II. Ochlocracy and Democratism

“Dix millions d’ignorances ne font pas un savoir.”

“DEMOCRACY” in ancient Greece, and especially in Athens, could almost be compared to an exclusive club of gentlemen who were distinct from slaves, resident aliens and other “inferior” individuals. There was a similar conception of democracy widely spread in the South of the United States. The Hansa towns and the Italian maritime republics were also strongly aristocratic. The only true “democracy” at the end of the Middle Ages in Europe was Switzerland, or to be more precise, the Alpine parts of Switzerland. The population of the original Eidgenossenschaft was almost entirely of peasant stock and lacked practically any social distinctions, yet the situation in Bern, Geneva, Fribourg, and Basle was quite different. At the time of the battle of Sempach there was no pretender for a nonexistent Swiss throne, and the public affairs of the Original Cantons were so simple that no officialdom of a bureaucratic pattern was necessary to cope with them; the result was the growth of a democratic republic. Some of the more ancient cantons have still preserved their original, direct democracy where the citizens appear in person at the diet to determine the state of affairs of their small political unit. The small size of these diets was not instrumental in favoring the rise of ochlocratic mass movements or a depersonalized ochlocratic mass culture.

Yet the great impulse for our modern ochlocracy and democratism comes from France. The French Revolutionaries have tried to copy antique forerunners, but they were not very lucky in their efforts.²¹There is a certain Swiss influence connected with this revolution, yet this element has nothing to do with the democratic peasant spirit of the Original Cantons. It emanates from the eighteenth-century enlightenment which has a strong Swiss, or rather Genevan background. This French town, acquired by the Swiss at a later period of their existence, had already produced its famous two Johns: Jehan Cauvin (from Noyon) and Jean Jacques Rousseau. M. Dunan’s humanitarian Red Cross, the assassination of Empress Elizabeth, the League of Nations, and the socialism of M. Nicole were scheduled to follow.

Whatever the conceptions of Enlightenment toward God might have been, whether they pictured Him as nonexistent, or as a pale being without personality, sunk in sleep, or at least disinterested toward the fate of the individual, that period took a negative attitude toward the next world. Enlightenment was antimetaphysical and geocentrical. In the framework of such a philosophy, devoid of otherworldliness, the human beings and their existence assumed automatically a different significance. The meaning of life, human happiness, and all the other basic values were projected into this world and that change brought an enormous thirst for “justice,” earthly justice, of course, which in turn was nothing else but an initially veiled and finally open demand for absolute equality.

This pagan geocentrism has changed the very content of our culture. The “happy end” of the cheap, popular novels and the films is nothing but the outcome of the supposition that the human drama finds its ultimate conclusion here on earth. The Calvinists in their materialism took a similar attitude.²² The more subtle Atheist, of greater experience, has contempt for the “happy end” and substitutes for it a stubborn heroical pessimism which comes pretty near to integral despair. The modern Catholic French writers like Mauriac and Bernanos avoid the happy end in relation to this life. Paul Claudel, in L’Ôtage, expresses his disbelief in earthly justice by punishing the people of good will and rewarding the villains in the last scene of this play. For the Christian the earth is essentially a “vale of tears.”

It has frequently been emphasized that the French Revolution aided at least the cause of reason and reasoning. One remembers the worship of reason on the Champs de Mars; yet it was a very one-sided form of reasoning which made such headway during the French Revolution, a reasoning without that deeper understanding which Peter Wust calls Vernunft in juxtaposition to Verstand. It was a distorted and rather Cartesian Verstand which became the measure of all things, and thus made possible the smooth evolution from theocentrism, over anthropocentrism, to geocentrism. Due to the elimination of the firm belief in another world the point of gravity was shifted to our earthly existence, and the happenings and events of this life became automatically “weighty,” final, irrevocable, unbearable. Humor died a lingering death. The transcendental levity of Christian culture was gone; there was no final consolation, no otherworldly relativity but only gray, inescapable fate. A hunchback was now all through his existence a hunchback, a man born blind all through his existence a blind man, a proletarian all through his existence a stepchild of life, whereas in the framework of Christian belief these shortcomings would last only for the earthly decades of a person’s existence, i.e., until his death. Things would change radically afterward. But with this truth lost to sight, life became a terrible load.

It is important to remember that Christianity had not abolished slavery. Neither had the Church ever praised this institution, like Calhoun, because the whole relationship of master to slave was not important enough in the light of a life eternal to be combated with furious indignation apart from the fact that even a slave had every protection in a truly Christian society.²³ But now the servant was an “eternal” servant, the master an “eternal” master, and the rich man possibly all through his assumed existence a rich man; thus the hatred of the lower classes now became wide awake. The employees had during the Middle Ages a knowing smile for those in the higher stations of life; they knew it could easily happen that a rich prince might suffer agonies in hell while a leprous beggar sat in the immediate nearness of God’s throne.

