Julius Evola’s Political Endeavors by H.T. Hansen (PDF – 574 KB):
Julius Evola’s Political Endeavors
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Hansen, H.T. “Julius Evola’s Political Endeavors.” Introduction to Julius Evola, Men Among the Ruins: Postwar Reflections of a Radical Traditionalist, pp. 1-104. Rochester: Inner Traditions, 2002.
Note: On Evola’s theories, see also: “Against Nihilism: Julius Evola’s ‘Traditionalist’ Critique of Modernity” by Thomas F. Bertonneau, “Julius Evola on Race” by Tomislav Sunic, “Tradition?” by Alain de Benoist, “A True Empire: Form and Presuppositions of a United Europe” by Julius Evola, “The Defining Element of the Conservative Revolution” by Julius Evola, and various other articles by or about Evola.
Filed under New European Conservative
Germany’s Third Empire by Arthur Moeller van den Bruck (PDF – 873 KB):
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Moeller van den Bruck, Arthur. Germany’s Third Empire. London: George Allen And Unwin, 1934.
Notes: The print version of this book was translated by Emily O. Lorimer and went through three editions: The first edition was published by George Allen And Unwin (London, 1934), the second edition was published by Howard Fertig (New York, 1971), and the third edition was published by Arktos (London, 2012), including a new foreword and added bibliography by Alain de Benoist.
The online text of this book as used for this PDF file was retrieved from the Australian nationalist website: <http://home.alphalink.com.au/~radnat/moeller/index.html >; It has also been presented at the official Eurasia Movement website: <http://evrazia.org/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=2068 >.
For an overview of Arthur Moeller van den Bruck’s life and ideas, see Lucian Tudor’s essay on him: <https://neweuropeanconservative.wordpress.com/2014/03/21/arthur-moeller-van-den-bruck-tudor/ >.
Filed under New European Conservative
Ernst Jünger: The Figure of the Worker Between the Gods & the Titans
By Alain de Benoist
Translated by Greg Johnson
Armin Mohler, author of the classic Die Konservative Revolution in Deutschland 1918-1933, wrote regarding Ernst Jünger’s The Worker (Der Arbeiter) and the first edition of The Adventurous Heart: “To this day, my hand cannot take up these works without trembling.” Elsewhere, describing The Worker as an “erratic bloc” in the midst of Jünger’s works, he states: “The Worker is more than philosophy, it is a work of poetry.”[1] The word is apt, above all if we admit that that all true poetry is foundational, that it simultaneously captures the world and unveils the divine.
A “metallic” book—one is tempted to use the expression “storm of steel” to describe it—The Worker indeed possesses a genuinely metaphysical quality that takes it well beyond the historical and especially political context in which it was born. Not only has its publication marked an important day in the history of ideas, but it provides a theme of reflection that runs like a hidden thread throughout Jünger’s long life.
I.
Ernst Jünger was born on March 28th, 1895 in Heidelberg.[2] Jünger went to school in Hannover and Schwarzenberg, in the Erzgebirge, then in Brunswick and finally in Hannover again, as well as the Scharnhorst Realschule in Wunstorf. In 1911 he joined the Wunstdorf section of the Wandervogel.[3] That same year published his first poem, “Unser Leben,” in their local journal. In 1913 at the age of 16, he left home. His escapade ended in Verdun, where he joined the French Foreign Legion. A few months later, after a brief sojourn in Algeria, where his training began at Siddi bel Abbes, his father was able to persuade him to return to Germany. He resumed his studies at the Hannover Guild Institute, where he became familiar with the works of Nietzsche.
The First World War broke out on August 1st, 1914. Jünger volunteered on the first day. Assigned to the 73rd regiment of fusiliers, he received his marching orders on October 6th. On December 27th, he left for the front in Champagne. He fought at Dorfes-les-Epargnes, at Douchy, at Moncy. He became squad leader in August 1915, sub-lieutenant in November, and from April 1916 underwent officer training at Croisilles. Two months later, he took part in the engagements on the Somme, where he was twice wounded. Upon his return to the front in November, with the rank of lieutenant, he was wounded again near Saint-Pierre-Vaast. On December 16th he received the Iron Cross First Class. In February 1917, he became Stosstruppfuehrer (leader of an assault battalion). This is when the war bogged down while the human costs became terrifyingly immense. The French prepared Nivelle’s bloody and useless offensive on the Chemin des Dames. At the head of his men, Jünger fought hand to hand in the trenches. Endless battles, new wounds: in July on the front in Flanders, and also in December. Jünger was decorated with the Knight’s Cross of the Oder of the Hohenzollerns. During the offense of March 1918, he again led assault troops. He was wounded. In August, another wound, this time near Cambrai. He ended the war in a military hospital, having been wounded fourteen times! That earned him the Cross Pour le merite, the highest award in the German army. Only twelve subaltern officers of the ground forces, one the future Marshal Rommel, received this decoration during the whole First World War.
“One lived for the Idea alone.”
Between 1918 and 1923, in the barracks at Hannover, Jünger began to write his first books, inspired by his experiences at the front. In Storms of Steel (In Stahlgewittern), first published in 1919 by the author and in a new edition in 1922, was an immediate success. There followed Battle as Inner Experience (Der Kampf als inneres Erlebnis) (1922), Copse 125: A Chronicle from the Trench Warfare of 1918 (Das Wäldchen 125) (1924), and Fire and Blood (Feur und Blut) (1925). Very quickly, Jünger was recognized as one of the most brilliant writers of his generation, even though, as Henri Plard points out in “The Career of Ernst Jünger, 1920–1929,” in Germanic Studies, April–June 1978), he first became known primarily as a specialist in military problems thanks to articles on modern warfare published in Militär-Wochenblatt.
But Jünger did not feel at home in a peacetime army. It no longer offered adventure of the Freikorps. In 1923 he left the Reichswehr and entered Leipzig University to study biology, zoology, and philosophy. On August 3rd, 1925 he married the 19 year old Gretha von Jeinsen. She gave him two children: Ernst in 1926 and Alexander in 1934.
At same time, his political ideas matured thanks to the veritable cauldron of agitation among the factions of German public opinion: the disastrous Treaty of Versailles, which the Weimar Republic had accepted without batting an eye at any of its clauses, was everywhere felt to be an unbearable Diktat. In the space of a few months Jünger had become one of the principal representatives of the national-revolutionary movement, an important part of the Conservative Revolution which extended to the “left” with the National Bolshevik movement rallying primarily around Ernst Niekisch.
Jünger’s political writings appeared during the central period of the Republic (the “Stresemann era”), a provisional period of respite and apparent calm which ended in 1929. He would later say: “One lived for the Idea alone.”[4]
Initially, his ideas were expressed in journals. In September 1925, a former Freikorps leader, Helmut Franke, who has just published a book entitled Staat im Staate (Berlin: Stahlhelm, 1924), launched the journal Die Standarte which set out to “contribute towards a spiritual deepening of the thought of the Front.” Jünger was on the editorial board, along with another representative of “soldatic nationalism,” the writer Franz Schauwecker, born in 1890. Initially published as a supplement of the weekly magazine Der Stahlhelm, the organ of the association of war veterans also called Stahlhelm,[5] directed by Wilhelm Kleinau, Die Standarte had a considerable circulation: approximately 170,000 readers. Between September 1925 and March 1926, Jünger published nineteen articles there. Helmut Franke signed his contributions with the pseudonym “Gracchus.” The whole anti-revolutionary young right published there: Werner Beumelburg, Franz Schauwecker, Hans Henning von Grote, Friedrich Wilhelm Heinz, Goetz Otto Stoffregen, etc.
In Die Standarte Jünger immediately adopted a quite radical tone, very different from that of most Stahlhelm members. In an article published in October 1925, he criticized the theory of the “stab in the back” (Dolchstoss), which was accepted by almost all nationalists, namely that the German army was not defeated at the front but by a “stab in the back” at home. Jünger also emphasized that certain revolutionaries of the far left had fought with distinction in the war.[6] Remarks of this kind caused a violent uproar. Quickly, the leaders of Stahlhelm moved to distance themselves from the young writer who had agitated their side.
In March 1926 Die Standarte was closed. But it was revived a month later under the abridged name Standarte with Jünger, Schauwecker, Kleinau, and Franke as co-editors. At this time, the ties with Stahlhelm were not entirely severed: the old soldiers continued to indirectly finance Standarte. Jünger and his friends reaffirmed their revolutionary calling. On June 3rd, 1926, Jünger published an appeal to all former front soldiers to unite for the creation of a “nationalist workers’ republic,” a call that found no echo.[7]
In August, at the urging of Otto Hörsing, co-founder of the Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot Gold, the Social Democrats’ security force, the government, using the pretext of an article about Walther Rathenau, banned Standarte for five months. Because of this, Franz Seldte the leader of Stahlhelm “decommissioned” its chief editor, Helmut Franke. In solidarity, Jünger quit, and in November the two, along with Wilhelm Weiss, became the editors of another journal, Arminius. (Standarte, under different editorship, continued until 1929.)
En 1927, Jünger left Leipzig for Berlin, where he formed close ties with former Freikorps members and with the young “bündisch” movement. The latter, oscillating between military discipline and a very firm esprit de corps, tried to reconcile the adventurous romanticism of the Wandervogel with a more hierarchical, communitarian mode of organization. In particular, Jünger was closely connected to Werner Lass, born in Berlin in 1902, who in 1924 had been the founder, with the old leader of the Rossbach Freikorps unit, of the Schilljugend (a youth movement named for major Schill, who was killed during the struggle for liberation against Napoleon’s occupation). In 1927, Lass left Rossbach and lauched Freischar Schill, a bündisch group of which Jünger rapidly became the mentor (Schirmherr). From October 1927 to March 1928, Lass and Jünger collaborated to publish the journal Der Vormarsch, created in June 1927 by another famous Freikorps leader, captain Ehrhardt.
“Losing the War to Win the Nation”
During this time Jünger had a number of literary and philosophical influences. During the war, the experience of the front enabled him to resolve the triple influence of such late 19th century French writers as Huysmans and Léon Bloy, of a kind of expressionism that still shows up clearly in Battle as Inner Experience and especially in the first version of The Adventurous Heart, and of a kind of Baudelairian dandyism clearly present in Sturm, an early novel recently published.[8]
Armin Mohler likens the young Jünger to the Barrès of Roman de l’Energie nationale: for the author of the Battle as Inner Experience, as for that of Scenes et doctrines du nationalisme, nationalism, a substitute religion, a mode of enlarging and strengthening the soul, results above all from a deliberate choice, the decisionist aspect of this orientation rising from the collapse of standards after the outbreak of the First World War.
The influence of Spengler and Nietzsche is also evident. In 1929, in an interview given to an English journalist, Jünger defined himself as a “disciple of Nietzsche,” stressing that Nietzsche was the first to challenge the fiction of an abstract universal man, “sundering” this fiction into two concrete, diametrically opposed types: the strong and the weak. In 1922 Jünger passionately read the first volume of The Decline of the West, then the second volume as soon as it was released in December of the same year, when he wrote Sturm.
However, as we shall see, Jünger was no passive disciple. He was far from following Nietzsche and Spengler in the totality of their positions. The decline of the west in his eyes was not an inescapable fate; there were other alternatives than simply acquiescing to the reign of “Caesars.” In the same way, if Jünger adopts Nietzsche’s questioning, it was first and foremost to bring it to an end.
Ultimately, the war represented the strongest influence. Jünger initially drew the lesson of agonism from it. The war must cause passion, but not hatred: the soldier on the other side of the trenches is not an incarnation of evil, but a simple figure of momentary adversity. It is because there is no absolute enemy (Feind), but only an adversary (Gegner), that “combat is always something holy.” Another lesson is that life is nourished by death and vice-versa: “The most precious knowledge that one acquired from the school of the war,” Jünger would write, “is that life, in its most secret heart, is indestructible” (Das Reich, I, October 1, 1930, 3).
