Scandinavians and the Netherlanders, while in its In any case the execution of the political world plans of bolshevism and national socialism is to be completely unrestrained by the moral concepts of Christianity or chivalry, obeying merely the dictates of an inexorable will for power and the law of the survival of the fittest—without regard to human life or human sufferings. For both doctrines are fanatically anti-pacifist and terrorist; their theoretical concepts are not drawn from saints or philosophers, #### THE SCALE OF STATE TOTALITARIANISM but from natural science and the animal world. They are not human but animal. In contrast with both these philosophic outlooks fascism does not set up to be a religion, but rather a political method. It rejects the Bolshevist domination of class just as it rejects the National Socialist domination of race. Its object is a strong Italy based on the capitalist economic system and Western civilisation, free from Bolshevist influence and from the unstable equilibrium of a parliamentary system poisoned by class warfare. To this end, when Mussolini saw the body of the Italian people threatened with Bolshevist infection, he inoculated it with Bolshevist poison to immunise it against further infection. To protect it against bolshevism he adopted a series of Bolshevist methods in smaller doses; opposition to the parliamentary system and to liberalism, terror, police domination, restriction of personal freedom, unrestrained propaganda, prohibition of opposition and criticism, party tyranny, and dictatorship. Only history will be able to judge of the eventual result of this dangerous experiment, but it is not too early to-day to say that a Fascist Italy, so far as human freedom and personality are concerned, is unquestionably preferable to a Bolshevist Italy; in н 113 a Bolshevist world a Fascist state would be an asylum for personality and freedom. In the same way the idea of freedom would make a decided advance if the National Socialist regime of Germany were to abandon its original Aryan world mission and be converted into a fascist state within the framework of Western civilisation. All these concepts are relative; perhaps there will some day be a form of state in comparison with which even Bolshevism would appear liberal, and if to-day a knight of the Middle Ages after five hundred years of sleep were to awake as an English lord, he would be convinced that his free country had been converted into a state of an inconceivably totalitarian nature. Thus Italy regarded from the French and English perspective is totalitarian, but from the German and Russian perspective liberal. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A knowledge of history has taught Mussolini that the strongest dictatorships are only short-lived and transitory phenomena. On the other side he saw a return to a liberal parliamentary system blocked so long as parliament remained an arena of class warfare and so long as there was a danger that Marxism, financed by the Third International, could acquire a parliamentary majority and carry out the social revolution by democratic methods. Thus Mussolini made up his mind to build the Fascist party dictatorship on an entirely new system—that of the corporative state. This corporative state constitutes a partial return to democracy and the electoral system, but the new chamber is divided, not according to ideological standpoints, but according to economic professional interests. Thus national economic questions are worked out by a body of experts instead of amateurs and bureaucrats, by practical men instead of theorists. Politically the state, based on callings and professions, crowned the Fascist anti-Marxist war by means of a new representation of the people which excludes the possibility of the dispossessed obtaining a majority over the possessors, or the working men a majority over townsfolk and peasants, even if increasing industrialism should result in a proletarian popular majority which submitted to Marxist propaganda. The possibility of carrying out the social revolution by parliamentary means disappears; the unstable equilibrium of the parliamentary state is replaced by the stable equilibrium of the corporative state. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The corporative state is not so much an expression of totalitarianism as an attempt to obviate it by new methods, for it rests on the idea of the democratic self-administration of the individual branches of the national economy within the framework of the state. It constitutes one stage in the great liberal line of Only the circumstance that the corporative system appeared in Fascist territory exposes it to the hate of democracies. Had England converted its Upper House into a chamber representative of callings and professions, this would have been hailed throughout the world of democracy as a triumph for the democratic idea, for the Fascist chamber of this character is undoubtedly more democratic in its construction than the British Upper House. Most opponents and critics of the corporative system fail to perceive that one of its roots is the syndicalism of Sorel, who exercised a great influence upon the intellectual and political development of Mussolini and does not represent a movement of the Right but rather a movement of the extreme Left—so far as the descriptions "Right" and "Left" have any sense whatever to-day. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . This kind of state is not yet a success, but rather an experiment of fundamental significance for the whole world, for it is still living completely in the shadow and under the guardianship of the Fascist party dictatorship. For this reason it is questionable whether and how far it can take over the heritage of the democratic parliament. The necessary condition for the functioning of such a state is a strong and authoritative government to act as umpire between the various interests, in all conflicts of interest between employers and employees, between industry and agriculture. At all times and in every case it represents the interests of the state as opposed to the special interests of callings and professions. There is no objective criterion for the composition of the corporative chamber and the distribution of portfolios. In this matter the authoritarian state must take an arbitrary decision and abide by this decision until it has had time to become a tradition. For institutions as well as men acquire dignity and authority through survival; even obedience conforms to the law of habit. At first, however, the chamber must feel that it reposes upon a stable and authoritarian administration, which is not the product of a compromise between professional creeds but rooted in the policy of the state. In Italy this political court is the Fascist Council, while in Portugal, Salazer is the author of a significant attempt to make a democratic chamber, not exposed to the fluctuations of class warfare, act as a political counterpart of the corporative chamber. In such a two chamber system the house representative of professions fulfils the same conservative functions as are to-day fulfilled by the British Upper House in relation to the Lower. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . It is a widespread democratic delusion that every nation has at all times a free choice between democracy and dictatorship, between freedom and state totalitarianism; that individual nations have submitted to dictatorships in pure blindness without sufficient cause; that all dictators are ambitious scoundrels who stifle the freedom of their fellow subjects out of cæsaro-mania. This childish attitude overlooks the fact that there are occasions in the life of the state when the subtle and complicated apparatus of democracy just ceases to function, and must be replaced by more robust methods of government, in the same way as a motorist crossing Africa must be prepared to allow himself to be towed out of a swamp by a buffalo cart because his car, though technically an incomparably better instrument, can more easily stick in such a bog. Such an occasion arises so soon as opposed and irreconcilable attitudes regarding the state's functions fight for ascendancy with approximately equal strength. The ideal conditions for a democratic regime exist when the ruling parties both of the government and the opposition are agreed on the fundamental aims and forms of politics, economics, and culture, as was the case in England with Whigs and Tories, and is to-day the case in the United States with Republicans and Democrats. In such cases the state has two groups of leaders who take turn and turn about in the roles of government and loyal opposition. This ideal system becomes untenable when the government party believes, let us say, in private property and liberty while an opposition of approximately the same strength believes in communism and dictatorship. For the continued maintenance of democracy would then signify that private property would be converted into public ownership by the communist majority in one parliament and again restored to private ownership by the bourgeois majority in the next—a grotesque and impossible conception, all the more in that the Bolshevists are notoriously determined, having once seized power, not to relinquish it of their own free will. When this case occurs in any democracy it is certain that before the election, the result of which is to determine the future of private property, religion and culture, almost all bourgeois democrats who to-day contest and despise Fascism would join its ranks with banners flying to obviate the greater danger of a Bolshevist dictatorship, since their form of life, their property and their religion rank higher with them than the principle of democracy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Austria was a typical example of such an enforced choice. This nation, with its democratic outlook and progressive leaders, was compelled to turn its back on parliamentary government because a totalitarian party had gone a long way with foreign help and foreign means to capture public opinion, and there was a danger that general elections held under the influence of this National Socialist movement would have destroyed Austrian independence and religious freedom. For this reason the Chancellor, Dollfuss, determined to break with parliamentary democracy and set up a "Ständestaat", or corporative state, which rejected the totalitarian ideology in principle and was incomparably more liberal than the system to which democratic elections would perhaps have led. A few years later King Carol of Rumania found himself in a similar position, forced to make a breach with the parliamentary system in order to protect his country from an anti-democratic party. These examples show that democracy and freedom are not always united, and that there may be times and conditions in which a people or a statesman must determine whether the principle of democracy is to rank higher than the idea of freedom. Fortunate peoples who have not to face such conflicts and make such decisions may rejoice in their democratic freedom, but should not too hastily judge less fortunate nations who have to find their way out of a political cul-de-sac—choosing between greater and lesser evils. . . . . . . . . If we pursue this train of thought to its conclusion, we must find it absurd that devotees of democracy and fascism to-day recommend their system to the world as a panacea instead of recognising that different conditions lead to different consequences. The system of the plebiscite, which has proved its worth in the objective and critical democracy of Switzerland, with its high degree of popular education and its democratic tradition, would necessarily lead to demagogic catastrophes in more passionate and imaginative nations. In the same way, the success of the parliamentary system in the cool atmosphere of England and Scandinavia is far from being proof that this system must necessarily work in other climates. It is therefore senseless to set neighbouring peoples at variance on the ground of the differences between their constitutions, instead of taking the standpoint that every state should seek for itself to find the methods which best suit its political outlook. It may be freely admitted that this toleration has a limit when constitutions are merely the expression of an aggressive Weltanschauung, the object of which is the destruction or the enslaving of neighbouring civilisations or peoples. Then we are concerned no longer with constitutional questions but with questions of life and death which necessarily lead to a defensive coalition among the states which are menaced. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . From this analysis of the totalitarian systems it emerges that there are great differences of degree and principle between them. The same differences exist also between democratic states. Among the parliamentary world powers Japan with its worship of the Emperor, its warrior state, and its state socialistic tendencies, stands between the totalitarian and the liberal states. Among the three liberal world powers France with its universal military service, compulsory education, and centralised bureaucracy, is nearest to the totalitarian principle, while both the Anglo-Saxon countries incorporate the extreme of liberalism. But even in these two countries the strength of liberalism is not equally great, inasmuch as the tendency to assimilation in the United States discloses many collective traits from which England is free. #### THE SCALE OF STATE TOTALITARIANISM England thus stands at the head of all free states, the extreme Antipodes to a completely totalitarian Russia—Russia as the extreme incorporation of state totalitarianism and England as its strongest negation, England as the extreme incorporation of personal freedom and Russia as its strongest negation. The scale of the world powers from collective state to personality state runs: Russia, Germany, Italy, Japan, France, America, England. This scale leads from the totalitarian to the liberal ideology: from the Russian idea of the omnipotent state to the British idea of the free man; from the Russian idea of collectivism to the British idea of individualism; from the Russian ideal of equality to the British ideal of freedom; from the Russian idea of revolution to the British idea of tradition; from the Russian ideal of the revolutionary intellectual to the British ideal of the gentleman. Mankind stands to-day before this grave and clear decision, whether to take the Russian or the British path, the path of the totalitarian state or the path of the totalitarian man. # Chapter IX #### TOTALITARIAN MAN NIETZSCHE was right in completing the question "Whence freedom?" with the question "Wherefore freedom?" For all freedom and all politics become devoid of sense if they are not sustained and justified through the human ideal which they serve. Economic policy is never more than a means; its end is cultural policy. The cultural ideal of bolshevism is that of a swarm of ants which destroys everything in its path, to construct its totalitarian edifice out of the ruins. The cultural ideal of national socialism, the studied breeding of Nordic man and his domination of the globe, is borrowed not from insects but from mammals. The cultural ideal of the Western world is the totalitarian man, the complete personality, whose freedom is only limited by the claim of his fellow men to freedom. This Western ideal reposes on three historical foundations, antiquity, Christianity, chivalry. Greece created the world of antiquity, Jews created Christianity, and Germanic peoples created chivalry. The ideal of antiquity was personality, freedom, harmony. #### TOTALITARIAN MAN The ideal of Christianity was holiness, the father-hood of God, love of one's neighbour. The ideal of chivalry was courage, loyalty, honour. The ideal of chivalry was the result of a synthesis of Christian and heathen values. After the mass migrations, when the Frankish, Saxon, Gothic, Lombard, German, Burgundian, and Norman warriors accepted Christianity, they did not abandon their Germanic ethic of courage, loyalty, and honour, but sought to transfigure, fulfil, and complete it with Christian ideals. Thus the ideal of chivalry came into existence as a mediæval vision of totalitarian man. Chivalry demands the greatest force in perfect form; loyalty towards one's liege, one's friend, and one's ally; childlike submission to God and fate, courage in face of the enemy and in misfortune, politeness and consideration for women, readiness to help the poor, the widow, and the orphan, respect for age, magnanimity towards the defeated, relentlessness in defence of one's own honour and respect for the honour of others, truthfulness and pride in all circumstances, self-control and strict self-discipline. Thus chivalry crystallised in the keeps and castles of all parts of Europe and received its final polish in the wars between Crusaders and Saracens. The legend of Richard Coeur de Lion, who saw the Sultan Saladin's war horse fall with him in the battle for Jerusalem and sent his best charger to his adversary, still stirs our hearts as representing the essence of the chivalrous spirit. The belief that honour ranks higher than life, not only one's own honour, but the honour of an honoured lady, lends to chivalry a superhuman gleam which still to-day casts its rays upon us. The order of chivalry disappeared, but chivalry remained. The European nobility of all nations has kept it alive until our own days from generation to generation through all the centuries as a most precious legacy of its great age. The nobility lost its political power first to the kings and then to the common people. It retained, however, its social power, and remained the finest flower of the social hierarchy. Thus its form of life was effective not through coercion but through snobbery and the example it afforded for the imitation of the aspiring bourgeoisie. Chivalrous values and forms, so far as they were not inseparable from the order of chivalry, were accepted by the *bourgeoisie*. There came into existence a *bourgeois* style of life with a chivalrous stamp. Here again England led the world, gradually creating out of the elements of chivalry a totalitarian human ideal adapted to *bourgeois* life—the gentleman. The ideal of the gentleman is the essence of Western humanity because it unites the Germanic heathen and the Christian values, the synthesis of which constituted chivalry, with the English human ideal of the stoic sage. Here the strong influence of #### TOTALITARIAN MAN the Renaissance and of Humanism on English schools and universities came into play. The stoic ideal of the common people of the ancient world became, by reason of its affinity, the philosophic complement of the mediæval ideal of chivalry. A new vision of man appeared, founded on honour and conscience, form and conduct, on the harmony of body and soul, mind and character; the Attic *kalokagathia* is reborn in modern England. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The ideal of the gentleman is totalitarian because it embraces the whole man in his three dimensions, body, character, and mind. It purports to produce no athletes, no saints, no geniuses, but developed men. It is at one and the same time an ideal of honour and of form. A man of honour without form is far from being a gentleman, and a man perfect in form who is not a man of honour cannot be a gentleman. The totalitarianism of the gentleman can only result from the combination. Gentleman means literally "gentle man"—a man of culture as opposed to a savage, a barbarian, a rowdy, a gangster. Tenderness is just as much his essential quality as strength. He is not only brave but also polite, not only sincere but also tactful, not only honourable but also amiable. He attaches value not only to a clean heart but also to a clean shirt. He respects his fellow men as he would himself be respected, and therefore he is careful not to put his fellow-men's nerves on edge through his conduct, and not to offend against good taste. Here is the root of that so-called etiquette which makes up the ritual of the world community of gentlemen. For the gentleman tact of the heart takes precedence of all codified rules of etiquette, the best example of which is the story of the English king who, when acting as host to an exotic prince, drank the water in his finger bowl when he saw that his guest, in ignorance of its purpose, was sipping from it. Thus on an ultimate analysis the ritual of the gentleman, apparently so complicated, rests upon the simple behests of fellow feeling and good taste. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . As the inheritor of stoic wisdom, the gentleman exhibits extreme patience and self-control. He will not be hurried but always maintains his deportment. This attitude of life is in keeping with the philosophy of Seneca and Marcus Aurelius—imperturbability of the soul in sorrow or joy, in pain and pleasure, the belief that self-perfection is a higher aim than enjoyment, and that a courageous and cheerful soul can master not only the pains of life but the fear of death. It is thanks to this stoic attitude towards life that the modern Briton so much resembles the classic #### TOTALITARIAN MAN Roman, who became master of the world of antiquity by virtue of that same style of life and conduct which has made the Englishman the master of his empire and the highest type of the Western world. Both have recognised that world mastery begins with self-mastery, and that only he can secure and maintain authority who is stricter with himself than with others. Thus the British Empire rests not only upon power but also upon authority. The ideal of the gentleman is a substitute for armies of millions. It is the greatest and most precious of all the products which England manufactures and exports, for it has become, far beyond the boundaries of the Western world, the ideal of the modern man and the symbol of the British place in the world. In his attitude towards women the gentleman is distinguished from the ancient Roman who, like the Greek and the Oriental, saw in the female sex an inferior kind of men. It was chivalry which, uniting the Christian worship of Mary with the high social standing of women among the ancient Germans, brought about a re-estimation of the values of antiquity. In the eyes of the knight a woman is a finer and purer being than a man, whose physical superiority imposes upon him the moral duty to honour and protect a woman. This heritage from chivalry has remained a living I thing for the gentleman, who is always a degree more polite and considerate to a woman than to a man. He sees in every woman a being who resembles his mother and to whom he owes a part of that respect which he feels for his mother. This chivalrous attitude teaches that nothing lowers a man so much as rudeness and inconsideration towards an unprotected woman, and that nothing more ennobles him than readiness to fight for a woman's honour and security. With this cult of women, chivalry created an ideal of woman—the lady. In the Middle Ages she was the counterpart of the knight, and to-day she is the counterpart of the gentleman. Just as the gentleman is the epitome of all manly virtues, so is the lady the epitome of all womanly virtues. She unites moral with æsthetic values. A woman may have a heart of gold and the character of a jewel; if she is unwashed, or even if she only goes about with dirty finger nails, she can be no lady. For her mission is to be a symbol of perfection and the handmaid of propriety, form, and beauty. If fortune and favour have denied her external beauty, she can specially perfect her inner beauty and become the protectress of æsthetic values. This is what Goethe meant in "Tasso": "Willst Du genau erfahren, was sich ziemt, so frage nur bei edlen Frauen an." In this sense the culture of the gentleman is unthinkable without the concept of the lady as its complement and counterpart. 1 "Wouldst thou know what is seemly, ask only noble women." #### TOTALITARIAN MAN The gentleman is chivalrous not only towards In personal, political, and social warfare he employs only honourable weapons, and respects fair play as the supreme law. He would rather risk defeat than win a certain victory with poisoned weapons. He rejects the principle that the end hallows the means, and believes on the contrary that unworthy means will soil the purest end. He keeps his word when no one can hold him to it even though his action involves the gravest sacrifice—this for the sake of his honour. He has no hatred for his adversary, but respects him when he fights with the same honourable weapons as he himself employs. Thus the gentleman appears as a chivalrous adversary, a loyal friend and reliable partner, and a pleasant fellow man. The best educator of the gentleman is sport, for it demands the same chivalrous attitude as did the tournament—self-control, strictest observance of the rules, and absolute justice and impartiality on the part of the umpire. The genuine sportsman rejoices without envy when his adversary scores a fine and deserved success, indeed almost as much as when he has himself succeeded. After the fight the adversaries shake hands as a sign of mutual esteem and appreciation. The sportsman learns to win without boasting and to lose without resentfulness. He learns that loyal observance of the rules is more important than victory, and that it is better to lose with honour than to win with the loss of honour. To-day, therefore, the playing-field is one of the most important schools for the gentleman, as the tournament field was once the most important school of chivalry. It is no accident that England is at one and the same time the home of modern sport and of the conception of the gentleman; the two things go together. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The continent has adopted sport from England as an element in popular education, but not always in the spirit of the gentleman ideal. In many countries sport is regarded as an element in the training of the body but not in the formation of character, as a preparation for military but not for political training. And yet the educational importance of sport as opposed to that of gymnastics differs in this, that it serves to build character as much as physique. The continental system of education has been guilty of serious neglect just in this respect. It does not consciously breed the young generation to be gentlemen, as the British system does; a clear human ideal as the aim and standard in the formation of personality is lacking. Thus it comes about that in the young generation a chaos of values has spread; one has learned through the films to see his ideal in the most ruthless gangster, the most unrestrained criminal; another, brought up religiously, sees his ideal in the Christian #### TOTALITARIAN MAN saint who offers his left cheek when he has been struck on the right; a third draws his ideal from sport, the boxer with the large biceps and the small brain; a fourth sees his ideal in the bookworm, with a large library in his head but with flabby limbs and a puffy body. Over against all these fragmentary ideals stands the totalitarian type of the gentleman, who stands with both feet in life and yet thinks and acts justly, courageously, decently, and humanly. His body is trained by sport without injuring the formation of his mind and character. He combines a sound human understanding with idealism, capability with imagination. This ideal of the gentleman requires neither the moral excellence of the saint nor the intellectual excellence of the genius. Any man of average ability and talents can attain an ideal so completely human and so removed from the superhuman. It can therefore serve as a standard of popular education since its values can be understood by any uneducated young human being. The scout movement, which pays homage to this ideal, proves through its worldwide success the effectiveness of its conception. The future of the gentleman ideal is decisive for the future of politics. So long as it is not generally appreciated, most statesmen have no reason to honour the signatures which they have affixed to treaties or to refrain from making electoral promises which they have no intention of fulfilling. Only when this ideal has won its place can demo- cracy repose upon firm and sound foundations. When that day comes, electors will entrust the leadership of their parties and their country only to decent men, men to whom they would readily entrust the administration of their property or the guardianship of their children—in a word "gentlemen". Politics to-day are partly in the hands of gangsters, who take pride in deceiving an adversary, in breaking a treaty, in betraying a friend, in attacking a defenceless man; who think themselves above good and evil, above decent and indecent, above noble and mean, and who just on this account are accorded the admiration of a large proportion of the representatives of public opinion—exactly as if they were successful gangsters of the cinema. So long as this condition of affairs endures, there can be neither assured peace nor assured freedom in Europe. Machiavellianism has brought success to isolated individuals and statesmen, but it has at the same time ruined the world. Only when the simple law of the gentleman becomes the standard for the internal and external policy of states can we surmount that political chaos which necessarily leads to-day to continual revolutions, wars, and dictatorships. • • • • • Because the state is not a creature in itself, but is composed of human beings, its renovation must begin with the renovation of human beings. The #### TOTALITARIAN MAN more the idea of the totalitarian man can prevail, the more must the idea of the totalitarian state fade away. The ideal of the gentleman itself still requires some refinement in the sense of pure humanity. There still clings to him, as there still clings to the lady, a trace of bourgeois class character and bourgeois arrogance which compromises the ideal in wide circles. As this chivalrous class ideal was once adopted by the bourgeoisie and renewed, so again this class ideal must be adopted and changed by workmen and peasants until its human and Western character has full play. For the ideal of the gentleman is not only aristocratic but also democratic. It rests upon justice and freedom, and respects the rights of others as its own. It is tolerant because it rejects every form of fanaticism, including the fanaticism of the Bolshevist and National Socialist *Weltanschauung*, which are in the sharpest contrast to it. It is not in opposition to any other *Weltanschauung* or world outlook, because it is not bound to any conception of the world or any religion. The believing Christian can be a gentleman just as much as the Jew or free thinker. The gentleman ideal is liberal because personal freedom is its necessary condition and its aim. Only the free man and not the enslaved man can be a gentleman. He who does not dare to express his opinion, who is forced to denounce his friends, who cannot consort with people of his own choice, who #### THE TOTALITARIAN STATE AGAINST MAN may not be loyal and chivalrous because the political powers that be or political leaders do not permit it—such a one cannot be a gentleman. Therefore the worst breeding ground for the growth of gentlemen is the totalitarian state, and the best breeding ground the free state. Free men in free England have through a tradition of centuries created the gentleman as a work of art and raised this work of art to their form of life. In the future also this ideal can be maintained and developed only in such states as respect freedom, personality, and truth—the immemorial idea of the totalitarian man. # Chapter X #### THE FIVE CLASSES An understanding of politics demands a realisation of the fact that the state is divided not only into individuals and provinces but also into callings. The word is used not only in the sense of professional callings but also in the sense of large strata of population of very varying mentalities living in very varying milieus even when they dwell closely together. Each one of these large callings or classes has its own picture of the world and its own political ends. The three historic classes which have together created our civilisation are the nobility, the clergy, and the *bourgeoisie*. Two others have appeared as political factors in the Nineteenth Century, namely the proletariat and the peasantry. These five classes constitute five worlds as far from each other as the five continents. Two aristocrats out of countries widely separated from each other will understand each other better than an aristocrat and an industrial worker who inhabit the same house. A pastor from an Italian village and a French missionary from China have the same catholic world outlook, while a whole world divides them from French and Italian materialists. A bourgeois intellectual from Europe can easily make himself understood by his American confrère when once the difficulties of language are surmounted. A European industrial worker feels a much closer association with his counterpart in Sydney, who has the same cares and the same aims, than with the manager of his factory, with whom he works under the same roof. A European peasant in his attitude towards nature, the seasons, and the urban population has more points of contact with the Chinese peasant than with an intellectual of the neighbouring town. These five classes, therefore, are no abstract construction but realities which every realistic policy must take into account. The three classes of the Middle Ages were as cut off from each other as the Indian and Egyptian castes, which mingle only in exceptional cases. The three modern classes overlap considerably. It is all the more difficult to draw hard and fast dividing lines between them in that they are associated by two large intermediate classes, namely the agricultural labourer as a bridge between the peasant and the industrial worker, and the petty bourgeois as an intermediate link between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. There were already similar intermediate classes in the Middle Ages—the knights of the Holy Orders as #### THE FIVE CLASSES intermediaries between knights and priests, the patricians as a half-way house between the nobility and the *bourgeoisie*, the free peasants as a link between peasant serfs and the lower nobility. The existence of the five classes has not been realised by democracy, although they are living factors as political party organisations and professional groups. The idea of the nobility lives in the conservative parties. The idea of the church lives in the Christian parties. The idea of the bourgeoisie lives in the liberal parties. The idea of the proletariat lives in the socialist parties. The idea of the peasantry lives in the agrarian parties. Thus considered the democratic party state is a concealed "profession state", if we think of principles and forms of life rather than of professional groups. The nobility of Europe is made up out of the heirs and successors of the military caste which sprang from the migrations of the tribes and dominated Europe for more than a thousand years. This military nobility was a landed nobility. From its keeps and castles it dominated the towns and villages. Although a large part of the nobility of to-day is of bourgeois origin, it has retained its connection with the land. So far as possible it draws its living from agriculture and unites the peasant's closeness to nature with the traditions of chivalry and a bourgeois education. The political importance of the nobility is slight. Among the world powers it has survived only in England and Japan in the form of Upper Houses, which are principally chambers of nobility. Prussia and Austria also had their "Herrenhäuser" until the World War, but they have since fallen victims to revolution. Only the Hungarian Upper House of the magnates has survived. At the same time part of the aristocratic ideology continues to live in the conservative parties, in their cult of tradition, in their clinging to existing institutions, in distrust of innovations and reforms, in hatred of revolution and subversion, in the strengthening of the authority and stability of the state, in respect for religion, for the monarchic idea, and the advancement of the army and the army's policy. In most states the surviving heirs of the feudal military caste are the leaders of the modern military caste, the officers' corps, wherein many heirs of the aristocracy find an asylum from the *bourgeois* world. The officer consciously cultivates the chivalrous tradition of honour, courage, loyalty, and magnanimity. Even when he is democratic out of patriotism, his instincts and values are aristocratic and heroic. In many countries the modern military caste, the officers' corps, and the army constitute a state within a state, with their own military ethic and with a hierarchic construction which is far removed from the democratic electoral system. As a knightly military caste the army has, in fact, taken over the power bequeathed by the nobility. #### THE FIVE CLASSES Since the beginning of civilisation the priestly caste has been the rival of the military caste in the struggle for political power. In India it has succeeded in winning the advantage over the military nobility. While the nobility derives its position from the might of the sword, the priesthood relies upon higher powers which have called it to leadership. It seeks to substitute spiritual and moral authority for the physical power which it lacks. The whole of the Middle Ages are filled with the struggle for supremacy of both the leading castes and their chiefs, the Emperor and the Pope. Had the Emperors been defeated it is possible that Europe to-day would have been a clerical state like Tibet. The political demand of the priesthood is the subordination of politics to religion. Its ideal is a theocratic hierarchy. The least it demands from the state is power over hearts and souls, and therewith the education of the young. The power of the Roman Catholic Church was shaken by the Reformation and that of Christianity by the age of enlightenment. Since the great clerical possessions have been secularised, the priesthood as a caste has ceased to fight for power. Even to-day, however, it still exercises great political influence. The decisive role played by the English prince of the Church, the Archbishop of Canterbury, in the recent Royal crisis is still fresh in our memories; the heads of the Greek Orthodox Church, too, are among the most influential personalities of their states, but above all the Vatican has continued through the centuries to fill the role of a moral great power. The inheritors of former clerical power have adopted the Christian parties in the various states. The Catholic Church in particular has known how to make use of democratic institutions to avoid being excluded from the modern struggle for power. As in former times it crowned emperors and kings, so today in many countries it is in a position to form and overthrow governments. Thus the priesthood has ceased to be a dominant caste while maintaining its authority as a political factor. . . . . . . The bourgeoisie alone belongs both to the three historic and to the three modern classes. It has, however, shifted its position. While it was until the French Revolution the third and lowest class, it is to-day the first and leading class. As the Middle Ages were a feudal epoch, so our epoch is a bourgeois one. The knightly class was firmly rooted in the land, while the *bourgeoisie* represents the city and city culture. It believes in intellect, education, science, and progress. It is poorer than the nobility but richer than the proletariat in traditions. Its thousand years of struggle against the domination of the nobility made the *bourgeoisie* the pioneers of political equality and personal freedom, the carriers of liberal and democratic ideas. Its economic out- #### THE FIVE CLASSES look is capitalist, because so far as concerns its present position of power it stands and falls with capitalism. It is led by the intelligentsia, in which it sees its *êlite*. For this reason the *bourgeois* strives for better education for himself and his children. It owes its victory over the nobility and the priesthood to the age of enlightenment, and has therefore remained fundamentally loyal to the ideas of that age. It is anti-clerical without being atheist—at one and the same time rationalist and idealist. At the present time members of this class dominate almost the whole apparatus of the state. It is not only the leaders of the Liberal parties who are mainly drawn from its members; the same is true of the Conservative, Clerical, Fascist, Socialist, and Agrarian parties. At the same time, the bourgeois spirit finds its purest expression in liberalism, with its double front against feudalism and clericalism on the one side and against socialism and fascism on the other. It is allied with the conservatives in economic questions and with the socialists in cultural questions, in so far as their cultural policy is evolutionary and not revolutionary, for liberalism with its evolutionary outlook is an enemy of reaction and revolution, firmly determined to consolidate the power won by the bourgeoisie in the French Revolution. The technical age carved a fourth class out of the third—the proletariat from the bourgeoisie, for the growing number of machines required more and more teams of workers, more and more hands, and thus the millions of the army of the industrial proletariat came