This is also the reason why such great stress was laid on the “democratic” aspects of death during the Middle Ages. It can still be witnessed in many a mystery play, especially in Everyman. The Totentanz, “Death Dance,” was a very popular motif in song as well as in art. The most famous of all these representations is probably Albrecht Dürer’s conception depicting death carrying away beggar, merchant, burgher, emperor and pope. One would really love to see in our democratic age the result of a Russian etcher’s artistic activity representing Stalin as fetched away by death, or the moral indignation of the progressive mob should somebody portray the President of the United States in similar circumstances.* Neither can one imagine Adolf Hitler washing the feet of twelve poor inmates of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. The reason for this change is that we are living in an age of “equality” and it is only surprising that our common descent from an assumed powerful King-Kong, instead of God, has not rendered us more charitable to each other.

This change from the fatherhood of God to the fatherhood of the pithecanthropus erectus, Dubois’ “Walking Ape-Man,” has destroyed a good deal of genuine human pride. Once everybody was proud of his own class or station in life. But now there is everywhere an unquenchable thirst for identity and equality. Nobody wants to serve, nobody wants to be subjected because service in a nonhierarchical society means going under the level of equality.

That state of affairs is also largely the reason why there is such a dearth of servants in England, Holland, and in America under normal conditions, and also why we find, for instance, in the United States, the desperate dread of cleaning shoes or boots on the part of servants. In spite of the large amount of unemployment in the United Kingdom after the World War I, we saw there the number of foreign maids and cooks swelling up to 15,000 in 1937. The efforts to get volunteers for the armed forces in England was, prior to Munich, a similar failure. Yet it was interesting to observe that the percentage of Catholics in the British army was 14 per cent in spite of the fact that the national average was only 6 per cent. They evidently shared less in that terrible neurosis of prestige which made itself felt all over Europe.

Yet the genuine pride which people used to feel for their station in life, vanished: the aristocratic pride, the craftsman’s pride, the burgher’s pride and honor. Everybody wanted to get quickly to the top of the ochlocratic sand heap of equal gains. The feeling of inequality begins now to be a burning pain, snobism lifts its ugly head, the element of general human competition gains headway in every phase of life.

People used to arrange their lives after the precepts of God; they felt that they were continuously observed by God and they were eager (in varying degrees) to please God; but now they compare themselves with their neighbors and their ambition becomes limitless. Dr. Leverett S. Lyon, vice-president of the Brookings Institution, thinks that the tendency to “keep up with the Joneses” is one of the strongest driving powers in American criminality. Yet even the nobility acquires in this new framework a new value and a new magnetism, and in an age of Social Registers it is difficult to understand how it was possible that the great merchants of Moscow considered it a shame when their daughters married mere princes. The class pride of the middle and lower classes not seldom underwent, in the “democratic” period of our history, a change into methodical snobism. The waning of class distinctions engendered a general “race” toward the higher strata which brought triumph to a few and grief to many.*

There is little doubt that atheism, agnosticism, and the denial of the other world are partially responsible for the rapid technical development which gave us, apart from exquisite instruments for mass destruction, various means to bridge time and space. We had the heading, “Speed,” in our chart of the herdist instinct and the romantic sentiment. Ortega y Gasset, in his Rebelión de las masas, points out very adroitly the fact that the automobile is the very expression of our present acute feeling of mortality. Endless progress in madly increased comforts and in technical developments is the goal of the age. On this basis, if we were bodily immortal we would feel no such need for technical gadgets saving time by conquering space.

Yet the conquest of time and space is only partially a final aim and ultimate goal of a herdist society. Every ideology visualizes a certain end and ochlocracy is no exception of the rule; the end is not as clearly formulated as in communism and one can say that it has been agreed upon by some sort of general consent. But even in spite of the fact that this ultimate aim is not of such a teleological nature as that of the proletarian Millennium of Karl Marx,** it is nonetheless chiliastic; the democratic middle class of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries always believed in some sort of “endless progress.”²⁴“Progress” is for the convinced ochlocrats a consoling Utopia of madly increased comfort and technicism.²⁵This charming but dull vision was always the pseudo-religious consolation of millions of ecstatic believers in ochlocracy and in the relative perfection and wisdom of Mr. and Mrs. Averageman Utopias in general are surrogates for heaven; they give a meager solace to the individual that his sufferings and endeavors may enable future generations to enter the chiliastic paradise. Communism works in a similar way. Its millennium is almost the same as that of ochlocracy. The Millennium of Lenin, the Millennium of Bellamy, the Millennium as represented in H. G. Wells’s, “Of Things to Come,” the Millennium of Adolf Hitler and Henry Ford — they are all basically the same; they often differ in their means to attain it but they all agree in the point of technical perfection and the classless or at least totally homogeneous society without grudge or envy. This identity of teleological outlooks explains the mutual admiration of certain déraciné Americans and Soviet-Russians for their respective fatherlands.*

There is little doubt that this millennium is one of civilization and not of culture because it is a millennium of comfort, free from effort and pain.**

These expressions — “culture” and “civilization” — have to be used in their Continental sense to make the point clear. “Culture” is the sum of all products which represent a personal manifestation, like painting, poetry, religion, philosophy, and the humanities. “Civilization” is non-personal. It is the sum total of all efforts which contribute to the increase of comfort or “usefulness” in the practical sense. Bathtubs, dentists’ tools, railways, and traffic regulations are products of civilization. These easily transcend national and racial borders. It would be difficult, no doubt, to assign here the proper place for such phenomena as manners or laws. They are on the border line of culture and civilization because they are partly manifestations and personal expressions of specific national groups in specific ages and partly lubricants of social life or guarantees of peaceful social coexistence. A document like the Sachsenspiegel is more or less a true mirror of medieval German culture, while the Swiss laws transplanted to Turkey by Atatürk have to be rated as efforts of civilization.