Granted, the war had been lost. But in virtue of the principle of the equivalence of contraries, this defeat also demanded a positive analysis. First, defeat or victory is not the most important issue of the war. Fundamentally activistic, the national revolutionist ideology professes a certain contempt of goals. One does not fight to attain victory, one fights to make war. Moreover, Jünger claimed, “the war is less a war between nations, than a war between different kinds of men. In all the nations that took part in that war, there are both victors and vanquished” (Battle as Inner Experience).
Better yet, defeat can become the ferment of a victory. It represents the very condition of this victory. As the epigraph of his book Aufbruch der Nation (Berlin: Frundsberg, 1930), Franz Schauwecker used this stunning phrase: “It was necessary for us to lose the war to win the nation.” Perhaps remembering the words of Léon Bloy, “All that happens is worthy,” Jünger also says: “Germany was vanquished, but this defeat was salutary because it contributed to the destruction of the old Germany. . . . It was necessary to lose the war to win the nation.”
Defeated by the allied coalition, Germany will be able to return to herself and change in a revolutionary way. The defeat must be accepted as a means of transmutation: in a quasi-alchemical way, the experience of the front must be “transmuted” in a new experience of the life of the nation. Such is the base of “soldatic nationalism.”
It was in the war, Jünger continues, that German youth acquired “the assurance that the old paths no longer lead anywhere, and that it is necessary to blaze new ones.” An irreversible rupture (Umbruch), the war abolished all old values. Any reactionary attitude, any desire to retrogress, became impossible. The energy that had been unleashed in a specific fight of and for the fatherland, can from now on serve the fatherland in another form. The war, in other words, furnished the model for the peace. In The Worker, one reads: “The battle front and the Labor front are identical” (p. 109).
The central idea is that the war, superficially meaningless though it may appear, actually has a deep meaning. This cannot be grasped by rational investigation but only by feeling (ahnen). The positive interpretation that Jünger gives war is not, contrary to what is too often asserted, primarily dependent on the exaltation of “warrior values.” It proceeded from a political concern to find a purpose for which the sacrifice of the dead soldiers could no longer be considered “useless.”
From 1926 onwards, Jünger called tirelessly for the formation of an united front of nationalist groups and movements. At the same time, he sought—without notable success—to change them. For Jünger too, nationalism must be alchemically “transmuted.” It must be freed of any sentimental attachment to the old right and become revolutionary. It must take note of the decline of the bourgeois world apparent in the novels of Thomas Mann (Die Buddenbrooks) or Alfred Kubin (Die andere Seite).
From this point of view, what is essential is the fight against liberalism. In Arminius and Der Vormarsch, Jünger attacks the liberal order symbolized by the literati, the humanistic intellectuals who support an “anemic” society, the cynical internationalists whom Spengler sees as the true authors of the November Revolution and who claimed that the millions who perished in the Great War died for nothing.
But at the same time, he stigmatizes the “bourgeois tradition” invoked by the nationalists and the members of the Stahlhelm, these “petit bourgeois (Spiessbürger) who, because of the war, slipped into a lion’s skin” (Der Vormarsch, December 1927). Tirelessly, he took on the Wilhelmine spirit, the worship of the past, the taste of the pan-Germanists for “museology” (musealer Betrieb). In March 1926, he coined the term “neonationalism,” which he opposed to the “grandfather nationalism” (Altvaternationalismus).
Jünger defended Germany, but for him the nation is much more than a country. It is an idea: Germany is everywhere that this idea inflames the spirit. In April 1927, in Arminius Jünger takes an implicitly nominalist position: he states that he no longer believes in any general truths, any universal morals, any notion of “mankind” as a collective being everywhere sharing the the same conscience and the same rights. “We believe,” he says, “in the value of the particular” (Wir glauben an den Wert des Besonderen).
At a time when the traditional right preached individualism against collectivism, when the völkisch groups were enthralled with the return to the earth and the mystique of “nature,” Jünger exalted technology and condemned the individual. Born from bourgeois rationality, he explains, in Arminius, all-powerful technology has now turned against those who engendered it. The more technological the world becomes, the more the individual disappears; neonationalism must be the first to learn this lesson. Moreover, it is in the great cities “that the nation will be won”: for the national-revolutionists, “the city is a front.”
Around Jünger a “Berlin group” soon formed, where representatives of various currents of the Conservative Revolution met: Franz Schauwecker and Helmut Franke; the writer Ernst von Solomon; the Nietzschean anti-Christian Friedrich Hielscher, editor of Das Reich; the neoconservatives August Winnig (whom Jünger first met in the autumn of 1927 via the philosopher Alfred Baeumler) and Albrecht Erich Günther, co-editor with Wilhelm Stapel of Deutsches Volkstum; the national-Bolsheviks Ernst Niekisch and Karl O. Paetel; and of course Friedrich Georg Jünger, Ernst Jünger’s younger brother, who was also a recognized theorist.
Friedrich Georg Jünger, whose own development is of great importance to that of his elder brother, was born in Hanover on September 1, 1898. His career closely paralleled his brother’s. He too volunteered for the Great War; in 1916 he saw combat on the Somme and became the leader of his squad. In 1917 he was seriously wounded on the front in Flanders and spent several months in military hospitals. He returned to Hanover at the end of the hostilities, and after a brief period as a lieutenant in the Reichswehr, in 1920 he decided to study law, defending his doctoral dissertation in 1924.
From 1926 on, he regularly contributed articles to the journals in which his brother collaborated: Die Standarte, Arminius, Der Vormarsch, etc., and published in the collection Der Aufmarsch, edited by Ernst Jünger, a short essay entitled “Aufmarsch des Nationalismus” (Der Aufmarsch, Foreword by Ernst Jünger, Berlin, 1926; 2nd ed., Berlin: Vormarsch, 1928). He was influenced by Nietzsche, Sorel, Klages, Stefan George, and Rilke, whom he frequently quoted and to whom he dedicated a volume of his own poetry. The first study published on him, Franz Josef Schöningh, “Friedrich Georg Jünger und der preussische Stil,” in Hochland, February 1935, 476–77, connects him to the “Prussian style.”
In April 1928, Ernst Jünger entrusted the editorship of Der Vormarsch to his friend Friedrich Hielscher. Hielscher edited Der Vormarsch for a few months, after which the journal, published by Fritz Söhlmann, came under the control of the Jungdeutscher Orden (Jungdo) and took a completely different direction. On Hielscher, to whom he was very attached (and whom he called “Bodo” or “Bogo” in its notebooks), Jünger once said that he presented a curious “mixture of rationalism and naïveté.”
Born on May 31st, 1902 in Guben, after the Great War he joined the Freikorps, then he became involved in the bündisch movement, in particular the Freischar Schill of Werner Lass. In 1928, he published a doctoral thesis, Die Selbstherrlichkeit [Self-glory] (Berlin: Vormarsch, 1928), in which he sought to define the foundations of a German right based on Nietzsche, Spengler, and Max Weber. Moreover, he was, along with his friend Gerhard von Tevenar, passionate about “European social-regionalism” and sought to coordinate the actions of regionalist and separatist movements to create a “Europe of the fatherlands” on a federal model. Also influenced by the thought of Eriugena, Meister Eckart, Luther, Shakespeare, and Goethe, he wrote a “political theology of the Empire” entitled Das Reich (Berlin: Das Reich, 1931) and founded a small neopagan church that sometimes brought him closer to the völkisch movement.
Under the Third Reich, Hielscher played a directing role in the research services of the Ahnenerbe, while he and his students maintained close contact with the “inner emigration.” The Hitlerian regime reproached him in particular for “philosemitism” (cf. Das Reich, p. 332), ordering his arrest in September 1944. Thrown in prison, Hielscher escaped death only because of the intervention of Wolfram Sievers. After the war Hielscher published his autobiography Funfzig Jahre unter Deutschen [Fifty Years under Germans] (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1954), but the majority of its writings (the “liturgy” of his neopagan church, a verse version of the Nibelungenlied, etc.) remain unpublished. On its role in resistance against Hitler, see Rolf Kluth, “Die Widerstandgruppe Hielscher” [“The Hielscher Resistance Group”], Puis, December 7, 1980, 22–27.
A few months later, in January 1930, Jünger became co-editor with Werner Lass of Die Kommenden [The Coming], the weekly newspaper founded five years before by the writer Wilhelm Kotzde, who then had a great influence over the bündisch youth movement, particularly the tendency that had evolved toward National Bolshevism, with Hans Ebeling and especially Karl O. Paetel, who simultaneously collaborated on Die Kommenden, as well as Die sozialistische Nation [The Socialistic Nation] and Antifaschistische Briefe [Anti-Fascist Letters].
Regarded as one of the principal representatives, with Ernst Niekisch, of German National Bolshevism, Karl O. Paetel was born in Berlin on November 23rd, 1906. Bündisch, then national revolutionary, he adopted National Bolshevism about 1930. From 1928 to 1930 he edited the monthly magazine Das junge Volk [The Young People]. From 1931 to 1933 he published the journal Die sozialistische Nation.
Imprisoned several times after Hitler’s rise to power, in 1935 Paetel went to Prague, then Scandinavia. In 1939, he was stripped of his German nationality and condemned to death in absentia. Interned in French concentration camps between January and June 1940, he escaped, reached Portugal, and finally settled in New York in January 1941.
In the United States, he publishes from 1946 on the newspaper Deutsche Blatter [German Pages]. The same year, with Carl Zuckmayer and Dorothy Thompson, published a collection of documents on the “inner emigration”: Deutsche innere Emigration. Dokumente und Beitrage. Antinationalsozialistische Zeugnisse aus Deutschland [German Inner Emigration. Documents and Contributions. Anti-National Socialist Testimonies from Germany] (New York: Friedrich Krause, 1946).
He also devoted several essays to Jünger: Ernst Jünger. Die Wandlung eines deutschen Dichters und Patrioten [Ernst Jünger: The Transformation of a German Poet and Patriot] (New York: Friedrich Krause, 1946); Ernst Jünger. Weg und Wirkung. Eine Einfuhrung [Ernst Jünger: Way and Influence. An Introduction] (Stuttgart, 1949); Ernst Jünger. Eine Bibliographie [Ernst Jünger: A Bibliography] (Stuttgart: Lutz and Meyer, 1953); Ernst Jünger in Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten [Ernst Jünger in his Own Words and Pictures] (Reinbek near Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1962).
After having launched a new newspaper, Deutsche Gegenwart [Geman Present] (1947–1948), Paetel returned to Germany in 1949 and continued to publish a great number of works. Decorated in 1968 with the Bundesverdienstkreuz [Federal Service Cross], he died on May 4th, 1975. His personal papers are today in part in the archives of the Jugendbewegung (Burg Ludwigstein, Witzenhausen) and in part in the “Karl O. Paetel Collection” of the State University of New York, Albany. On Paetel, see his history of National Bolshevism: Versuchung oder Chance? Zur Geschichte of the deutschen Nationalbolschewismus [Temptation or Chance? Toward a History of German National Bolshevism] (Göttingen: Musterschmid, 1965) and his posthumous autobiography, published by Wolfgang D. Elfe and John M. Spalek: Reise ohne Urzeit. Autobiography [Journey without Beginning: Autobiography] (London: World of Books and Worms: Georg Heintz, 1982).
Jünger also collaborated on the journal Widerstand [Resistance] founded and edited by Niekisch since July 1926. The two men met in the autumn of 1927, and a true friendship is quickly rose between them. Jünger wrote: “If one wants to put the program that Niekisch developed in Widerstand in terms of stark alternatives, it would be something like this: against the bourgeois for the worker, against the western world for the east.” Indeed, National Bolshevism, which has multiple tendencies and varieties, joins the idea of class struggle to a communitarian, if not collectivist, idea of the nation. “Collectivization,” affirms Niekisch, “is the social form that the organic will must adopt if it is to affirm itself vis-à-vis the fatal effects of technology” (“Menschenfressende Technik” [“Man-Eating Technology”] in Widerstand, 4, 1931). According to Niekisch, in the final analysis, the national movement and the communist movement have the same adversary, as the fight against the occupation of the Ruhr appeared to demonstrate, and this is why the two “proletarian nations” of Germany and Russia must strive for an understanding. “The liberal democratic parliamentarian flees from decision,” declared Niekisch. “He does not want to fight, but to talk. . . . The Communist wants a decision. . . . In his roughness, there is something of the hardness of the military camp; in him there is more Prussian hardness than he knows, even more than in a Prussian bourgeois” (“Entscheidung” [“Decision”], Widerstand, Berlin, 1930, p. 134). These ideas influenced a considerable portion of the national revolutionary movement. Jünger himself, as seen by Louis Dupeux, was “fascinated by the problems of Bolshevism”—but was never a National Bolshevik in the strict sense.