into existence. The proletariat is distinguished from the bourgeoisie through its lack of property. Having no capital reserves, it must earn its daily bread with its hands. This signifies a life of extreme insecurity and\\neconomic want of freedom—either in distress or on the edge of it. It is therefore ridiculous and absurd to ask that the proletariat should be satisfied with its share of the good things of life, or to expect it to abandon its struggle to obtain a richer share. At first the proletariat based its hopes upon democracy. It had, however, to suffer the disappointment of finding that *bourgeois* society, while it offered the ballot paper with one hand, wielded the whip of hunger with the other, and used it to drive the working classes back again into distress and economic slavery. This is the source of its hatred of conservative forces, of the nobility and the priesthood, with a complement of hatred and envy for the bourgeoisie and its economic system—capitalism. Marxism gave this hatred an economic shape. It deepened the gulf between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat through its materialist and atheist Weltanschauung, which has at times lent to class warfare the savour of a religious war between Christians and the godless. The aim of Marxism is the destruction of capital- #### THE FIVE CLASSES ism, of *bourgeois* society, and Western culture, with a view to constructing on its ruins a new collectivist world in which there shall be no more exploitation and no more class divisions. The struggle between the individualist idea of the state entertained by the bourgeoisie and the collectivist idea entertained by the proletariat dominates our times. In this struggle the heirs of the nobility and the priesthood, to wit, the conservative and clerical forces, side with the bourgeoisie on the antisocialist front. • • • • • • While both the city classes, bourgeoisie and proletariat, fight over the shaping of the future, the power and significance of the agricultural class, the peasantry, is growing. In most European countries this class was only a few generations ago without either right or might, in the semi-slavery of serfdom. It was the ideas of the age of enlightenment which first liberated it. The peasantry, however, could acquire political power only when it had grown up through universal education, and when the progress of transport brought about easier association between peasants of different districts, as well as between peasants and inhabitants of the towns. The power of the peasantry was at first extended at the cost of the nobility. The feudal lords were the real slave-owners of the serfs. Likewise the second step in the liberation of the peasants, the breaking K up of the large estates, was achieved at the expense of the nobility. In the struggle against the nobility the peasantry were allied with the *bourgeoisie* and the proletariat. On the other hand, a satisfied peasantry has become in part the heir of feudal conservatism, the preserver of tradition, the defender of private property, the protector of religion, the representative of the land against the domination of the city and its rationalist ideas. For the peasant lives in nature, with nature, and by nature, in symbiosis with animals and plants. For this reason his picture of the world is fundamentally different from that of the townsman remote from nature, who spends his days among all kinds of machinery and often himself becomes a semimachine. The peasant has the slow tempo of the seasons and not the quick tempo of motor-cars. His attitude towards the world and to things is organic and not mechanical. He is neither an outspoken idealist nor materialist, but realist. He is mistrustful of the whole culture of the towns with its changing slogans and ideologies, and maintains his cold calm and sound commonsense in face of the hysteria of the large towns. Thus he has become, with his stronger nerves and his internal stability, the great hope and reserve of the future in the midst of a world which is threatened with madness, and has already partially fallen a victim to mass mania. The peasantry is from the economic standpoint organised in the agricultural co-operatives and from the political standpoint in the agrarian parties. These parties, as opposed to the labour parties, represent not so much ideological aims as great economic interests. They are convinced champions of private economy and opponents of big capital. And yet capitalists, like socialists, seek to use the peasants in their struggle against their class opponents. All parties, Conservative and Clerical, Liberal, Socialist and Fascist, court the favour of the peasantry, because it is not yet wedded to any independent ideology but rather allows its policy to be directed in accordance with its practical class interests. • • • • • • In a democratic state each of these five classes has its factors of power outside parliament and the government, which often exercise greater influence than a minister. The summit of the military caste is the generalissimo, as leader of the army. The summit of the clerical caste is the highest prince of the church, as spiritual head of his country or as representative of the Pope. The most powerful representative of the interests of the *bourgeois* caste is the governor of the central bank, the guardian of the national source of money. The summit of the labouring caste is the general secretary of the trade unions. #### THE TOTALITARIAN STATE AGAINST MAN The summit of the peasant caste is the general secretary of the agricultural co-operatives. Most of these class organisations are international in character and connected with sister organisations abroad. There are relations between army staffs only in the case of allied states, but the reciprocal sympathy and respect entertained for each other by officers' corps, even in the case of hostile states with opposed social structures, is something which can be universally observed. The Christian churches are split into two international organisations, the centralising Roman Catholic world church on the one side and the world union of Christian churches on the other. The national banks have their international centre in the Board of the Bank for International Settlement in Basle. The trade unions have their international central organisation in Amsterdam. The agricultural co-operatives have their international secretariat in Paris. Thus not only states but also classes have their own organisations and world connections analogous to the League of Nations. . While bolshevism is dependent on the proletariat and strives to invest it with dictatorship, fascism of various forms among various nations rests on none of these five classes, but rather upon the intermediate class which came into existence after the World War through the conversion of large sections of the bourgeoisie into proletariat elements. The World War, inflation, and the economic crisis resulted in millions of bourgeois existences losing their bearings—people who belong to the bourgeoisie in culture but to the proletariat in economics, who would like to have been bourgeois but were proletarian, who were reluctant to accept the proletarian ideology of Marxism and to be merged in a class-conscious proletariat because they clung by every means to the illusion of their lost bourgeois existence. This class is doubly to be pitied because it unites the cultural and social claims of the bourgeoisie with the distress and insecurity of the proletariat. It is filled with resentment and hate for capitalism and socialism as well as for the whole liberal democratic order which allows it to be ruined; for in the struggle for existence it is the equal neither of the propertied bourgeoisie nor of the organised working class. Since the members of this intermediate class are for the most part half-educated, understanding only their mother tongue, they fall easy victims to the deceptive teaching of extreme nationalism, to the illusion that only their own nation is really civilised, and that all other peoples are barbarian or decadent. This nationalism, which raises their own nation above all others, ennobles them and gives them an importance which the world denies them. This intermediate class, therefore, is the vanguard of all nationalist parties and the champion of national dictatorship. Here its members find a path on which they can trample over their bourgeois and proletariat rivals, and through the victory of their trustee and leader secure not only their existence but also social importance and a share in the power of the state. Since they generally have nothing to lose but everything to gain, they are the best champions of political revolutions. In spite of the great power which this class has won in many states, it remains an intermediate class without a future, for so soon as its members succeed in winning bourgeois livings for themselves they return to the bosom of the bourgeoisie. If they are not successful in achieving this promotion, they turn their backs upon the bourgeoisie, to be merged in the proletariat at the latest during the next generation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Thus the bourgeoisie, the proletariat, and the peasantry remain the three great classes of our age. Of these three living classes two, namely the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, are in a state of war with each other. No theory and no prohibition will prevent the one side from wishing to retain its property and the other from wishing to take it. The one wish is as conceivable and human as the other. The bourgeoisie employs democracy as a means for the maintenance of property, and the proletariat #### THE FIVE CLASSES hopes to confiscate it with the same means. The bourgeoisie is ready to invoke the aid of dictatorship for the protection of property; the proletariat is ready to make use of dictatorship if its hope of confiscation by democratic means is not quickly enough fulfilled. Fundamentally neither the one side nor the other are true democrats; rather each desires to use the same means to trick the other. In this struggle over democracy the chief weapon of the bourgeoisie is corruption and of the proletariat demagogy. Thus both debase the democratic struggle with unclean weapons. At the same time they are arming against each other outside the parliamentary battlefield. They are both arming for civil war. The last hope of the proletariat is the Soviet Union, and of the bourgeoisie the great Fascist powers; for both parties are ready in case of necessity to call the foreigner to their aid against their fellow citizens. The opposition of these two classes is not merely a struggle for possession but rather a struggle between two kinds of *Weltanschauung* and form of life. The bourgeoisie desires to maintain and build up Western civilisation; the proletariat desires to destroy it and replace it with a new form of life. The former not only holds fast to the institution of private property, but also to the ideal values and traditions which spring from antiquity, Christianity, and chivalry, and have served to mould our modern civilisation. The latter believes that our so-called modern civilisation is bankrupt, that it represents the crassest injustice and the worst barbarity, and that true civilisation can only come into existence when this so-called capitalist civilisation of exploitation, injustice, and superstition is exterminated root and branch. Between these two opposed outlooks there is no bridge. The luxury steamer is a very different resort as seen from a cabin-de-luxe and from the stokehold. The bourgeoisie desires to maintain at any price the three-thousand-year-old palace of the West, the building of which has occupied hundreds of generations of statesmen, artists, and scientists, while making it more habitable by putting in modern drains, heating, and lighting. The proletariat desires to demolish this palace and put in its place a modern building specially constructed, less splendid than the palace, but in keeping with all the technical and sanitary standards of our age. • • • • • This deciding factor, the class war, is the great question affecting the fate of our century. The differences between conservatives and liberals, clericals and anti-clericals, pale into insignificance beside it. There are possibilities of compromise between all these adversaries, but there can be no compromise between those who wish to maintain our civilisation #### THE FIVE CLASSES and those who would reduce it to ruins. Every attempt to secure parliamentary co-operation between those two tendencies without the introduction of a third force is dishonest to begin with and hopeless for the future. All good advice to break off class warfare for the sake of freedom falls on deaf ears; the *bour*geoisie would only accept it if they could retain their power and their property, and the proletariat if they could possess themselves of that power and property. It is not to be supposed, however, that the bourgeoisie will voluntarily surrender to the proletariat, or vice versa. Thus class warfare threatens to run its course until the outbreak of civil war, which ends with the survival of the fitter—with a proletarian or bourgeois dictatorship. Only a change of mind and of general social relations can prevent this development, but both require years. Thus the question arises whether, in face of this state of warfare between the *bourgeoisie* and the proletariat, there can be any hope at all of democratic development and the salvation of freedom. • • • • The answer to this question would be in the negative if both the warring classes faced each other alone in the state, if a happy disposition of fate had not presented us with a natural intermediary which constitutes a buffer between the *bourgeoisie* and the proletariat—the peasantry. The rise of the peasant class and its political significance is contemporaneous