In July of 1931, Werner Lass and Jünger withdrew from Die Kommenden. In September, Lass founded the journal Der Umsturz [Overthrow], which he made the organ of the Freischar Schill and which, until its disappearance in February 1933, openly promoted National Bolshevism. But Jünger was in a very different frame of mind. In the space of a few years, using a whole series of journals as so many walls for sticking up posters—it was, as he would write, a milk train, “that one gets on and gets off along the way”—he traversed the whole field of his properly political evolution. The watchwords he had formulated did not have the success that he hoped for; his calls for unity were not heard. For some time, Jünger felt estranged from all political currents. He had no more sympathy for the rising National Socialism than for the traditional national leagues. All the national movements, he explained in an article of Suddeutsche Monatshefte [South German Monthly] (September 1930, 843–45), be they traditionalist, legitimist, economist, reactionary, or National Socialist, draw their inspiration from the past, and, in this respect, are “liberal” and “bourgeois.” Divided between the neoconservatives and the National Bolsheviks, the national revolutionary groups no longer commanded respect. In fact, Jünger no longer believed in the possibility of collective action. (In the first version of The Adventurous Heart, Jünger wrote: “Today one can no longer make collective efforts for Germany” [p. 153]). As Niekisch was to emphasize in his autobiography (Erinerrungen eines deutschen Revolutionärs [Memories of a German Revolutionary] [Cologne: Wissenschaft u. Politik, 1974, vol. I, p. 191), Jünger intended to trace a more personal and interior way of dealing with the current situation. “Jünger, this perfect Prussian officer who subjects himself to the hardest discipline,” wrote Marcel Decombis, “would never again be able to fit in a collectivity” (Ernst Jünger [Sapwood-Montaigne, 1943]). His brother, who had abandoned his legal career in 1928, evolved in the same direction. He wrote on Greek poetry, the American novel, Kant, Dostoyevsky. The two brothers undertook a series of voyages: Sicily (1929), the Balearic Islands (1931), Dalmatia (1932), the Aegean Sea.
Ernst and Friedrich Georg Jünger continued, certainly, to publish some articles, particularly in Widerstand. (In total, Ernst Jünger published eleven articles in Standarte, twenty-eight in Arminius, twelve in Der Vormarsch, and eighteen in Widerstand. Like his brother, he collaborated on Widerstand until its prohibition, in December 1934.) But the properly journalistic period of their engagement was over. Between 1929 and 1932, Ernst Jünger concentrated all his efforts on new books, starting with the first version of Das abenteuerliche Herz (The Adventurous Heart, 1929), then the essay “Die totale Mobilmachung” (“Total Mobilization,” 1931), and finally Der Arbeiter. Herrschaft und Gestalt (The Worker: Domination and Figure), published in 1932 in Hamburg by the Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt of Benno Ziegler and reprinted many times before 1945.
Notes
Source: Alain de Benoist, “Ernst Jünger: La Figure du Travailleur entre les Dieux et les Titans,” Nouvelle Ecole No. 40 (Autumn 1983): 11–61.
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De Benoist, Alain. “Ernst Jünger: The Figure of The Worker Between the Gods & the Titans.” Originally published in three parts at Counter-Currents Publishing. Part 1: 6 April 2011. Part 2: 13 April 2011. Part 3: 26 July 2011. <http://www.counter-currents.com/2011/04/ernst-junger-the-figure-of-the-worker-part-1/ >; < http://www.counter-currents.com/2011/04/ernst-junger-figure-of-the-worker-part-2/ >; < http://www.counter-currents.com/2011/07/ernst-junger-the-figure-of-the-worker-between-the-gods-the-titans-part-3/ >.
Filed under New European Conservative
Soldier, Worker, Rebel, Anarch: Types & Figures in Ernst Jünger’s Writings
By Alain de Benoist
Translated by Greg Johnson
In Jünger’s writings, four great Figures appear successively, each corresponding to a quite distinct period of the author’s life. They are, chronologically, the Front Soldier, the Worker, the Rebel, and the Anarch. Through these Figures one can divine the passionate interest Jünger has always held toward the world of forms. Forms, for him, cannot result from chance occurrences in the sensible world. Rather, forms guide, on various levels, the ways sensible beings express themselves: the “history” of the world is above all morphogenesis. As an entomologist, moreover, Jünger was naturally inclined to classifications. Beyond the individual, he identifies the species or the kind. One can see here a subtle sort of challenge to individualism: “The unique and the typical exclude one another,” he writes. Thus, as Jünger sees it, the universe is one where Figures give epochs their metaphysical significance. In this brief esposition, I would like to compare and contrast the great Figures identified by Jünger.
* * *
The Front Soldier (Frontsoldat) is first of all a witness to the end of classical wars: wars that gave priority to the chivalrous gesture, that were organized around the concepts of glory and honor, that generally spared civilians, and that distinguished clearly between the Front and the Rear. “Though once we crouched in bomb craters, we still believed,” Jünger said, “that man was stronger than material. That proved to be an error.” Indeed, from then on, the “material” counted more than the human factor. This material factor signifies the irruption and dominion of technology. Technology imposes its own law, the law of impersonality and total war—a war simultaneously massive and abstract in its cruelty. At the same time, the Soldier becomes an impersonal actor. His very heroism is impersonal, because what counts most for him is no longer the goal or outcome of combat. It is not to win or lose, live or die. What counts is the spiritual disposition that leads him to accept his anonymous sacrifice. In this sense, the Front Soldier is by definition an Unknown Soldier, who forms a body, in all senses of the term, with the unit to which he belongs, like a tree which is not only a part but an exemplary incarnation of the forest.
The same applies to the Worker, who appears in 1932, in the famous book of that name, whose subtitle is: “Dominion and Figure.”[1] The common element of the Soldier and Worker is active impersonnality. They too are children of technology. Because the same technology that transformed war into monotonous “work,” drowning the chivalrous spirit in the mud of the trenches, has also transformed the world into a vast workshop where man is henceforth completely enthralled[2] by the imperatives of productivity. Soldier and Worker, finally, have the same enemy: the contemptible bourgeois liberal, the “last man” announced by Nietzsche, who venerates moral order, utility, and profit. Also the Worker and the Soldier back from the Front both want to destroy in order to create, to give up the last shreds of individualism in order to found a new world on the ruins of the old “petrified form of life.”
However, while the Soldier was only the passive object of the reign of technology, the Worker aims actively to identify himself with it. Far from being its object, or submitting to its manifestations, the Worker, on the contrary, seeks in all conscience to endorse the power of technology that he thinks will abolish the differences between the classes, as well as between peace and war, civilian and military. The Worker is no longer one who is “sacrificed to carry the burdens in the great deserts of fire,” as Jünger still put it in the The Forest Path,[3] but a being entirely devoted to “total mobilization.”[4] Thus the Figure of the Worker goes far beyond the Type of the Front Soldier. For the Worker—who dreams all the while of a Spartan, Prussian, or Bolshevik life, where the individual would be definitively outclassed by the Type—the Great War was only the anvil where another way of being in the world was forged. The Front Soldier limited himself in order to embody new norms of collective existence. The Worker, for his part, intends to transplant them into civilian life, to make them the law of the whole society.
The Worker is thus not merely the man who works (the most common meaning), any more than he is the man of a social class, i.e., of a given economic category (the historical meaning). He is the Worker in a metaphysical sense: the one who reveals Work as the general law of a world that devotes itself entirely to efficiency and productivity, even in leisure and rest.
The elements of Jünger’s worldview—his aesthetic and voluntarist conception of technology, his decisionism of every moment, the opposition of the Worker to the bourgeois, the Nietzschean will “to transvalue all values” which already underlay Jünger’s “soldatic nationalism” of the Twenties—are sometimes summarized with the phrase “heroic realism.” However, under the influence of events, Jünger’s reflection would soon undergo a decisive inflection, which took it in another direction.
The turn corresponds to the novel On the Marble Cliffs,[5] published in 1939. The heroes of the story, two brothers, herbalists from the Great Marina who recoil in horror at the inexorable outcome of the Great Forester’s enterprise, discover that there are weapons stronger than those that pierce and kill. Jünger, at that time, was not only informed by the rise of Nazism, he was influenced by his brother, Friedrich Georg Jünger, who in a famous book[6] was one of the first to work out a radical critique of the technological framework.[7] As children of technology, the Soldier and especially the Worker were on the side of the Titans. Yet Ernst Jünger came to see that the Titanic reign of the elemental leads straight to nihilism. He understood that the world should be neither interpreted nor changed, but viewed as the very source of the unveiling of truth (aletheia). He understood that technology is not necessarily antagonistic to bourgeois values, and that it transforms the world only by globalizing the desert. He understood that, behind history, timelessness returns to more essential categories, and that human time, marked off by the wheels of the watch, is an “imaginary time,” founded on an artifice that made men forgetful of their belonging to the world, a time that fixes the nature of their projects instead of being fixed by them, unlike the hourglass, the “elementary clock” whose flow obeys natural laws—a cyclic not a linear time. Jünger, in other words, realized that the outburst of the Titans is first and foremost a revolt against the gods. This is why he dismissed Prometheus. The collective Figures were succeeded by personal ones.
Against totalitarian despotism, the heroes of On the Marble Cliffs chose withdrawal, taking a distance. By this, they already announced the attitude of the Rebel, of whom Jünger would write: “The Rebel is . . . whoever the law of his nature puts in relation to freedom, a relation that in time brings him to a revolt against automatism and a refusal to accept its ethical consequence, fatalism.”
One sees by this that the Figure of the Rebel is directly connected to a meditation on freedom—and also on exclusion, since the Rebel is equally an outlaw. The Rebel is still a combatant, like the Front Soldier, but he is a combatant who repudiates active impersonnality, because he intends to preserve his freedom with respect to the cause he defends. In this sense, the Rebel cannot be identified with one system or another, even the one for which he fights. He is not at ease in any them. If the Rebel chooses marginalization, it is above all to guard against the forces of destruction, to break the encirclement, one might say, using a military metaphor that Jünger himself employs when he writes: “The incredible encirclement of man was prepared long ago by the theories that aim at giving a flawless logical explanation of the world and that march in lockstep with the development of technology.”
“The mysterious way goes towards the interior,” said Novalis. The Rebel is an emigrant to the interior, who seeks to preserve his freedom in the heart of the forests where “paths that go nowhere” intersect. This refuge, however, is ambiguous, because this sanctuary of organic life not yet absorbed by the mechanization of the world, represents—to the precise extent that it constitutes a universe foreign to human norms—the “great house of death, the very seat of the destructive danger.” Hence the position of the Rebel can only be provisional.
The last Figure, whom Jünger calls the Anarch, first appeared in 1977 in Eumeswil,[8] a “postmodern” novel intended as a sequel to Heliopolis[9] and set in the third millennium. Venator, the hero, no longer needs to resort to the forest to remain untouched by the ambient nihilism. It is enough for him to have reached an elevation that allows him to observe everything from a distance without needing to move away. Typical in this respect is his attitude toward power. Whereas the anarchist wants to abolish power, the Anarch is content to break all ties to it. The Anarch is not the enemy of power or authority, but he does not seek them, because he does not need them to become who he is. The Anarch is sovereign of himself—which amounts to saying that he shows the distance that exists between sovereignty, which does not require power, and power, which never confers sovereignty. “The Anarch,” Jünger writes, “is not the partner of the monarch, but his antipode, the man that power cannot grasp but is also dangerous to it. He is not the adversary of the monarch, but his opposite.” A true chameleon, the Anarch adapts to all things, because nothing reaches him. He is in service of history while being beyond it. He lives in all times at once, present, past, and future. Having crossed “the wall of time,” he is in the position of the pole star, which remains fixed while the whole starry vault turns around it, the central axis or hub, the “center of the wheel where time is abolished.” Thus, he can watch over the “clearing” which represents the place and occasion for the return of the gods. From this, one can see, as Claude Lavaud writes regarding Heidegger, that salvation lies “in hanging back, rather than crossing over; in contemplation, not in calculation; in the commemorative piety that opens thought to the revealing and concealing that together are the essence of aletheia.”[10]
What distinguishes the Rebel from the Anarch, is thus the quality of their voluntary marginalization: horizontal withdrawal for the first, vertical withdrawal for the second. The Rebel needs to take refuge in the forest, because he is a man without power or sovereignty, and because it is only there that he retains the conditions of his freedom. The Anarch himself is also without power, but it is precisely because he is without power that he is sovereign. The Rebel is still in revolt, while the Anarch is beyond revolt. The Rebel carries on in secret—he hides in the shadows—while the Anarch remains in plain sight. Finally, whereas the Rebel is banished by society, the Anarch banishes himself. He is not excluded; he is emancipated.
* * *
The advent of the Rebel and Anarch relegated the memory of the Front Soldier to the background, but it did not end the reign of the Worker. Admittedly, Jünger changed his opinion of what we should expect, but the conviction that this Figure really dominates today’s world was never abandoned. The Worker, defined as the “chief Titan who traverses the scene of our time,” is really the son of the Earth, the child of Prometheus. He incarnates this “telluric” power of which modern technology is the instrument. He is also a metaphysical Figure, because modern technology is nothing other than the realized essence of a metaphysics that sets man up as the master of a world transformed into an object. And with man, the Worker maintains a dialectic of possession: the Worker possesses man to the very extent that man believes he possesses the world by identifying himself with the Worker.
However, to the precise extent that they are the representatives of the elementary and telluric powers, the Titans continue to carry a message whose meaning orders our existence. Jünger no longer regards them as allies, but neither does he regard them as enemies. As is his habit, Jünger is a seismograph: he has a presentiment that the reign of the Titans announces the return of the gods, and that nihilism is a necessary part of the passage towards the regeneration of the world. To finish with nihilism, we must live it to its end—“passing the line” which corresponds to the “meridian zero”—because, as Heidegger says, the technological framework[11] (Ge-stell) is still a mode of being, not merely of its oblivion. This is why, if Jünger sees the Worker as a danger, he also says that this danger can be our salvation, because it is by it and through it, that it will be possible to exhaust the danger.
* * *
It is easy to see what differentiates the two couples formed, on the one hand, by the Front Soldier and the Worker, and on the other, by the Rebel and the Anarch. But one would be wrong to conclude from this that the “second Jünger,” of On the Marble Cliffs, is the antithesis of the first. Rather, this “second Jünger” actually represents a development, which was given a free course, of an inclination present from the beginning but obscured by the work of the writer-soldier and the nationalist polemicist. In Jünger’s first books, as well as in Battle as Inner Experience [12] and Storm,[13] one actually sees, between the lines of the narrative, an undeniable tendency toward the vita contemplativa. From the beginning, Jünger expresses a yearning for meditative reflection that descriptions of combat or calls to action cannot mask. This yearning is particularly evident in the first version of The Adventurous Heart,[14] where one can read not only a concern for a certain literary poetry, but also a reflection—that one could describe as both mineral and crystalline—on the immutability of things and on that which, in the very heart of the present, raises us up to cosmic signs and a recognition of the infinite, thus nurturing the “stereoscopic vision” in which two flat images merge into a single image to reveal the dimension of depth.
There is thus no contradiction between the four Figures, but only a progressive deepening, a kind of increasingly fine sketch that led Jünger, initially an actor of his time, then a judge and critic of his time, to place himself finally above his time in order to testify to what came before his century and what will come after him.
In The Worker, one already reads: “The more we dedicate ourselves to change, the more we must be intimately persuaded that behind it hides a calm being.” Throughout his life, Jünger never ceased approaching this “calm being.” While passing from manifest action to apparent non-action—while going, one might say, from beings to Being—he achieved an existential progression that finally allowed him to occupy the place of the Anarch, the unmoving center, the “central point of the turning wheel” from which all movement proceeds.
Appendix: On Type and Figure [15]
In 1963, in his book entitled Type—Name—Figure,[16] Jünger writes: “Figure and Type are higher forms of vision. The conception of Figures confers a metaphysical power, the apprehension of Types an intellectual power.” We will reconsider this distinction between Figure and Type. But let us note immediately that Jünger connects the ability to distinguish them with a higher form of vision, i.e., with a vision that goes beyond immediate appearances to seek and identify archetypes. Moreover, he implies that this higher form of vision merges with its object, i.e., with the Figure and the Type. Furthermore, he specifies: “The Type does not appear in nature, or the Figure in the universe. Both must be deciphered in the phenomena, like a force in its effects or a text in its characters.” Finally, he affirms that there exists a “typifying power of the universe,” which “seeks to pierce through the undifferentiated,” and which “acts directly on vision,” causing an “ineffable knowledge: intuition,” then conferring a name: “The things do not bear a name, names are conferred upon them.”
This concern with transcending immediate appearances should not be misinterpreted. Jünger does not offer us a new version of the Platonic myth of the cave. He does not suggest seeking the traces of another world in this world. On the contrary, in The Worker, he already denounced “the dualism of the world and its systems.” Likewise, in his Paris Diaries,[17] he wrote: “The visible contains all the signs that lead to the invisible. And the existence of the latter must be demonstrable in the visible model.” Thus for Jünger, there is transcendence only in immanence. And when he intends to seek the “things that are behind things,” to use the expression he employs in his “Letter to the Man in the Moon,” it is while being convinced, like Novalis, that “the real is just as magical as the magical is real.”[18]
One would also err gravely by comparing the Type to a “concept” and the Figure to an “idea.” “A Type,” Jünger writes, “is always stronger than an idea, even more so than a concept.” Indeed, the Type is apprehended by vision, i.e., as image, whereas the concept can be grasped only by thought. Thus to apprehend the Figure or the Type is not to leave the sensible world for some other world that constitutes its first cause, but to seek in the sensible world the invisible dimension that constitutes the “typifying power”: “We recognize individuals: the Type acts as the matrix of our vision. . . . That really shows that it is not so much the Type that we perceive but, in it and behind it, the power of the typifying source.”
The German word for Figure is Gestalt, which one generally translates as “form.”[19] The nuance is not unimportant, because it confirms that the Figure is anchored in the world of forms, i.e., in the sensible world, instead of being a Platonic idea, which would find in this world only its mediocre and deformed reflection. Goethe, in his time, was dismayed to learn that Schiller thought that his Ur-Plant (Urpflanze) (archetype) was an idea. The Figure is often misunderstood in the very same way, as Jünger himself emphasized. The Figure is on the side of vision as it is on the side of Being, which is consubstantial with the world. It is not on the side of verum, but of certum.
Let us now see what distinguishes the Figure and the Type. Compared to the Figure, which is more inclusive but also fuzzier, the Type is more limited. Its contours are relatively neat, which makes it a kind of intermediary between the phenomenon and the Figure: “It is,” says Jünger, “the model image of the phenomenon and the guarantor image of the Figure.” The Figure has a greater extension than the Type. It exceeds the Type, as the matrix that gives the form exceeds the form. In addition, if the Type qualifies a group, the Figure tends rather to qualify a reign or an epoch. Different Types can coexist alongside each other in the same time and place, but there is room for only one Figure. From this point of view, the relationship between the Figure and the Type is comparable to that of the One and the many. (This is why Jünger writes: “Monotheism can know, strictly speaking, only one Figure. That is why it demotes the gods to the rank of Types.”) That amounts to saying that the Figure is not only a more extensive Type, but that there is also a difference in nature between the Figure and the Type. The Figure can also give rise to Types, assigning them a mission and a meaning. Jünger gives the example of the ocean as an expanse distinct from all the specific seas: “The Ocean is formative of Types; it does not have a Type, it is a Figure.”
Can man set up a Figure like he does a Type? Jünger says that there is no single answer to this question, but nevertheless he tends to the negative. “The Figure,” he writes, “can be sustained, but not set up.” This means that the Figure can be neither conjured by words nor confined by thought. Whereas man can easily name Types, it is much more difficult to do anything with a Figure: “The risk is more singificant, because one approaches the undifferentiated to a greater extent than in naming Types.” The Type depends on man, who adapts it by naming it, whereas the Figure cannot be made our own. “The naming of Types,” Jünger stresses, “depends on man taking possession. On the other hand, when a Figure is named, we are right to suppose that it first takes possession of man.” Man has no access to the “homeland of Figures”: “What is conceived as a Figure is already configured.”
Insofar as it is of the metaphysical order, a Figure appears suddenly. It gives man a sign, leaving him free to ignore or recognize it. But man cannot grasp it by intuition alone. To know or to recognize a Figure implies a more profound contact, comparable to the grasp of kinship. Jünger does not hesitate here to speak about “divination.” A Figure is unveiled, released from oblivion, in the Heideggerian sense—released from the deepest levels of the undifferentiated, says Jünger—by the presence of Being. But at the same time, as it reveals itself, as it rises to appearance and effective power, it “loses its essence”—like a god who chooses to incarnate himself in human form. Only this “devaluation” of its ontological status makes it possible for man to know what connects him to a Figure that he cannot grasp by thought or by name. Thus the Figure is the “highest representation that man can make of the ineffable and its power.”
In light of the preceeding, can one say that the four Jüngerian Figures are really Figures and not Types? In all rigor, only the Worker fully answers the definition of a Figure insofar as he describes an epoch. The Soldier, the Rebel, and the Anarch would instead be Types.
Jünger writes that, for man, the ability to set up Types proceeds from a “magic power.” He also notes that nowadays this human aptitude is declining and suggests that we are seeing the rise of the undifferentiated, i.e., a “deterioration of Types,” the most visible sign that the old world is giving way to a new one, whose Types have not yet appeared and thus still cannot be named. “To manage to conceive new Types,” he writes, “the spirit must melt the old ones. . . . It is only in the glimmer of the dawn that the undifferentiated can receive new names.” This is why, in the end, he wants to be confident: “It is foreseeable that man will recover his aptitude to set up Types and will thus return to his supreme competence.”
Notes
Source: “Types et figures dans l’oeuvre d’Ernst Jünger: Le Soldat du front, le Travailleur, le Rebelle et l’Anarque,” was originally presented as a lecture in Rome in May 1997.
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De Benoist, Alain. “Soldier, Worker, Rebel, Anarch: Types & Figures in Ernst Jünger’s Writings.” Counter-Currents Publishing, 29 March 2011. <http://www.counter-currents.com/2011/03/soldier-worker-rebel-anarch/ >.
Filed under New European Conservative
“Hugo von Hofmannsthal and the Interwar European Right” by Paul Gottfried (PDF – 119 KB):
Hugo von Hofmannsthal & the Interwar European Right
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Gottfried, Paul. “Hugo von Hofmannsthal and the Interwar European Right.” Modern Age, Vol. 49, No. 4 (Fall 2007), pp. 508-519.