with the exacerbation of class warfare. Just because both city classes fight against each other, the political key position shifts to the peasantry, which alone is capable and determined to play this role of social broker. The peasant class is anti-plutocratic and anti-Marxist. It is opposed to social exploitation by large capital, under which it itself suffers, and at the same time to all socialising tendencies in Marxism, which threaten the foundations of its existence. The majority of peasants are neither rich nor devoid of possessions, but rather small capitalists who work hard on their own plots of land. The peasant is therefore conservative without being reactionary, in favour of a private economy and yet social. The co-operative movement is the only way open to him to unite the advantages of a large undertaking with the freedom of private property, and to make all coercion by the state superfluous through voluntary collaboration. The peasant class of Europe is therefore to-day the only class which is really democratic without mental reservation, which is devoted to its freedom and will maintain its independence against banks and tendencies to state capitalisation alike, and against leanings to dictatorship whether of the *bourgeois* or of the proletarian variety. The peasantry is anti-ideological. It has therefore discovered no Karl Marx to preach the healing of sick civilisation by a dictatorship of the peasantry, with a clear political *Weltanschauung* for the peasants of all nations. Thus the right lines for the construction of a future peasant democracy can be traced only in the one European state, the Swiss Federation, which owes its foundation to peasants. This state, founded as a peasant democracy seven hundred years ago, has since developed into an exemplary community of peasants, *bourgeois*, and workers. It has at the same time expanded the federalist idea, which is better adapted than any other system to unite freedom and co-operation. For federalism in politics reposes upon the same foundations as co-operation in economic matters—the synthesis of individualism with the necessities of the state. For this reason a peasant democracy will always bear a federalist character, in contrast to the centralising tendencies of all large cities, and of the bourgeoisie as much as of the proletariat. Federalism alone safeguards the future, the freedom, and the power of the peasantry against the centralising tendency of large cities, and therewith secures its independent development on the foundations of the co-operative system and of cantonal and communal autonomous administration. Throughout the Middle Ages the land ruled the town, and feudal federalism had the upper hand of centralism. It was absolutism which first put power #### THE TOTALITARIAN STATE AGAINST MAN in the hands of the cities and their inhabitants. Democracy has clung to this power of the cities until after centuries of interruption power has swung back to the land through fratricidal strife between the two city classes. This definite displacement of power opens up the possibility of saving our civilisation and our freedom, provided that neither of the two warring classes, but the third in the person of the peasant, conquers the key position in the state. # Chapter XI ## THE DEATH OF AN ILLUSION In the eighteenth century freedom and equality were allies. In the nineteenth century they became enemies. In the twentieth century the Russian Revolution to establish equality constituted the counter-revolution to the French Revolution to establish freedom. It was the creator of the totalitarian state, the founder of the Bolshevist state, and the immediate cause of the Fascist state. On the political plane freedom and equality are related. On the economic plane they are opposites. Liberalism's principle of freedom is irreconcilable with communism's principle of equality. Economic equality can only be maintained by a system of force, while economic freedom leads inevitably to inequality. The ideal of equality demands the totalitarian state, the ideal of freedom the totalitarian man. It is simple-minded to regard the capitalist system as merely an outgrowth from, instead of the kernel of, a state based on freedom. Again, it is simple-minded to regard the principle of dictatorship as an outgrowth from, instead of the kernel of, a state based on equality. If you want a meadow, you must be content to have blades of grass of unequal height. If you want a lawn, you must be prepared to cut the blades to the same height with a mowing machine—in fact, to use brute force and to cut off heads. Anyone who believes that the capitalist system can be reconciled with universal equality is a Utopian; anyone who believes that the communist system can be reconciled with universal freedom is likewise a Utopian. The economic form of the principle of freedom is capitalism; the economic form of the principle of equality is communism. Capitalism is economic individualism; communism is economic collectivism. When the great civil war between freedom and equality broke out after the World War, a third principle appeared in order to restore peace by sacrificing both of them. This principle of order is fascism. Neither freedom nor equality have capitulated to this principle of order, and thus there is fighting on all three fronts: the liberal front fights against communism and fascism; the communist front fights against fascism and liberalism; the fascist front fights against liberalism and communism. The Anglo-Saxons and French stand at the head of the liberal world front. The citizens of Soviet Russia stand at the head of the communist world front. The Italians and Germans stand at the head of the fascist world front. Japan is anti-bolshevist, but stands outside the liberal and fascist fronts. This tripartite division is a key to world politics. In its early years the League of Nations was an anti-bolshevist world front. Since the entry of the Soviet Union, the withdrawal of Japan, Germany, and Italy, it has tended to change into an anti-fascist world-front. A new anti-bolshevist front has come into existence—Germany, Japan, and Italy. There is no such thing as an anti-liberal world front, because the political differences between bolshevism and fascism remain stronger than their hatred of democracy. Paradoxically, there is not one single front for freedom in world politics; there are two which intersect, the political front of the democracies against fascism and the economic front of fascism against bolshevism. The logical consequence of this class warfare would be an alliance between liberalism and fascism to ward off world revolution and defend private economy. This alliance founders on the imperialism of the Fascist states. The Soviets have been clever enough to exploit this in order to ally themselves with individual democracies for national self-defence and to obviate an anti-Bolshevik coalition of the capitalist powers. The struggle between these three principles is conducted in internal politics as well as in world politics. Under the dictatorships liberal, fascist, or communist oppositions can only work underground, while in the democracies bolshevist and fascist groups fight for power openly. In all democracies one section of public opinion is directed from Moscow while another sympathises with Rome and Berlin. Both groups arm publicly for revolution against democracy, not however in association, but in opposition to each other. Fascism supports the democratic system against bolshevism, and bolshevism supports it against fascism. Both regard democratic freedom as the best soil in which to prepare their respective revolutions. Party concepts are confused and falsified to-day by the representation of the parliamentary semi-circle with its left liberal and right conservative wing; with the socialists as neighbours of the liberals on their left, and the nationalists as neighbours of the conservatives on their right; with the communists as extreme left and the fascists as extreme right. In reality this picture has long since ceased to correspond to the facts; thanks to the appearance of the communists and fascists the parliamentary semi-circle has been closed and become a circle; communists and fascists meet in their totalitarian ideology and in their fight against political individualism. The opposite pole of this circle, those historic opponents, liberals and conservatives, have joined forces to save democracy and personal freedom—to preserve liberalism. This individualist block often extends leftwards to the socialists and often rightwards to the nationalists, but must always reckon with the possibility that the socialists will desert it for the communists and the nationalists for the . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . In this organisation, which is politically a new one, social democracy has a curious place, seeking as it does to reconcile the ideals of socialism with those of democracy—the principle of equality with the principle of freedom. As a result it has found itself involved in a paradox; it calls for the overthrow of the existing social order on Marxist lines but without revolution and terror. It wavers between an alliance with the liberals to maintain democracy and an alliance with the communists to realise socialism. It rejects the dictatorship of the proletariat, and yet strives to secure it a position of domination. Social democracy refuses to recognise that a war has broken out between the principles of freedom and equality, that Lenin was the loyal executor of the Marxist testament, and that his revolutionary programme of upheaval has stood the test better than their parliamentary programme. ь 161 Social democracy refuses to realise that class warfare has entered on a new phase which makes the realisation of socialism by parliamentary means an impossibility, inasmuch as every increase in the power of Marxism leads automatically to an increase in the counter-forces of fascism, and that therefore the ultimate decision rests outside and not inside parliament. Thus every socialist who does not shrink from this consequence but pursues it to its logical conclusion is faced with the following alternatives, either to subscribe to the revolutionary Marxism of the communists or to break with the Marxist ideology and convert social democracy into a social reform party on the model of the English Labour party, which has gone so far as to decide for the maintenance of the monarchy. Given communism promoted on revolutionary lines by a world power in the shape of the Soviet Union a revolutionary social democracy has no raison d'être and no possibility of development. Thus the path of social democracy leads from upheaval to reform, to a representation of the interests of the working classes analogous to the representation by the agrarian parties of the interests of the peasant class. The crisis of social democracy poses a still graver problem—the crisis of the social question. It must be decided whether the struggle against inequality or the struggle against distress is the central problem of the social movement, whether, in other words, it is more essential to bring economic inequality or economic distress to an end. Until now the revolution to establish equality was Marxism's principal aim. To despoil the capitalist was at least as essential as to enrich the proletariat. The thought of retributive justice was as intense as was the thought of distributive justice. The hope of exacting revenge upon oppressors was as great as the hope of distributing their possessions. Resentment and envy were at least as essential driving forces in the movement as the desire for justice and human dignity. The poor were to be indemnified for a life of poverty and the rich to be punished for a life of wealth. Compensation was, therefore, not only an economic requirement but also a moral one. The mere existence of riches appeared to be a moral offence against world order and a provocation to the poor. Its disappearance would make the poor happier in any case, even if they did not become richer. This mobilisation of the instincts of hatred and revenge has contributed much to strengthening the Marxist movement; in the Russian Revolution it erupted in floods of unprecedented cruelty. Thus the Russian Revolution succeeded in abolishing wealth, but not in abolishing distress. Capitalist democracies such as Switzerland and Scandinavia have come much nearer to this goal than Bolshevist Russia. This is a fact which should engage the attention of all socialists whose final aim is not to abolish inequality but to exterminate misery, to do away with poverty rather than wealth, to bring about a social evolution and not a Marxist revolution. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . In the pre-bolshevik epoch the abolition of wealth through the creation of economic equality seemed identical in aim with the abolition of poverty through a just distribution of possessions. In those days the followers of Marxism had a great advantage over the followers of capitalism, in that they could always compare the socialist dream with capitalist actuality. They were at liberty to embroider their dream as they wished. Thus a comparison between the socialist dream and the capitalist reality was always favourable to Marxism, just as is the comparison between living men and idealised romantic figures. Bolshevism for the first time made the Marxist dream reality; one-sixth of the surface of the world became a crucible for the Marxist experiment. No small and poverty-stricken state, but a world power endowed by nature on the richest scale, became the corner stone of the Marxist edifice. At its head appeared a group of Marxists as convinced as they were intelligent, led by a political genius in the person of Lenin. Since then two decades have elapsed. If we leave the first years of the revolution out of account, we are still left with half a generation of constructive socialist work—time enough to build factories and railways, canals and streets, in the service of a state of immeasurable wealth and a government of unlimited power. Construction has been carried out, too, in the grand style. It could repose partially on the preparatory economic work carried out in pre-revolutionary Russia and have the benefit of capitalist inventions and methods of organisation. Inexhaustible raw materials and a population of 160 million souls constituting an army of workers were at its complete disposition; here we have material and time enough to erect at least the main walls of the communist paradise of the future. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The first result of an experiment of such interest in the history of the world was the bankruptcy of communism in the sense in which communism represents a principle of equality. It soon became clear, indeed during the lifetime of Lenin, that an economy based on the principle of equality was unworkable, and that even the bolshevist state had to cling to economic inequality in order to save itself from ruin. Accordingly inequality of income was borrowed from capitalism, as well as the directing power of the factory manager in face of the failure of the communist attempt to entrust the direction of factories to councils of workmen. Since then, strictly speaking, the Soviet Union has no longer been communist, but state capitalistic. Capitalist methods have been proved to be indispensable even in the Soviet economy. Specialists and organisers from capitalist countries, and above all from America, have been brought in to the Soviet Union in large numbers to build up its economy. This economy has been organised as a large capitalist undertaking, with this difference, that in the place of a multitude of entrepreneurs to be found in capitalist countries there is one gigantic employer, the Soviet Union. The whole population of Russia constitutes the employees. State officials take the place of private entrepreneurs. The whole economy has been bureaucratised . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . To-day we can survey the outcome of this state capitalist system. It has shown itself capable of survival, and it has gone a long way in the construction of Russian industry. The figures of production are higher than before the War. In contrast to most, but not all, capitalist countries, there is no unemployment. On the other hand, this system has not succeeded in abolishing distress. Housing conditions are inconceivably bad judged by Western standards. Officially every Soviet citizen is entitled to a space of $3 \\times 3 \\times 3$ metres, with the result that in most rooms there are several beds, and often several families doing their cooking. In many towns the space is even more restricted than the official allowance of twentyseven cubic metres. For most Russians a room to oneself is an extravagant dream, as great a luxury as a private car to a European. If we leave questions of food and clothing aside, these inhuman housing conditions make any parallel with the standard of life enjoyed by the workmen of Europe and America' impossible. Further, the real wages of a Soviet worker are far below those of his European or American fellow. He must put in several times as much work before he can purchase the same clothing and furniture as his Western compeers, and even then the quality is inferior. Again, the food situation is worse than in Europe and America. The former granary of Europe is scourged by periodic famine, and cannot provide enough food for a large part of its population. The moral are even worse than the material conditions of life. Freedom and legal protection are non-existent. Anyone who entertains views which may be communist indeed but do not exactly coincide with the party attitude of the moment endangers his life. Every economic or technical mistake can be denounced as sabotage and lead to immediate execution. Conversation with a foreigner arouses suspicions of espionage and can lead to the same result. The highest dignitaries of the country have not only been executed on obviously false accusations, but were first forced by mysterious means to accuse themselves of a whole series of crimes which they never committed. Orderly justice and the protection afforded by the law are non-existent. Through the terror of the secret police and their agents every man is in danger of being denounced as a Trotskyist and executed without the possibility of a proper defence. Now all this is happening, not as in Robespierre's terror during a revolution, but at least fifteen years after its conclusion, in a period of internal peace and tranquillity. Thus no end to this reign of terror can be foreseen, because it is an essential element in the regime, which regards individual life and individual suffering as of no significance when compared with the interest of the state, the party, and the party leaders. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Anyone can make for himself a comparison between this model Marxist state and any European or American democracy chosen at random. For the purpose of this comparison let us choose a state which has no colonies, no sea-board, no precious metals, no minerals and no fertile soil, but on the other hand can boast a model democracy and a real capitalist economy—namely, Switzerland. The density of population in Switzerland is about one hundred people to the square kilometre, and in Russia about twelve, so that, given the same condias much land and space as the Swiss. In both cases, of course, we must make a deduction, in Russia because of the Polar regions and in Switzerland because of the snow and mountains. Instead of the Russian being much richer than the Swiss, the Swiss workman has an incomparably higher standard of life than the Russian workman. It is also to his advantage that he enjoys political freedom and security, thanks to which he is immune from interference so long as he commits no punishable public offence and has not been convicted by a regular court. The average wealth of the Swiss is so great that about 80 gold francs per head of population was subscribed for the Defence Loan of 1936 without the slightest pressure from the government. Switzerland is on the way to secure for all its workers a *bourgeois* existence, worthy of human beings, which far outstrips the miserable existence of the Soviet worker. What applies to Switzerland is just as true of the Scandinavian democracies, which also have no tropical colonies and owe their well-being to a policy of peace and freedom, to progressive capitalism, and to an honest, industrious, thrifty and virtuous population whose outlook on life is based on individualism. In spite of mendacious propaganda spread over the whole world regarding the achievements of the Soviet Union, the difference in the standard of life and the enjoyment of rights between the workers of the Soviet state and those of Western democracies is a fact which no honest comparison can gainsay. The Soviets attempt to meet this annihilating attack upon their system with their hopes for the future. Perhaps they are right, and perhaps we may expect an improvement in the Russian standard of living, but capitalist countries have also a right to be hopeful regarding their future development, and thus these hopes cancel each other out. For the time being, however, the world can take account only of facts, and not of hopes. It must be in the highest degree distrustful of a system which in any case desires to smash our present civilisation and form of life and stifle our freedom and security—indemnifying us with a very problematic hope in the future and an even more problematic civilisation. For the aim of bolshevism is to convert the bourgeoisie and the peasants into proletarians, the bourgeoisie through expropriation and the peasants through the system of the Kolchos, which organises agriculture as an industrial undertaking with the intention of gradually converting free peasants into a landed proletariat. The Soviet leaders know quite well that so long as there are peasants there will be individualists, and that therefore the destruction of the peasant class is an indispensable preliminary to complete collectivism. The cultural aim of Switzerland and the other Western democracies is the opposite of that of the bolshevists—the maintenance of the peasant class and the bourgeoisie, and the gradual promotion of the proletariat to bourgeois forms of life and economics through improvements in the standard of living, in economic security, and in education. Marxists in all countries must make up their minds which better corresponds to the real interests of the working classes—the method of the Soviet Union or the method of Switzerland. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A century of Marxist world propaganda has discredited capitalism before the bar of public opinion. In face of the results of Marxist politics and economics the time has come to review this judgment. For capitalism is nothing but economic individualism founded on personal initiative, gains, losses, risk, competition, and credit. It has displayed a masterly capacity for using personal egoism and acquisitiveness as economic driving forces. The following parable traces a picture of the economic significance of the entrepreneur. In a bolshevist country running its factories with salaried officials it occurs to a minister of economics to replace the salary by a participation in earnings; the result is to arouse the energy and initiative of the directors and give them pleasure in their work, and at the same time to increase state revenue. This minister's successor finds it unfair that the state alone should bear the risk of loss incurred in its undertakings while the directors pocket a proportion of the profits. Therefore he completes the regulation of his predecessor by the provision that in future the factory managers shall share in the losses as well as in the profits. A third minister desires to be an even better guardian of the state's interests. The state should share in the profits of its undertakings, but not in its losses. He shifts the whole risk to the factory manager and exacts from him only a portion of his profits. Thus we come by a roundabout route to the capitalist economic system, under which the state participates in the profits of enterprise by taxation, but not in its risks or its losses. Instead of paying the factory director a salary, the latter pays the state a yearly rent in the shape of taxes. The entrepreneur has to make the greatest effort to keep pace with his competitors, to maintain his business, to lay aside reserves against future losses, to pay his taxes and make a living for his family, while the official who runs a factory has no inducement to do more for it than is prescribed by his official obligation within his official hours. It is clear that the private undertaking will work better, more cheaply, and more rationally than a state undertaking, and that for this #### THE DEATH OF AN ILLUSION reason state capitalism cannot compete with private capitalism. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Most anti-capitalists believe that capitalists are economic pests because they have withdrawn their property and income from the community, and therefore incurred the guilt involved by the general distress of the masses. This belief is a fundamental delusion; even if they wished the rich could not withdraw their money from the economy. A miser who invests his money in shares and bonds thereby strengthens and vitalises the public economy. A spendthrift distributes his money among the populace directly. If he throws it out of the window, there will be people to catch it. If he papers his walls or lights his fire with banknotes, he withdraws them from the note circulation and so makes a gift of their present value to the state. If he gambles away his money, he gambles it into other hands. The result is the same if he gives it away or spends it in dissipation. If he drinks it, it finds its way to wine merchants and workers in the vineyards. If he turns it into building, it flows into the building trade. If he buys works of art, art and handicraft profit thereby. Thus, even against his will, he is a Mæcenas or a philanthropist. Money flows through his hands, not into them. He retains only a small percentage with which to enjoy life. A rich man who spends his money does not withdraw his capital from the public economy any more than a lake into which a river flows withdraws this water from the ocean. On the contrary, the miser is the accumulator of the public wealth and the spend-thrift its transformer. Both thereby exercise economic functions which benefit the community, and therefore the rich contribute to an improvement and not to a lowering of the common standard of living. Wealth is not only an important element in the economy of a country, but also in culture. Under state capitalism there is only one Mæcenas, the state. An artist whose works do not meet with the approval of the minister of art may starve. Under the capitalist system there is more than one Mæcenas, and they have varying tastes. What displeases one may please another. Even abnormal works of art find their collectors and purchasers. They are often inferior, but in many cases they will first be appreciated by succeeding generations. Arts and handicraft can only flourish under a capitalist system. State museums are far too small to take more than a fraction of the national production. Where all are poor handicraft dies, as do art and its tradition. Higher culture flourishes only in an atmosphere of luxury such as capitalism creates—the atmosphere of antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and modern times. Under a communist or state socialist system culture must die because luxury dies. Most of the reproaches made against capitalism apply just as much to the state capitalism of the Soviets. Only the reproaches made against wealth apply to private capitalism exclusively, because in the Soviet state there is only poverty. Many of the reproaches levelled against capitalism are justified. It is an offence against the individualist principle that trusts should be formed in order to increase the prices of the necessaries of life, that grain dealers should speculate in bread, that armament dealers should spend millions to set nations against each other, that the owners of large estates should prevent internal colonisation and the extension of a free peasantry. All these abuses of capitalism should be put down by the state with a strong hand. They should not serve, however, to bring capitalism itself into discredit, since Western individualism stands and falls with it. He who is against private capitalism is in favour of bolshevism; there is no third economic system. He who is in favour of bolshevism is in favour of terror, of the denial of liberty, of arbitrariness, of the universalisation of poverty, of the destruction of our civilisation, of materialism, of the totalitarian state. Capitalism alone makes a democracy possible, such as exists in England or Switzerland. Each may choose which system he prefers, which evil he holds to be the lesser, for in politics there can only be a choice between greater and lesser evils. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . He who regards the social question as a demand for the abolition of wealth must take the Russian road. He who sees in it a demand for the abolition of distress must take the Swiss road. The Russian revolution has done mankind one great service. It has replaced the Marxist dream by Marxist reality, the outlines of which come every day more clearly into view out of a fog of propaganda and lies. The man who seeks an answer to the social problem no longer finds himself forced to choose between reality and a dream, but rather between two realities between which a comparison can be instituted. And so the great illusion which has almost decoyed our civilisation to the edge of a precipice, the illusion of the Marxist state of the future, fades away. This illusion has led to the crisis in freedom, to the ideal of totalitarianism, to bolshevism and fascism, to the splitting of the world into opposing camps. The end of this illusion opens up the possibility of a revaluation, of class reconciliation, and of a renewal of freedom. #### THE DEATH OF AN ILLUSION At the beginning of our era a Chinese idealist, the emperor Wang Mang, introduced socialism into China. China learned from the catastrophic consequences of this attempt, and has held fast to capitalism for almost two thousand years. Lenin was the Wang Mang of the West, and perhaps his experiment has the same significance for Europe. The moral bankruptcy of bolshevism is opening the eyes of the West, re-opening the path to freedom and the totalitarian man. **M** 177 # Chapter XII #### THE FRATERNAL REVOLUTION The first step necessary to overcome the totalitarian state has been taken in the fiasco of bolshevism and the bankruptcy of class warfare. This fact has not yet sunk into the consciousness of the masses. Truth, however, makes its own paths. Its progress can be delayed by lies and propaganda, but it cannot be brought to a halt. It is in the interest of all mankind outside Russia that the Soviet state should remain in existence until the most simple-minded of communists must recognise that the capitalist working man enjoys a higher standard of living, more freedom and more security; that state capitalism cannot compete with private capitalism; and that the Marxist experiment of a Russian working man's paradise has completely miscarried. The overthrow of the Soviet regime through a capitalist crusade would be an irremediable catastrophe for anti-bolshevism; it would make it possible for Marxists to argue even centuries later that bolshevism was stifled by capitalism just at the moment when it was about to outstrip it, and the consequence would be that Marxist hopes and threats would survive instead of expiring with the Soviet state. Bolshevism should not suffer execution by an external force, but rather continue in life as a warning and example for civilised mankind until it is too tired to live or commits suicide, until it breaks to pieces from within, or voluntarily transforms itself into a private economy. Until that time arrives all mankind should have the opportunity of comparing its moral and economic situation with that of the capitalist states. As the birth of fascism followed the birth of bolshevism, so the end of fascism will follow the end of bolshevism. It will have fulfilled its mission. The twilight of the totalitarian state has set in; so sets in the dawn of totalitarian man. The second step in the removal of class warfare and state totalitarianism is the destruction of class hatred. This hatred of the poor for the rich will live as long as distress. So long as men must be hungry, they will entertain hatred for men who can eat until they are sated. So long as men must suffer cold, they will entertain hatred for men in furs and well-heated rooms. So long as men have no roof over their heads, they will entertain hatred for men in houses and in beds. This logic is so elementary that it is senseless and shameless for well-fed men to preach peace and the cessation of class strife to the starving. The second cause of class hatred is slavery. For it is a modern form of slavery when millions of men must daily pass eight hours by a running belt and make the same manual motions countless times to prevent their families from starving. As the hungry hate the well fed, so will slaves continue to hate their slave-drivers. It is not Marxism which has created class hatred, but the other way round. There is, therefore, only one way to expel class hatred—through the expulsion of distress and slavery. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The weapon in this struggle against misery and slavery is not Marxism, but technical knowledge. Before the day of modern technology there was necessarily distress in our climate, because there were not enough foodstuffs to satisfy everybody, not enough clothing to cover everyone sufficiently, and not enough houses to lodge them. Before the day of modern technology there had to be slavery because life, civilisation, and our economy were dependent upon human muscles. Not only did the power of Rome rest upon slave labour, but also the freedom of Athens. The liberation of the slaves would have been the suicide of civilisation. It was technical progress which first presented us with the possibility of attacking distress by mass production and of attacking slavery by substituting the powers of nature for muscular power. Through technical development Europe and #### THE FRATERNAL REVOLUTION America are on the way to producing more foodstuffs than their populations require, more clothes, more furniture, more houses—and that means the elimination of distress. Countless articles which were luxuries yesterday are to-day consumed in large quantities by industrial labourers—sugar, soap, tea, coffee, oranges, bananas, handkerchiefs, watches, collars and ties. Labourers' dwellings daily become more beautiful and more spacious. We are not far from the time when there will be no more hungry people in Europe or America, no more people with bare feet or frozen ears and fingers, no more people insufficiently clad, and no more without a roof over their heads; when every working-class family will possess its own small house, its bathroom, radio, and telephone—provided that this line of development is not interrupted by a new world war or a world revolution. Parallel with this development the break-up of slavery is in process. Steam, electricity and motor power more and more take the place of muscular power. Thanks to the motor the working man is gradually becoming a regulator of power. An army of slave machines is taking the place of an army of slave human beings. Goods are not only becoming more plentiful and cheaper; they require for their production less and less time and physical energy. For the time being a dark shadow lies over this development; twenty million men in Europe and America lack work because motors have hounded them from their jobs. This fact is a blot upon our age, but it is a transitory phenomenon, lasting only until politics catch up with technical development. In a series of states the problem of unemployment has already been overcome, and in others it will be overcome through a diminution of working time corresponding with the progress of technical development. When the millions who are overworked have given up part of their working hours to the unemployed, distress in a double form will be conquered—the distress of overwork and the distress of underwork. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . When it is generally realised that the social problem can be solved by capitalism and technology, the prerequisite for a steady political development without revolutions, *coups d'état*, and catastrophes has been created. When that time comes, the demagogic slogan "property is theft" must again give way to the thesis of the French Revolution, "property is the right of man". Then only can class warfare in its present form disappear. There will be differences between employers and employees so long as these two classes exist. The employee will always seek to secure for himself the highest possible and best secured share of the undertaking's receipts, while the employer will always seek to strengthen the undertaking's reserves to meet times of crisis. But these differences will be resolved in just the same way as the differences between in- dustry and agriculture—without the threat of revolution. The difference between employers and employees will be identical neither with the present difference between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat nor with the difference between rich and poor; for every carpenter, bootmaker, and tailor who has journeymen to assist him is an employer, while Cabinet Ministers and ambassadors, bank directors and general managers of industrial undertakings all belong to the category of employee. When once the existence of industrial labourers is assured and they become manual salaried servants and officials, the class difference between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, and with it class hatred, will disappear. Every working man who owns something and earns enough to save a little is as attached to his small property as the entrepreneur is to his large property. The former is as fond of his allotment and his bicycle as the latter is of his villa and his motorcar. Just as on the land there is envy but no class warfare between large and small peasants, because both are attached to their property, so class warfare between large and small capitalists will also disappear in the towns. For a world separates the man who owns something from the man who owns nothing, but not the man who owns something from the man who owns much. There is nothing more mistaken than the belief that happiness is in constant proportion to income. This is true only in the lower grades of income and not in the higher; generally speaking, the well-to-do are happier than the rich. Even when mass distress has been overcome there will be eccentrics who demand communist equality on principle, having the same kind of temperament as men who cannot bear to see a large book standing beside a small one on a shelf. The masses, however, will cease to be interested in these eccentrics; the man with a full belly is not usually a revolutionary. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Instead of destroying each other in class warfare, the three great classes of our age will wage a common campaign in internal politics against misery and in external politics against war. They will work for the lowering of customs and duties and the extension of the field of economic effort, in order to increase the turnover and raise the general standard of living. Above all, they will fight in common for the great aims of personal freedom, human rights, and human dignity. For the bourgeois, the peasant and the working man have a common interest in preventing ambitious statesmen from waging wars of conquest or provoking neighbouring powers; they have a common interest in seeing that no one is tortured, that no one is hauled off to a concentration camp without trial or executed for political or religious convictions. They are interested in securing that their representatives and trustees should have a determining voice in the weight of taxation and control over its expenditure; that judges shall be upright and officials incorruptible; that no government should rule except for the people and in its interests; that everyone who respects the law should be protected by it, and that the state should be the protector of the individual man and his freedom, rather than his hangman. Thanks to this great community of interests the barriers between the classes will gradually fall. The peasant and the working man as well as the bourgeois will strive to attain the ideal of the gentleman. An increase in cleanliness will break down the high social barriers which still exist between the washed and the unwashed so soon as all men take a daily bath, as do the Japanese of all classes. Eastern Asia can further be a model for the world in that it regards politeness as one of the highest virtues and a necessity for human intercourse. When all men make an effort to be politer and more patient with their fellow men, with their superiors, their inferiors, and their equals, a new class barrier will fall. The barriers between town and country will also disappear so soon as the great city in its modern form, this stone prison for millions, gives place to the garden city, and every