Filed under New European Conservative
The Revolutionary Conservative Critique of Oswald Spengler
By Lucian Tudor
Oswald Spengler is by now well-known as one of the major thinkers of the German Conservative Revolution of the early 20th Century. In fact, he is frequently cited as having been one of the most determining intellectual influences on German Conservatism of the interwar period – along with Arthur Moeller van den Bruck and Ernst Jünger – to the point where his cultural pessimist philosophy is seen to be representative of Revolutionary Conservative views in general (although in reality most Revolutionary Conservatives held more optimistic views).[1]
To begin our discussion, we shall provide a brief overview of the major themes of Oswald Spengler’s philosophy.[2] According to Spengler, every High Culture has its own “soul” (this refers to the essential character of a Culture) and goes through predictable cycles of birth, growth, fulfillment, decline, and demise which resemble that of the life of a plant. To quote Spengler:
A Culture is born in the moment when a great soul awakens out of the proto-spirituality of ever-childish humanity, and detaches itself, a form from the formless, a bounded and mortal thing from the boundless and enduring. It blooms on the soil of an exactly-definable landscape, to which plant-wise it remains bound. It dies when the soul has actualized the full sum of its possibilities in the shape of peoples, languages, dogmas, arts, states, sciences, and reverts into the proto-soul.[3]
There is an important distinction in this theory between Kultur (“Culture”) and Zivilisation (“Civilization”). Kultur refers to the beginning phase of a High Culture which is marked by rural life, religiosity, vitality, will-to-power, and ascendant instincts, while Zivilisation refers to the later phase which is marked by urbanization, irreligion, purely rational intellect, mechanized life, and decadence. Although he acknowledged other High Cultures, Spengler focused particularly on three High Cultures which he distinguished and made comparisons between: the Magian, the Classical (Greco-Roman), and the present Western High Culture. He held the view that the West, which was in its later Zivilisation phase, would soon enter a final imperialistic and “Caesarist” stage – a stage which, according to Spengler, marks the final flash before the end of a High Culture.[4]
Perhaps Spengler’s most important contribution to the Conservative Revolution, however, was his theory of “Prussian Socialism,” which formed the basis of his view that conservatives and socialists should unite. In his work he argued that the Prussian character, which was the German character par excellence, was essentially socialist. For Spengler, true socialism was primarily a matter of ethics rather than economics. This ethical, Prussian socialism meant the development and practice of work ethic, discipline, obedience, a sense of duty to the greater good and the state, self-sacrifice, and the possibility of attaining any rank by talent. Prussian socialism was differentiated from Marxism and liberalism. Marxism was not true socialism because it was materialistic and based on class conflict, which stood in contrast with the Prussian ethics of the state. Also in contrast to Prussian socialism was liberalism and capitalism, which negated the idea of duty, practiced a “piracy principle,” and created the rule of money.[5]
Oswald Spengler’s theories of predictable culture cycles, of the separation between Kultur and Zivilisation, of the Western High Culture as being in a state of decline, and of a non-Marxist form of socialism, have all received a great deal of attention in early 20th Century Germany, and there is no doubt that they had influenced Right-wing thought at the time. However, it is often forgotten just how divergent the views of many Revolutionary Conservatives were from Spengler’s, even if they did study and draw from his theories, just as an overemphasis on Spenglerian theory in the Conservative Revolution has led many scholars to overlook the variety of other important influences on the German Right. Ironically, those who were influenced the most by Spengler – not only the German Revolutionary Conservatives, but also later the Traditionalists and the New Rightists – have mixed appreciation with critique. It is this reality which needs to be emphasized: the majority of Conservative intellectuals who have appreciated Spengler have simultaneously delivered the very significant message that Spengler’s philosophy needs to be viewed critically, and that as a whole it is not acceptable.
The most important critique of Spengler among the Revolutionary Conservative intellectuals was that made by Arthur Moeller van den Bruck.[6] Moeller agreed with certain basic ideas in Spengler’s work, including the division between Kultur and Zivilisation, with the idea of the decline of the Western Culture, and with his concept of socialism, which Moeller had already expressed in an earlier and somewhat different form in Der Preussische Stil (“The Prussian Style,” 1916).[7] However, Moeller resolutely rejected Spengler’s deterministic and fatalistic view of history, as well as the notion of destined culture cycles. Moeller asserted that history was essentially unpredictable and unfixed: “There is always a beginning (…) History is the story of that which is not calculated.”[8] Furthermore, he argued that history should not be seen as a “circle” (in Spengler’s manner) but rather a “spiral,” and a nation in decline could actually reverse its decline if certain psychological changes and events could take place within it.[9]
The most radical contradiction with Spengler made by Moeller van den Bruck was the rejection of Spengler’s cultural morphology, since Moeller believed that Germany could not even be classified as part of the “West,” but rather that it represented a distinct culture in its own right, one which even had more in common in spirit with Russia than with the “West,” and which was destined to rise while France and England fell.[10] However, we must note here that the notion that Germany is non-Western was not unique to Moeller, for Werner Sombart, Edgar Julius Jung, and Othmar Spann have all argued that Germans belonged to a very different cultural type from that of the Western nations, especially from the culture of the Anglo-Saxon world. For these authors, Germany represented a culture which was more oriented towards community, spirituality, and heroism, while the modern “West” was more oriented towards individualism, materialism, and capitalistic ethics. They further argued that any presence of Western characteristics in modern Germany was due to a recent poisoning of German culture by the West which the German people had a duty to overcome through sociocultural revolution.[11]
Another key intellectual of the German Conservative Revolution, Hans Freyer, also presented a critical analysis of Spenglerian philosophy.[12] Due to his view that that there is no certain and determined progress in history, Freyer agreed with Spengler’s rejection of the linear view of progress. Freyer’s philosophy of culture also emphasized cultural particularism and the disparity between peoples and cultures, which was why he agreed with Spengler in terms of the basic conception of cultures possessing a vital center and with the idea of each culture marking a particular kind of human being. Being a proponent of a community-oriented state socialism, Freyer found Spengler’s anti-individualist “Prussian socialism” to be agreeable. Throughout his works, Freyer had also discussed many of the same themes as Spengler – including the integrative function of war, hierarchies in society, the challenges of technological developments, cultural form and unity – but in a distinct manner oriented towards social theory.[13]
However, Freyer argued that the idea of historical (cultural) types and that cultures were the product of an essence which grew over time were already expressed in different forms long before Spengler in the works of Karl Lamprecht, Wilhelm Dilthey, and Hegel. It is also noteworthy that Freyer’s own sociology of cultural categories differed from Spengler’s morphology. In his earlier works, Freyer focused primarily on the nature of the cultures of particular peoples (Völker) rather than the broad High Cultures, whereas in his later works he stressed the interrelatedness of all the various European cultures across the millennia. Rejecting Spengler’s notion of cultures as being incommensurable, Freyer’s “history regarded modern Europe as composed of ‘layers’ of culture from the past, and Freyer was at pains to show that major historical cultures had grown by drawing upon the legacy of past cultures.”[14] Finally, rejecting Spengler’s historical determinism, Freyer had “warned his readers not to be ensnared by the powerful organic metaphors of the book [Der Untergang des Abendlandes] … The demands of the present and of the future could not be ‘deduced’ from insights into the patterns of culture … but were ultimately based on ‘the wager of action’ (das Wagnis der Tat).”[15]
Yet another important Conservative critique of Spengler was made by the Italian Perennial Traditionalist philosopher Julius Evola, who was himself influenced by the Conservative Revolution but developed a very distinct line of thought. In his The Path of Cinnabar, Evola showed appreciation for Spengler’s philosophy, particularly in regards to the criticism of the modern rationalist and mechanized Zivilisation of the “West” and with the complete rejection of the idea of progress.[16] Some scholars, such as H.T. Hansen, stress the influence of Spengler’s thought on Evola’s thought, but it is important to remember that Evola’s cultural views differed significantly from Spengler’s due to Evola’s focus on what he viewed as the shifting role of a metaphysical Perennial Tradition across history as opposed to historically determined cultures.[17]
In his critique, Evola pointed out that one of the major flaws in Spengler’s thought was that he “lacked any understanding of metaphysics and transcendence, which embody the essence of each genuine Kultur.”[18] Spengler could analyze the nature of Zivilisation very well, but his irreligious views caused him to have little understanding of the higher spiritual forces which deeply affected human life and the nature of cultures, without which one cannot clearly grasp the defining characteristic of Kultur. As Robert Steuckers has pointed out, Evola also found Spengler’s analysis of Classical and Eastern cultures to be very flawed, particularly as a result of the “irrationalist” philosophical influences on Spengler: “Evola thinks this vitalism leads Spengler to say ‘things that make one blush’ about Buddhism, Taoism, Stoicism, and Greco-Roman civilization (which, for Spengler, is merely a civilization of ‘corporeity’).”[19] Also problematic for Evola was “Spengler’s valorization of ‘Faustian man,’ a figure born in the Age of Discovery, the Renaissance and humanism; by this temporal determination, Faustian man is carried towards horizontality rather than towards verticality.”[20]
Finally, we must make a note of the more recent reception of Spenglerian philosophy in the European New Right and Identitarianism: Oswald Spengler’s works have been studied and critiqued by nearly all major New Right and Identitarian intellectuals, including especially Alain de Benoist, Dominique Venner, Pierre Krebs, Guillaume Faye, Julien Freund, and Tomislav Sunic. The New Right view of Spenglerian theory is unique, but is also very much reminiscent of Revolutionary Conservative critiques of Moeller van den Bruck and Hans Freyer. Like Spengler and many other thinkers, New Right intellectuals also critique the “ideology of progress,” although it is significant that, unlike Spengler, they do not do this to accept a notion of rigid cycles in history nor to reject the existence of any progress. Rather, the New Right critique aims to repudiate the unbalanced notion of linear and inevitable progress which depreciates all past culture in favor of the present, while still recognizing that some positive progress does exist, which it advocates reconciling with traditional culture to achieve a more balanced cultural order.[21] Furthermore, addressing Spengler’s historical determinism, Alain de Benoist has written that “from Eduard Spranger to Theodor W. Adorno, the principal reproach directed at Spengler evidently refers to his ‘fatalism’ and to his ‘determinism.’ The question is to know up to what point man is prisoner of his own history. Up to what point can one no longer change his course?”[22]
Like their Revolutionary Conservative precursors, New Rightists reject any fatalist and determinist notion of history, and do not believe that any people is doomed to inevitable decline; “Decadence is therefore not an inescapable phenomenon, as Spengler wrongly thought,” wrote Pierre Krebs, echoing the thoughts of other authors.[23] While the New Rightists accept Spengler’s idea of Western decline, they have posed Europe and the West as two antagonistic entities. According to this new cultural philosophy, the genuine European culture is represented by numerous traditions rooted in the most ancient European cultures, and must be posed as incompatible with the modern “West,” which is the cultural emanation of early modern liberalism, egalitarianism, and individualism.
The New Right may agree with Spengler that the “West” is undergoing decline, “but this original pessimism does not overshadow the purpose of the New Right: The West has encountered the ultimate phase of decadence, consequently we must definitively break with the Western civilization and recover the memory of a Europe liberated from the egalitarianisms…”[24] Thus, from the Identitarian perspective, the “West” is identified as a globalist and universalist entity which had harmed the identities of European and non-European peoples alike. In the same way that Revolutionary Conservatives had called for Germans to assert the rights and identity of their people in their time period, New Rightists call for the overcoming of the liberal, cosmopolitan Western Civilization to reassert the more profound cultural and spiritual identity of Europeans, based on the “regeneration of history” and a reference to their multi-form and multi-millennial heritage.
Notes
[1] An example of such an assertion regarding cultural pessimism can be seen in “Part III. Three Major Expressions of Neo-Conservatism” in Klemens von Klemperer, Germany’s New Conservatism: Its History and Dilemma in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968).
[2] To supplement our short summary of Spenglerian philosophy, we would like to note that one the best overviews of Spengler’s philosophy in English is Stephen M. Borthwick, “Historian of the Future: An Introduction to Oswald Spengler’s Life and Works for the Curious Passer-by and the Interested Student,” Institute for Oswald Spengler Studies, 2011, <https://sites.google.com/site/spenglerinstitute/Biography>.
[3] Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West Vol. 1: Form and Actuality (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1926), p. 106.
[4] Ibid.
[5] See “Prussianism and Socialism” in Oswald Spengler, Selected Essays (Chicago: Gateway/Henry Regnery, 1967).
[6] For a good overview of Moeller’s thought, see Lucian Tudor, “Arthur Moeller van den Bruck: The Man & His Thought,” Counter-Currents Publishing, 17 August 2012, <http://www.counter-currents.com/2012/08/arthur-moeller-van-den-bruck-the-man-and-his-thought/>.
[7] See Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair (Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1974), pp. 238-239, and Alain de Benoist, “Arthur Moeller van den Bruck,” Elementos: Revista de Metapolítica para una Civilización Europea No. 15 (11 June 2011), p. 30, 40-42. <http://issuu.com/sebastianjlorenz/docs/elementos_n__15>.
[8] Arthur Moeller van den Bruck as quoted in Benoist, “Arthur Moeller van den Bruck,” p. 41.
[9] Ibid., p. 41.
[10] Ibid., pp. 41-43.
[11] See Fritz K. Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic Community, 1890–1933 (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1990), pp. 183 ff.; John J. Haag, Othmar Spann and the Politics of “Totality”: Corporatism in Theory and Practice (Ph.D. Thesis, Rice University, 1969), pp. 24-26, 78, 111.; Alexander Jacob’s introduction and “Part I: The Intellectual Foundations of Politics” in Edgar Julius Jung, The Rule of the Inferiour, Vol. 1 (Lewiston, New York: Edwin Mellon Press, 1995).
[12] For a brief introduction to Freyer’s philosophy, see Lucian Tudor, “Hans Freyer: The Quest for Collective Meaning,” Counter-Currents Publishing, 22 February 2013, <http://www.counter-currents.com/2013/02/hans-freyer-the-quest-for-collective-meaning/>.
[13] See Jerry Z. Muller, The Other God That Failed: Hans Freyer and the Deradicalization of German Conservatism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), pp. 78-79, 120-121.
[14] Ibid., p. 335.
[15] Ibid., p. 79.
[16] See Julius Evola, The Path of Cinnabar (London: Integral Tradition Publishing, 2009), pp. 203-204.
[17] See H.T. Hansen, “Julius Evola’s Political Endeavors,” in Julius Evola, Men Among the Ruins: Postwar Reflections of a Radical Traditionalist (Rochester: Inner Traditions, 2002), pp. 15-17.
[18] Evola, Path of Cinnabar, p. 204.
[19] Robert Steuckers, “Evola & Spengler”, Counter-Currents Publishing, 20 September 2010, <http://www.counter-currents.com/2010/09/evola-spengler/> .
[20] Ibid.
[21] In a description that applies as much to the New Right as to the Eurasianists, Alexander Dugin wrote of a vision in which “the formal opposition between tradition and modernity is removed… the realities superseded by the period of Enlightenment obtain a legitimate place – these are religion, ethnos, empire, cult, legend, etc. In the same time, a technological breakthrough, economical development, social fairness, labour liberation, etc. are taken from the Modern” (See Alexander Dugin, “Multipolarism as an Open Project,” Journal of Eurasian Affairs Vol. 1, No. 1 (September 2013), pp. 12-13).
[22] Alain de Benoist, “Oswald Spengler,” Elementos: Revista de Metapolítica para una Civilización Europea No. 10 (15 April 2011), p. 13.<http://issuu.com/sebastianjlorenz/docs/elementos_n__10>.
[23] Pierre Krebs, Fighting for the Essence (London: Arktos, 2012), p. 34.
[24] Sebastian J. Lorenz, “El Decadentismo Occidental, desde la Konservative Revolution a la Nouvelle Droite,”Elementos No. 10, p. 5.
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Tudor, Lucian. “The Revolutionary Conservative Critique of Oswald Spengler.” Tankesmedjan Motpol, 7 November 2014. <http://www.motpol.nu/english/2014/11/07/the-revolutionary-conservative-critique-of-oswald-spengler/ >.
Note: See also the mentions of various other Right-wing critiques of Spengler which are discussed by Karlheinz Weißmann in the editorial on Oswald Spengler in Sezession im Netz (May 2005): <http://www.sezession.de/wp-content/uploads/alte_nummern/sezession_spengler.pdf > (See alt. link).
Additional Note: This essay was also republished in Lucian Tudor’s From the German Conservative Revolution to the New Right: A Collection of Essays on Identitarian Philosophy (Santiago, Chile: Círculo de Investigaciones PanCriollistas, 2015).
Filed under New European Conservative
“Kameradschaftsbund: Contribution to the history of Czech-German relationship” by Lukáš Novotný (PDF – 2.3 MB & 2.4 MB):
Kameradschaftsbund – Contribution to the history of Czech-German relationship (Part 1)
Kameradschaftsbund – Contribution to the history of Czech-German relationship (Part 2)
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NOVOTNÝ, Lukáš: “Kameradschaftsbund. Contribution to the history of Czech-German relationship (Part one).” In: Prague Papers on the History of International Relations, Prague – Vienna, Institute of World History, Faculty of Arts and Philosophy, Charles University Prague [Filozofická fakulta Univerzity Karlovy v Praze] – Institute of World European History, Faculty of Historical and Cultural Sciences, University of Vienna, 2008, s. 291–309. ISBN 978-80-7308-254-3. <http://usd.ff.cuni.cz/?q=system/files/novotny%20kamerad.pdf >.
NOVOTNÝ, Lukáš: “Kameradschaftsbund. A Contribution to the History of the Czech-German Relationship (Part two).” In: Prague Papers on the History of International Relations, Prague – Vienna, Institute of World History, Faculty of Arts and Philosophy, Charles University Prague [Filozofická fakulta Univerzity Karlovy v Praze] – Institute of World European History, Faculty of Historical and Cultural Sciences, University of Vienna, 2009, s. 387–405. ISSN 1803-7356. ISBN 978-80-7308-296-3. <http://usd.ff.cuni.cz/?q=system/files/novotny%20kamarad.pdf >.
Note: See also “Othmar Spann: A Catholic Radical Traditionalist” by Lucian Tudor: <https://neweuropeanconservative.wordpress.com/2014/06/23/othmar-spann-tudor/ >.
Filed under New European Conservative
The Political Soldier: Carl Schmitt’s Theory of the Partisan
By Greg Johnson
So powerful is the civilizing genius of European man that, for a brief time, we even managed to tame war itself. But not all wars could be civilized, only those between civilized European states. The rules of war did not apply to wars against non-state actors, such as colonial wars against savages, civil wars and revolutions in which the state is up for grabs, and irregular warfare against partisans or guerrillas, which is the subject of Carl Schmitt’s Theory of the Partisan (1962).[1]
Theory of the Partisan & The Concept of the Political
Schmitt subtitles Theory of the Partisan, an “Intermediate Commentary on the Concept of the Political,” thus linking it to his classic treatise The Concept of the Political (1932), in which Schmitt both defines the political and defends it from forms of anti-political utopianism.
For Schmitt, the political arises from the fact of human diversity: there are many different peoples and subgroups with distinct identities and ways of life that can, in principle, conflict with one another. These differences give rise to enmity, which is a serious matter because it can lead to war. Politics arises out of enmity, and one of the chief aims of politics is to manage enmity. For Schmitt, therefore, the political does not refer to routine “domestic” politics but rather to grander, potentially bloody affairs: foreign policy, warfare, civil war, and revolution. Domestic relations can become political in Schmitt’s sense if they become sufficiently polarized, but they cease being domestic if they give rise to civil war or revolution.
Schmitt defends the political against anti-political forms of utopianism, including liberalism, anarchism, pacifism, and global capitalism. Of course in ordinary parlance, these are “political” ideologies, but in Schmitt’s sense of the political they are anti-political because they aim at the elimination of enmity, the underlying condition of which is diversity. Such utopianism is doomed, however, because utopians have enemies too, namely political realists like Schmitt and all those who wish to preserve their distinct collective identities from global homogenization.
Furthermore, Schmitt argues that attempts to eliminate enmity actually intensify it, for the enmity between finite peoples can be contained by the rules of warfare and concluded by a treaty of peace. Utopians, however, claim to fight in the name of all humanity. Their enemies are thus the enemies of humanity. But one cannot sign a peace treaty with the enemies of humanity. Thus war can only end with the enemy’s defeat and complete annihilation as an independent people, whether through assimilation or outright extermination.
Theory of the Partisan is a commentary on The Concept of the Political insofar as civilized warfare, one of the great achievements of European politics, is defined in contradistinction to non-civilized warfare, including partisan warfare, which Schmitt examines in detail, for it not only throws light on the nature of civilized warfare but also on its collapse into the uncivilized warfare of the 20th century and beyond.
Limited & Unlimited Warfare
The rules of European limited or “bracketed” warfare evolved slowly over centuries, establishing clear distinctions between war vs. peace, combatants vs. non-combatants, and enemies vs. criminals. Schmitt’s point of departure, however, is the Congress of Vienna of 1814–1815, the post-Napoleonic restoration which codified what he calls the “classical” laws of limited warfare, which remained in effect to the end of the First World War.
Regular warfare is waged between state actors that recognize one another as bearers of a jus belli, the right to conduct war. The other side of the jus belli is the right to conclude peace. Bearers of the jus belli are not criminals; otherwise it would not be possible to conclude peace with them. A criminal must simply be defeated and destroyed as an independent agent if not altogether.
The rules of regular warfare did not apply to what Schmitt calls “colonial warfare,” which is directed against peoples who were regarded as savages and sometimes against other European colonizers.
When European powers wished to conclude peace with savages whom they could not destroy, they were capable of recognizing them as sovereign peoples, e.g., the Maori in New Zealand and the various Indian tribes of North America, which were treated as nations that could sign treaties. They may have been conquered peoples, but they were still recognized as peoples.
Of course, unless they are assimilated or exterminated, conquered peoples remain distinct peoples whether or not they are recognized as such by their conquerors. Anti-colonial warfare is simply a matter of a conquered people re-asserting its sovereignty and fighting to regain its independence.
Schmitt’s notion of colonial warfare seems to subsume all wars of conquest and assimilation or extermination, in which the enemy ceases to exist as a distinct people—even a conquered people—and a bearer of the jus belli. One cannot sign a peace treaty with an enemy that no longer exists, which is the only possible end of “unlimited” warfare.
Civil war is a war between multiple parties for control of a single state. Each party demands to be recognized as a state actor, but it cannot extend that recognition to its rivals, which have to be treated as rebels and criminals. Civil wars end when one party is left in control of the state and the others are dissolved or destroyed. If the parties to a civil war recognize each other as legitimate state actors, this amounts to the partition of the state, in which case we no longer have a civil war, but a war of partition or secession.
A revolution is pretty much the same thing as a civil war. When a civil war begins, the party in power regards its rivals as revolutionaries who seek to overthrow it, and when a revolution is launched, the outcome is generally decided by civil war, unless the existing state is too weak to resist and simply collapses or the revolutionaries are so weak that they can be quashed simply by the police.
The American Revolution was not really a revolution or a civil war but an anti-colonial war of secession. The American Revolutionaries never contemplated overthrowing George III altogether. They merely wished to secede from his empire. Indeed, the American revolutionaries had to recognize the legitimacy of the British throne, because the colonies needed the British to recognize them back, as legitimate states with which a peace treaty could be concluded.
Regular & Irregular Troops
Theory of the Partisan is based on two lectures delivered by Schmitt in March of 1962 in Franco’s Spain. Because of his Spanish audience, Schmitt begins his discussion of partisan warfare with the Spanish guerilla war against Napoleon from 1808–1813.
The term “partisan,” however, appears as early as 1595, in French decrees regarding enemy invasions which use the terms “partisan” and “parti de guerre” (p. 17, n23). In his Translator’s Introduction, G. L. Ulmen quotes Johan Heinrich Zedler’s 1740 dictionary definition of Parthey, Parti:
. . . a group of soldiers on horseback or on foot, which is sent out by a general to do damage to the enemy by ruses and speed, or to investigate his condition. . . . It has to have valid passports, letters of marque, or salviguards, otherwise they are considered highway robbers. The leader of such a party is called a Partheygänger [party-follower] or partisan. (p. X.)
Here we have two of the chief characteristics of the partisan in Schmitt’s terms: (1) the partisan is an “irregular” soldier, which means that he has an ambiguous legal status vis-à-vis regular soldiers, hence the risk of being treated as a mere criminal and the need to maintain some connection to regularity in order to avoid summary execution, and (2) the partisan is characterized by mobility and guile.
Partisan warfare played a large role in the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), particularly in the American theater, where it was known as the French and Indian War. The partisan techniques of the French and Indian War were later used to great effect by the colonists in the American Revolutionary War.
Johann Ewald (1744–1813), who fought in Europe in the Seven Years’ War and in America during the Revolutionary War as a company commander in the Hessian Field Jaeger Corps, published a treatise on partisan warfare in 1785 entitled Über den kleinen Krieg (On Small War), which has been translated as Treatise on Partisan Warfare.[2]
Four Characteristics of the Partisan
Schmitt discusses four traits of the partisan: (1) irregularity, (2) “intense political engagement,” (3) tactical versatility and speed, and (4) a “telluric” character.