working man cultivates his allotment, and when again every person can have contact with the city at his will through new means of transport, the radio, the telephone, and the television set. 185 The termination of class warfare through the fiasco of bolshevism and the triumph of technics constitutes the first movement in the great revolution for fraternity, following the French Revolution for freedom and the Russian Revolution for equality. Its aim is collaboration in freedom, toleration, consideration and humanity—socialism on the basis of individualism, the crowning of the idea of personality with respect for the individuality of one's neighbour. History has as yet known only two revolutions for fraternity, namely Buddhism and Christianity. For in both these fraternal religions the base is individualism and the summit is socialism. They regard all human beings as brothers and sisters, and therefore called upon to help to bear each other's heavy burdens. The modern world has moved far away from this fraternal spirit. It subscribes to the alleged fundamental law of Darwin—the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest. A materialist bolshevism obeys this commandment as blindly as a racial national socialism. Both are blind to the fact that the struggle for existence covers only one-half of natural life, while its complement is a second fundamental law, the commandment which requires reciprocal toleration and aid—symbiosis, or the law of fraternity. It is time to recall this second, forgotten commandment to the recollection of peoples and their leaders, to remind them that the primitive forest would long ago have succumbed to murder were the struggle for existence the sole governing force, and that not only all mammalian animals but even all men would long ago have died out if mothers had not for millions of years been in the habit of suckling their helpless children. The kernel of all brotherliness and all humanity is maternal feeling. While the egotistical struggle for existence is a masculine principle of life, reciprocal aid is a feminine principle. The mother makes the first and the strongest bond between the "I" and the "Thou"; she is the foundation of all fraternity. It is therefore to be hoped and expected that the growing influence of women in politics and in the spiritual life of our age will be decisive in bringing about a revision of masculine values and a triumph of the fraternal revolution. Nietzsche, with his doctrine of the will to power as the central phenomenon of psychology and cosmology, has gone no better than Darwin and his masculine one-sidedness. A satiated lion does *not* pursue antelopes out of a will to power. No crystal and no flower grows beyond the limits which nature has prescribed for it. The fundamental phenomenon is not the will to power, but the will to form, to development, to freedom. Man too desires to develop, but not to dominate. Natural instinct desires freedom and not power; the highest aim of a healthy and harmonious human being is neither to give nor to receive orders, but to develop himself physically, spiritually and intellectually. This natural instinct is suppressed and falsified by the course of politics. In unfree times power is the one way to freedom. In autocratic times the man who desired not to tremble before autocrats, but to be free, had to attempt to make himself an autocrat. Thus the desire for freedom was transmuted into a desire for power—the ideal of freedom into an ideal of power. The desire for power is a perverted desire for freedom. Those who hunger for power are spiritual sadists, discordant natures nourished on an inferiority complex. Imperialism is a national desire for power, a perverted desire for freedom. Once upon a time the Swedes were imperialists; to-day they are cured of this illness. The former great power has become a minor state, but the Swedes have realised that they are better off to-day than in the great days of Gustavus Adolphus, and that their lot is better than that of citizens of the great powers. They have learned that freedom and peace, even for a nation, are more important than power and military fame, and that the true greatness of a nation resides not in its conquests but in its #### THE FRATERNAL REVOLUTION cultural achievements and the perfection of the human beings which it produces. • • • • • The fraternal revolution is promoted by all classes and all philosophies which subscribe to idealism, and above all by Christianity, the social ideal of which is consummated in brotherhood, and which remains true to itself only when it opposes the idolatry of the totalitarian state. The peasants are already working to-day for this great fraternal revolution, which in its spirit unites personality with co-operation. It is the great task of social democracy to draw the right conclusions from the fiasco of Marxism, and as representing the working classes to become a leading party in the cause of the rights of man and of brotherhood. The same is true of the *bourgeois* groups, which must be taught by the totalitarian defeat suffered by extreme liberalism that the future of personal freedom can only be assured within the framework of brotherhood. The heirs of a chivalrous way of life will join this movement of the upper classes in the consciousness that the consummation of magnanimity is brother-hood, and that the conduct of the strong towards the weak and the unprotected is a measure of their chivalry. As the kindness of a man can be measured by his kindness to the least protected of the unprotected, to dumb animals, so the moral and cultural standard of a nation can be measured by its conduct towards the minorities which are in its power. For neither democracy nor dictatorship, but only chivalry and brotherhood of the spirit and respect for the individual, can protect the rights of national and religious minorities. In this question free Switzerland is a model for dictatorships and democracies, for small states and big powers. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The political requirement of brotherhood is federalism, the natural and organic construction of the state out of its individuals. The path from men to the universe leads through concentric circles: men build families, families communes, communes cantons, cantons states, states continents, continents the planets, the planets the solar system, solar systems the universe. Every man has a part in all of these communities, but remains the central point of his own world. His highest duty, therefore, is self-perfection, the development of his own soul, transfigured egoism. Next come his duties towards his family, and so forth. Every other order of magnitude is arbitrary and inorganic, and falsifies the picture of the universe. The federalist system corresponds to this natural world order. It requires a hierarchic construction of the world from the bottom upwards. It is a social pyramid, as is feudalism, but built from the bottom to the top instead of from the top to the bottom. The federalist form of the state is called internally self-administration and externally state union. It rejects the centralist state, the centralist continent, and the centralist League of Nations. The commune is a union of families and men; the canton is a union of communes; the state is a union of cantons; the continent is a union of states; humanity is a union of continents. The foundation of this system is the freedom of the individual, of the commune, of the canton, of the state, and of the continent, and at the same time brotherhood between individuals, communes, cantons, states, and continents, with a definite rejection of anarchy and state totalitarianism. The British Empire, the North American Union, and the Swiss Federation all rest on this firm foundation of federalism, self-administration and the freedom of the individual within the organisation of the state. The principle of brotherhood has enabled them to solve innumerable problems which have appeared insoluble to centralist states. Thus the United States of America is a model for the construction of the American continent. Thus Switzerland is a model for the construction of the European community. Thus the British Empire is the model for the reform of the League of Nations and the organisation of humanity. 191 In the economic field the revolution to establish brotherhood wages war against state socialism and plutocracy. It demands a free economic system and cooperation. Its aim is the creation of the greatest possible number of independent existences bound together by the principle of co-operation. It rejects both economic anarchy and collectivism. Its model is to be found in the agricultural co-operatives, which combine all the advantages of private property with the spirit of brotherhood and reciprocal aid; they differ as much from the collectivist factory management of the Soviet *kolchos* as they do from the anarchic misery of small isolated peasants without machinery and co-operation. This model should be adopted so far as possible by other classes with a view to the construction of an economic federal system based upon personality and self-administration. The way to this future is indicated by the corporative system, which is intended both to check extreme economic liberalism and to obviate a controlled state economy. For since the aberration of totalitarianism democracy has also been seeking for new paths and methods. A return to freedom does not mean a return to parliamentaryism, but to the rights of man and the control of governments. Without these two requirements there is no freedom and no brotherhood. Perhaps new methods will be found to secure them, better guarantees for the authority and #### THE FRATERNAL REVOLUTION stability of governments and the selection of leaders, a union of the principle of spiritual and moral aristocracy with democratic control. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The attainment of this aim demands a reform in education. It demands a double reform, in popular and in university education. Here again the essential thing is to surmount the materialist spirit which has led both to plutocracy and to Marxism. Since the science of the twentieth century has refuted this heresy of the nineteenth century, it is necessary to banish it from social and political life and to obliterate its traces from the schools. From earliest childhood it should be brought home to a man that he is an inconceivably miraculous creature and a part not only of the physical but also of the divine world; that all phenomena and objects are aspects of the spirit; that life is only a brief opening of the eye, a stopping place on a journey from unknown worlds into unknown worlds; that it is therefore senseless to chase after power, fame, enjoyment, and wealth instead of after perfection and a purification of the soul. It must be brought home to him that the centre of gravity, so far as human fortune is concerned, does not lie in material things; as a peasant sound of limb is happier than a crippled millionaire, so a crippled and poverty-stricken saint is incomparably happier than either. It must be brought home to him that all men are brothers and sisters, children of the same god, whatever their race, their faith, their language, or their class. It is only forgetfulness of these simple truths that has caused mankind to be captured by a clumsy materialism which has overestimated material values, and thus brought class hatred to a white heat which has burned freedom to ashes and threatens to destroy our civilisation. In every school in the world these words from the Gospel should be written up in golden letters in order that they may burn themselves into the hearts of youth: "For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?" • • • • • It is a precedent requirement for this reform of primary education that there should be a reform of higher education. It is impossible to teach idealism in the popular schools while the universities are breeding grounds for materialism and semieducation. The universities have been untrue to their name and their spirit since they ceased to be the sources of true education and became the providers of courses for specialists, since philosophy ceased to be the natural groundwork for all higher education and became a special branch. Only thus has it been possible for most students to leave the university, with or without a degree, as semi-educated people ready to fall victims to absurd and economically untenable theories such as bolshevism or national socialism. It is precisely the rehabilitation of democracy which requires that the universities should again become asylums of true education instead of mere places of knowledge and erudition, should carry on the great classic culture and tradition of Athens, should be the fountains of a true idealism, and should give form and shape to totalitarian man. Only this university spirit can encourage the growth of true education and of an aristocracy of the spirit which is called upon to break and dissolve the power of semi-education and demagogy. The revolution in favour of brotherhood will bring a decision in the world struggle between the It will thus release mankind from the cramp which has taken possession of it. It will, now that the revolution in favour of freedom has been brought to a standstill and the revolution in favour of equality has failed, build bridges between one nation and another, and one class and another, in order to bring to all of them the glad tidings of the brotherhood of free men. The totalitarian state is still a nightmare oppressing millions of souls. ![](https://samisdat.in/user/pages/03.books/1938%20-%20The%20Totalitarian%20State%20Against%20Man/read/_page_195_Picture_0.jpeg?g-16018011) --- ## Navigation - Parent: [The Totalitarian State Against Man (1938) by Richard Nicolaus Coudenhove-Kalergi](https://samisdat.in/books/the-totalitarian-state-against-man-1938.md)