Irregularity: Regular troops have four main traits: (1) responsible officers, (2) symbols that are visible (uniforms, flags) and fixed (one cannot wear enemy uniforms or fly enemy flags), (3) open display of weapons, and (4) observance of the rules of warfare, which would include, for example, taking prisoners and tending the wounded. Irregular or partisan warfare violates some or all of these rules, particularly the second and third.
Political Engagement: The original sense of “partisan” is simply someone who participates in warfare in an irregular way. Soldiers, of course, participate in warfare, but they are supposed to, so they are not called partisans. But when somebody participates in warfare who should not, such as an armed peasantry, they are called partisans. When regular soldiers participate in warfare in an irregular fashion, they are called partisans as well.
Schmitt, however, wishes to characterize partisans as political partisans, by which he means they fight for a particular political ideology. Of course ideological partisans, such as Marxist guerrillas and Muslim jihadists, have been very prominent since the Second World War. But I see no reason why partisans need necessarily to be particularly politically conscious or engaged, for they can simply fight to repel invaders from their homelands.
Schmitt claims that the political engagement of the partisan is one of the marks distinguishing him from a mere member of a criminal gang. But one could say the same thing about the partisan who fights merely for hearth and home.
Tactical Versatility and Speed: Partisans are often characterized as “light” troops: lightly armed, lightly armored, and lightly provisioned. Partisans travel and fight light because they put a premium on speed, which gives them a tactical advantage when engaging heavily armed regular troops. Partisans are also characterized by strategic flexibility, moving rapidly from attack to retreat. To offset the advantages of more heavily armed opponents, partisans also use guile, disguising themselves as civilians or even as enemy soldiers, carrying concealed weapons, laying traps and ambushes, etc. Schmitt saw that all of these traits can only be enhanced by technological progress, particularly in transportation and communications.
“Telluric” Character: Schmitt also characterizes partisans as having a “telluric,” i.e., earth-related, character. Specifically, the partisan is tied to his homeland, which he defends from invaders. Schmitt, however, recognizes that the partisan loses his telluric character if he is committed to an aggressive global ideology (e.g., Communism, Islam, liberal democracy) and takes advantage of modern advances in transportation and communication.
Guerrillas, Terrorists & Mercenaries
There is no real difference between a partisan and a guerrilla. The Spanish word for partisan warfare, “guerrilla,” simply means “small war.” In Spanish, guerrilla fighters are called “guerrilleros,” but in English as early as 1809, they were called “guerrillas.”
What is the relationship of partisan warfare to terrorism? Schmitt does not deal with this question, but I would like to suggest an answer that is consistent with his position. It is very tempting to conflate partisans with terrorists, since the terrorists we see on TV fit the partisan model. But that strikes me as a mistake.
The distinctive trait of terrorism is that it does not respect the distinction between combatants and non-combatants. Terrorists target non-combatants in order to terrorize them, in the hope that it will demoralize their enemies and break their will to fight.
Thus defined, there is no necessary connection between terrorists and partisans. Terrorism can be used both by regular armies and partisan groups. Indeed, states rather than partisans are the greatest terrorists of all, because they have the greatest capacity to do violence. The pinnacle of terrorism, thus far, are Anglo-American innovations: the mass killing of enemy civilians through starvation and disease imposed by economic blockades and “sanctions” and through incineration by atomic and conventional bombing.
The conventional image of mercenaries, like that of terrorists, makes it easy to confuse them with partisans as well. But what distinguishes mercenaries is not their manner of waging war but their motive. Mercenaries fight for money. They will fight as regular troops or irregular troops, if the price is right. Furthermore, although mercenaries can operate like partisans, they lack the telluric character and political commitment of partisans. If a mercenary fights for his own homeland or a cause in which he believes, that is merely an accident of commerce.
Prussians & Partisans
The second chapter of Theory of the Partisan, entitled “Development of the Theory,” opens with a discussion of the relationship between the Prussian military and partisan warfare. According to Schmitt, the Prussian military was intensely committed to the classical rules of regular warfare. But because of this commitment to regular warfare, the Prussians reacted with particular savagery toward partisans.
This was the case during the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871). After Napoleon III was defeated at Sedan, his government was overthrown, and the new republic under Leon Gambetta proclaimed a war of national liberation against the Prussians, including widespread partisan warfare, which the Prussians fought savagely to suppress with summary executions, hostage taking, and reprisals against civilians. One wonders if the same dynamic led to similar anti-partisan measures on the Eastern Front in the Second World War.
But Schmitt points out, ironically, that the Prussians were no strangers to partisan warfare. Even Otto von Bismarck himself, when facing defeat in the Austro-Prussian War of 1866, wanted to “mobilize the underworld” (Archeronta movere), “to take every weapon in hand to be able to unleash the national movement not only in Germany, but also in Hungary and Bohemia” (Bismarck quoted in Schmitt, p. 40). In the end, however, Bismarck triumphed through classical limited warfare.
The Prussians also contemplated partisan warfare in 1812–1813, when the Prussian General Staff decided to mobilize the people in the struggle against Napoleon. The Prussian Landsturm (national militia) edict of April 21, 1813, signed by the king himself, ordered every subject to resist the enemy with every available weapon, explicitly mentioning axes, pitchforks, scythes, and hammers. Subjects were ordered not to cooperate with enemy attempts to restore public order. The Spanish guerrilla war against Napoleon was expressly invoked as the model. The end of national liberation “sanctifies all means” of resistance. A few months later, however, the edict was purged of all partisan elements and resistance was assigned to the regular army.
From Limited to Total War
The example of the Franco-Prussian War makes it clear that limited warfare is a product of monarchy, specifically of feudal monarchy. In monarchical systems, kings and their cabinets fight wars over honor, territory, and wealth. Wars are simply duels and jousts writ large, which makes it possible to keep them contained. Both parties to the duel, moreover, follow the same code of honor. They recognize one another as being worthy opponents and worthy friends when the contest has ended. The feudal model allows the defeat of an enemy without his destruction as a distinct political entity. The defeated ruler simply bends his knee to the victor, swears fealty, and pays tribute. The classical limited European war thus takes on a ritualistic or game-like quality, much like the Aztec “wars of the flowers.”
When the Prussians defeated Napoleon III in the Franco-Prussian War, according to the rules of limited warfare, he should have retained his sovereignty and signed a peace treaty. But before that could happen, Napoleon III was overthrown by a popular government which launched its people’s war against Prussia.
In short, if limited warfare goes along with the principle of monarchy, unlimited warfare—including partisan warfare—goes along with the principle of popular sovereignty. For example, when kings, their cabinets, and their armies fight wars, it is possible to make neat distinctions between combatants and non-combatants. But when peoples fight wars—by means of mass levees and partisan tactics—the distinction between combatant and non-combatant is no longer so clear.
Furthermore, as the examples of the Napoleonic Wars and the Austro-Prussian War indicate, kings and their cabinets, when faced with defeat within the rules of limited warfare, are not above the temptation to appeal to the people and license partisan warfare. Thus when war loses its game-like quality and gets existentially serious—a matter of survival for whoever wages it—then limited warfare goes out the window, the underworld is mobilized, and all hell breaks loose.
Granted, partisan warfare existed before the rise of popular sovereignty, but whenever the people make war, they are performing sovereign functions. Thus partisan warfare is implicitly revolutionary. This may be why the Prussian monarchy ultimately resisted using partisan warfare, for once the principle of popular sovereignty is established, monarchy’s days are numbered.
According to Schmitt, the man who saw this most clearly was Vladimir Lenin, who was a careful student of Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz (1780–1831). In his notes on Clausewitz’s On War, Lenin distinguished real war (Voina) from mere military play (Igrá). Limited warfare is mere play because it is not existentially serious. Yes, people die in limited wars, but the state actors do not; the fundamental political system remains intact.
Lenin, of course, was a revolutionary who wanted to overthrow the existing system, and revolution has never been a form of limited warfare. Revolution has always had the utmost existential seriousness, because one can win only by destroying all other pretenders to sovereignty. Furthermore, Lenin was a Communist revolutionary. He fought in the name of the people, through totally mobilizing the people, which makes it difficult to distinguish between combatants and non-combatants. Finally, Communism, like Islam and liberal democracy, is a universal political ideology, which means that it denies the legitimacy of all other forms of government all over the globe. Such an ideology can lead only to unlimited, global warfare until all distinctions are obliterated.
Types of Enmity
The friend-enemy distinction is the foundation of the political. In war, the enemy is obviously the most important category. Schmitt distinguishes at least four different types of enemy in Theory of the Partisan: (1) the legal enemy vs. (2) the real enemy, and (3) the relative enemy vs. (4) the absolute enemy.
One of the functions of the sovereign is to declare the enemy. This is the legal enemy. However, enmity is not merely conventional. There are real enemies and real friends based on real conflicts and harmonies of interest. Thus the legal enemy can be different from the real enemy. For example, in 1812, Prussia was allied with Napoleon against Russia. Thus, legally speaking, Russia was the enemy and France the friend. However, in terms of fundamental values and interests, France was the true enemy and Russia the true friend. Thus, in December of 1812, the Prussian General Hans von Yorck, who commanded the Prussian division of Napoleon’s army in Russia, defected to the Russians. In a letter to his king, Frederick William III, Yorck asked the king to decide whether to condemn him as a rebel for usurping his sovereign role of determining the enemy or to ratify his decision by moving against the real enemy, Napoleon.
For Schmitt, the relative enemy is the enemy of a limited, bracketed war, i.e., the sort of enemy with which one can make peace. The absolute enemy is the enemy in a colonial, civil, or revolutionary war, i.e., an enemy with which one cannot make peace and who must therefore be destroyed as a distinct being, either by absorption or extermination.
Morality & Enmity
Civilized war is not the same as moralized war. In fact, civilized war is rather morally cynical. States can make war and peace out of the basest of motives. If you shoot 10 innocent hostages in reprisal for one murdered soldier, you are civilized. If you shoot 11, you are a barbarian. But in spite of this moral cynicism, bracketed warfare did serve the higher good by making it possible to limit the scope of warfare and conclude wars with peace.
According to Schmitt, injecting morality into warfare merely intensifies enmity thus widening the scope and prolonging the duration of warfare. We cannot afford this in a world with weapons of mass destruction:
. . . the ultimate danger exists not even in the present weapons of mass destruction and in a premeditated evil of men, but rather in the inescapability of a moral compulsion. Men who use these weapons against other men feel compelled morally to destroy these other men as offerings and objects. They must declare their opponents to be totally criminal and inhuman, to be a total non-value. Otherwise they themselves are nothing more than criminals and brutes. The logic of value and non-value reaches its full destructive consequence, and creates ever newer, ever deeper discrimination, criminalizations, and devaluations, until all non-valuable life has been destroyed. (p. 94)
The Future of the Partisan
Schmitt’s nightmare, like Heidegger’s, is the fulfillment of our ongoing “progress” toward a completely homogenized, global technological civilization. His deepest hope seems to be that the partisan, because of his telluric nature, can resist this future: “. . . the partisan, on whose telluric character we have focused, becomes the irritant for every person who thinks in terms of purpose-rationality and value-rationality. He provokes nothing short of a technocratic affect [by which Schmitt seems to mean “rage”]” (pp. 76–77). (Interestingly, in his later writings, such as “The Origin of the Work of Art” and “The Thing,” Heidegger also appeals to the telluric as a force of resistance to the technological drive toward complete transparency and availability.)
Schmitt’s hope is that globalization and homogenization will not be completed because they will give rise to partisans who will resist the process in the name of their own particularity: their distinct homelands, cultures, and ways of life. Schmitt also hopes that partisans will appropriate modern technology to resist modern technocracy, that they will turn every modern “advance” into a new means and opportunity for resistance. In a rather apocalyptic, Road Warrior turn of imagination, he even speaks of partisans who will spring up after a nuclear war or other form of catastrophic civilizational collapse to inaugurate a new phase of world history.
Schmitt’s great fear, however, is that even the telluric, identitarian nature of the partisan can be coopted by the technological world system. For example, he devotes a great deal of space to discussing the development of Marxist theories of guerrilla warfare from Lenin to Stalin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, and Che Guevara, noting how masterfully Communists were able to exploit even rooted and nationalistic partisans in order to advance a homogenizing global ideology.
* * *
Theory of the Partisan is a melancholy little book, by turns illuminating and obscure, nostalgic and revolutionary.
On the one hand, Schmitt clearly mourns the loss of classical bracketed warfare. In a rare moment of petulance, he blames Lenin for “blindly” destroying “all traditional bracketing of war” (p. 89). With all due contempt for Lenin, in this case he was not blind. His eyes were wide open.
Lenin saw quite clearly that classical bracketed warfare was a relic of the age of monarchy, and although it was indeed civilized, it was never all that serious. It was merely the expression of the petty politics of prestige and dynastic intrigue: the game of thrones.
The game of war never replaced real war. It simply drove it to the margins. Real war is existentially serious: the stakes are global and the penalty for loss is biological extinction. This is what Nietzsche called “Grand Politics.” This is our fight, and we need to see it for what it is, with eyes unclouded by nostalgia and tears.
On the other hand, Schmitt’s vision of the identitarian partisan has genuine revolutionary potential. Perhaps the best contemporary examples of identitarian partisans are the defenders of biological rather than cultural diversity: Greenpeace, Earth First!, the Earth Liberation Front, and sundry freelance monkeywrenchers, tree-spikers, and animal protectors and liberators. These partisans take their telluric rootedness seriously. When white racial preservation* inspires the levels of organization, idealism, and moral and physical courage displayed by partisans of trees, birds, and lab rats, I will no longer fear for our future.
Notes
1. Carl Schmitt: Theory of the Partisan: Intermediate Commentary on the Concept of the Political, trans. G. L. Ulmen (New York: Telos Press, 2007).
2. Johann Ewald, Treatise on Partisan Warfare, ed. and trans. Robert A. Selig and David Curtis Skaggs (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1991).
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Added Note:
* Instead of “white racial preservation”, it is preferable to invoke the idea of European Identitarianism and European ethnic life. Although our views do include a racial component, it is preferable not to limit ourselves to that alone. And naturally, European Identitarians can also stand with non-European Identitarians in the struggle against world homogenisation; a mutual cooperation which could lead to the establishment of the Multipolar World (an idea already presented by Schmitt in his The Nomos of the Earth, and further developed by Alain de Benoist and Alexander Dugin).
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Johnson, Greg. “The Political Soldier: Carl Schmitt’s Theory of the Partisan.” Counter-Currents Publishing, 20 July 2012. <http://www.counter-currents.com/2012/07/the-political-soldier-carl-schmitts-theory-of-the-partisan/ >.
Filed under New European Conservative
Carl Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political
By Michael O’Meara
However it is posed, the question of the political is always about the most important issue facing every people.
The political, though, is not to be confused with “politics” or “party-politics,” which speaks to individual or special interest in parliamentary gas houses.
“Politics” is tied to rationalism, materialism, economism, and the rule of Mammon, all of which undermine authority, tradition, and the imperatives of the “political.”
One.
The political addresses the state in its highest manifestation as the agent of its inner peace and outer security.
Only after liberal society reformed the state — to enable private individuals to maneuver for positions of power and influence, once particular interests superseded the polity’s collective interest — did politics and the political begin to diverge. (In the Unites States, the first liberal state, politics was a business from the very beginning).
The political for Schmitt is thus not about what is conventionally thought of as politics, but rather about those situations, where the state (”the political status of an organized people in an enclosed territorial unit”) is separate from and above society, especially in situations when it is threatened with destruction by a superpersonal movement or entity and must therefore act to defend itself and the community it is dedicated to defending.
Two.
The polar categories defining the political are, as such, those of the friend–enemy distinction — a distinction implying the possibility of physical killing between rival states. This distinction is based on antithetical categories distinct to the political — distinct in the way that the categories of good and evil are specific to morality, the beautiful and the ugly to aesthetics, the profitable or unprofitable to economics, etc.
Three.
Who is the enemy? For Schmitt, it is the superpersonal other, the stranger, the existential outsider, whose intense hostility and readiness for combat threatens the state and the relations of friendship internal to it.
The enemy is thus designated not on the basis of personal feelings or moral judgments (inimicus), but only in face of an intensely hostile power (hostis), which menaces the state’s existence.
An enemy, in this sense, exists wherever one fighting-collectivity poses an existential threat to another collectivity.
In order to identify the enemy, it is necessary to experience it as a live-threat — in a way no rational analysis, no discursive logic, no objective judgment, no normative standard can possibly anticipate — for this experience is of a people, which knowingly senses whenever its existence is endangered.
The enemy here is defined in terms of criteria, not content or substance — which means it takes the form of something that is always specific and concrete and very intense — not being, then, just something symbolic or metaphorical.
“What always matters is only the possibility of conflict.”
Usually the enemy is the alien “other,” whose threat comes from the exterior.
But the enemy can also emerge from internal differences, such as when domestic social, religious, sectional, etc., differences become so antagonistic that they weaken the unity of the state and the common identity of the citizenry, polarizing them into friends and enemies — i.e., into a state of civil war, as internal politics become primary.
Another, rarer example of an enemy situated in the interior (an example distinct to the United States,) is found whenever foreign culture elements take control of the state at its citizens’ expense (becoming what Yockey called “an inner enemy”).
Four.
Friends, by contrast, share a commitment to a way of life that binds them together, that gives them a sense of solidarity, a sense transcending matters of economics or morality, something that resembles a shared, homogenous identity reaching beyond the imperatives of private life — even if these “friends” do not know one another.
Friendship — the condition of amity between those making up a large socially or communally cohesive association — is always prior to enmity. For it is impossible to have a life-threatening “them” without first having a life-affirming “us.”
Indeed, it is only in face of the death and destruction posed by an enemy that “we” become fully conscious of who we are and learn what is truly “rational” for us.
This friendship implies that the “particular” trumps the “universal” and that a compromised convergence of interest, based on qualities shared with the enemy, is inconceivable.
Five.
The political is ultimately, then, a question of life or death — a question that presupposes the existence of an enemy — an enemy comprehended independent of other antitheses (e.g., the moral antitheses of good v. evil) and with conceptually autonomous categories of thought.
In presupposing the political, the state in the Schmittian sense orients to external threats rather than to internal structures of government or social-economic activity (the realms of party politics). The state anchors itself, instead, in its willingness to defend — with arms, if necessary — its distinct existence.
This gives the state the “right,” in exerting its jus belli authority, to call on its individual members to kill and to risk being killed.
Such an authority makes the state “superior” to all other associations, for it alone compels its members to kill and risk being killed.
Weak peoples afraid of the “trials and risks” that come with the political inevitably disappear from history
It is this determination, implying life or death, that specifically constitutes what Schmitt sees as the essence of the political.
Whoever, moreover, makes this determination, deciding whether an enemy is to be fought or not, possesses the decisive, authoritative political power: Sovereign power.
When the imminent threat of war subsides, so too does the political.
This doesn’t mean that war in itself is the “aim, purpose, or content” of the political, only that the “mode of behavior” — the individual responsibility — the sovereign exercise of authority — that perceives the danger and decides to resist it — constitutes the political.
To be political in Schmitt’s sense requires, then, not just a prior commitment to domestic relations of friendship and the social solidarity it engenders, but also to a particular form of life in which group identity is valued, in the last instance, above physical existence.
Six.
The political, which “neither favors nor opposes war,” is thus not necessarily a function solely of war (the highest expression of the friend-enemy polarity) nor can it be said that it is per se a bellicose nihilism. Rather it is more like something determined by the possibility of armed enmity — even in cases where the parties belligérantes legitimate their belligerency in the name of freedom, justice, or some other abstraction.
War is simply an “ever present possibility,” which Schmitt recognized and designated as the core of the political sphere.
But if war for Schmitt is, above all, a reaction to an external threat, not a sought-after aggression, what does this imply existentially? (On the surface, at least, it suggests a rejection of l’esprit de conquête and the will to power, which one comrade thought was a liberal vestige in Schmitt’s thought and I thought was a Catholic moral one. In any case, Schmitt never actually came to terms with Nietzsche.)
Seven.
Liberalism cannot distinguish between friend and enemy because its individualist, universalist, and pluralist ideology (”conceived in liberty and dedicated to the [abstract] proposition that all men are created equal”) denies that such a designation is conceivable in a world understood in market or moralist terms, where there are only competitors and moral entities, with whom one negotiates or reasons on the basis of universal rights and interests.
Compromise, not conflict, is accordingly the principal aim of the liberal state. Hence, its propensity for exchange, negotiation, and business.
But however it may try, liberalism cannot elude the “political.”
In cases where it is forced to designate an enemy, it is conceived as being outside “humanity” and thus something not simply to be defeated, but ruthlessly annihilated — for, by definition, the liberal’s enemy is non-human.
Eight.
Because it sees the state as essentially an instrument of society and economy, dedicated to the greatest happiness (material well-being) of the greatest number, liberalism lacks a political theory – having, in effect, only a critique of the political.
Indeed, liberal individualism and universalism negate the very possibility of the political, at least in principle. For nothing in its view should compel an individual to die for the sake of the state, which it understands in economic and ethical, instead of political terms.
Such a compulsion, it holds, would not only violate the individual’s freedom, it would make his nation/state association primary — whereas liberalism, in its humanism and rationalism, irrationally and inhumanely claims that only individualistic matters of ethics and economics are primary.
The liberal state, as such, is ethically committed to the rights and interests of individuals seen as self-contained units, whose sum is humanity — and economically, committed to untrammeled production and trade.
In practice, this has meant that the old ordered estates, along with the “prerogatives” of tradition, were forced to bow to the wishes of formless, manipulable masses, as quantity trumped quality and money overthrew the divine right of kings — a right, incidentally, that subsequently passed to the money men, this ethnic minority whose rule has proven to be more devastating than that of any former tyrant.
It has also meant that the usurer could evoke property rights to dispossess farmers of their land; that the personal interests represented by politicians takes priority over the nation’s Destiny; and that the brotherhood of man entails the greatest, most violent, and vigilant of wars to stifle expressions of political polarity.
Nine.
The political, though, cannot be done away with or evaded — it is immune to depoliticizing procedure — it is the essence of sovereignty.
In cases of war, the state, as the instrument of the political, is the ultimate authority — above the law — and as long as a state of emergency lasts.
Legal systems are based, in fact, not on legal reason, but on an authority that speaks to an existential/ontological situation needing no justification other than its own existence.
Ten.
“The protego ergo oblige [I protect therefore I oblige] is the cogito ergo sum [I think therefore I am] of the state.”
The state, as such, is the highest form of human association, defending the life of its citizens and expecting that they, in turn, prepare to die for it, if necessary.
Protection and obedience, in healthy bondage to one another, are in this way mutually entwined.
Eleven.
Ultimately, the political is an existential matter of the highest degree.
In the face of death, one is forced to take sides and thus to take responsibility for one’s life. The enemy, in this strife, invariably highlights the true significance of friendship.
At the same time, the enemy defines what it means to be human, for only when faced with death do we confront life as a whole.
The political, then, entails Destiny, for it keeps men in historicity and it takes them beyond their private selves, into the realm of great events.
In the liberal’s envisioned one-world state, in a situation where there is only “humanity” and thus no friend-enemy distinctions (except with extra-terrestrials), there would be no political, only competition between individuals, whose highest concern would be self-enrichment, comfort, and entertainment.
Without the political and the state upon which it rests (i.e., without an existential commitment to a shared identity), there would be, as a consequence, no polarity, no opposition, no transcendent reference, and no way to counter the entertainment of modern nihilism.
The first victim of liberal depoliticization is thus always “meaning.”
If Europeans, then, are ever to regain control of their Destiny, it will only come through a political assertion of the identity that distinguishes them from the world’s other peoples.
All else is simply “politics.”
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O’Meara, Michael. “Carl Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political.” The Occidental Quarterly Online, 5 April 2010. <http://www.toqonline.com/blog/carl-schmitts-concept-of-the-political/ >.
Filed under New European Conservative