Yet while civilization is basically lack of friction, smoothness, comfort, and material enjoyment we have to look at traditional Christianity — with its violent opposition to euthanasia, abortion, contraception, pacifism, and individualism — as being something “uncomfortable.” Christianity is after all the only great religion which does not content itself with preaching indifference toward suffering, like the Stoa or Buddhism, but actually sees in suffering, sustained in the right spirit, a positive value. And just because Christianity in general, and Catholicism in particular, are neither keen on mere “beauty” or “comfort” but stand for magnificence (Grandeur, Grossartigkeit) they reject naked aestheticism or civilization if not in the letter at least in the spirit.²⁶ It is difficult to project into the frame of a comfortistic civilization* the picture of Christ, hanging on the cross with a body convulsed by pain, the palms torn to shreds by the heavy nails, the hairs glued to the scalp by sweat and coagulated blood. It ought to be repeated again that culture is always “magnificent.” Pure, uprooted l’art pour l’art civilization, on the other side, is always practical and utilitarian and thus is bound to enter into conflict with integral Christianity and every true culture, because neither culture nor the Church are ever “practical”; they are — in a bourgeois, not a cosmic sense — highly unpractical. No wonder therefore that integral Christianity is more at home in those parts of the world where culture is predominant and civilization at a low ebb. Southern India is thus a more favorable soil for the Church than Pittsburgh or Detroit. Civilization is geocentric comfort. But culture, which must be bought by bitter suffering (there is neither art nor sanctity without suffering), points always toward heaven. And the ochlocratic millennium hell bent upon avoiding suffering will turn its back toward heaven.

These questions had to be cleared up first before the political aspects of ochlocracy could be analyzed. The ochlocratic movements do not thrive on air, they need a specific soil, a specific culture and civilization with the preponderance of the latter. Some readers may still consider it unreasonable to see ochlocracy accused in the preceding as well as in the following pages for numerous shortcomings in modern culture and civilization. Yet it cannot be emphasized with sufficient candor that there is a deep inner connection between all manifestations of cultural existence, and that it is indeed difficult to place the individual cultural phenomena in any graded sequence as to their temporal precedence, causality, primariness, etc. The complexity of culture, thought, tradition is such that we frequently face a maze of manifestations which influence each other mutually and thus engender new variations. It is all very nice to draw up a long pedigree of national socialism, starting with Descartes and then leading, through Kant and Hegel, on to the incestuous liaison of Marx and Treitschke. There are hundreds of other factors which made the thoughts and ideas of these thinkers acceptable and brought them to maladive virulence. And these men in turn were influenced by the things they saw and heard, by architectural styles, living conditions, conversations, etc. The ochlocratic tendencies influenced modern times, and the modern spirit modeled and remodeled democratism. It is a process of mutuality.

The main argument of this book could have been built up either by leaving the political aspects of our culture for the end, or else by placing them at the very beginning. Yet the reason why the political argumentation, centered in the ochlocratic ideologies (we have to speak in the plural), takes so much space is simply due to the fact that political ideologies lend themselves better to argumentation and discussion than art, literature, externals of worship, cuisine, architecture, or sartorial fashions. In the latter, the principle of de gustibus non est disputandum, coupled with the inevitability of great variations in individual interpretation, makes a fruitful discussion difficult if not impossible.

One must remember, on the other hand, that the tendency toward homogeneity and totality, apparent in every culture, does not permit the substitution of individual values without far-reaching consequences. To all practical purposes these two trends are not interchangeable without intimately affecting the whole or being mutually destroyed. If, for instance, in a thoroughly “democratized” state (one that is ochlocratic in politics and democratistic in purely cultural matters) family life, male superiority, and the prerogatives of the paterfamilias would suddenly increase out of proportion thanks to some magic interference, this change would inevitably affect not only the social structure of the country but even its political form. (The rule of two parents over four children is clearly “undemocratic”)

It is difficult to fear death if one is very pious. It is difficult not to worship health if one fears death. It is difficult to enforce general health without large-scale state intervention and it is equally difficult to imagine increased state intervention without a loss of liberties. This totality of human culture, society, politics and religion, was always well understood by the Church which always disagreed with the Marxian, neo-Protestant and demoliberal view that “Religion is a private matter.”* Such an atomistic view blurs every comprehensive vista. None of our actions, thoughts, or products leads an existence in vacuo.

And now, after a cursory discussion of the claims and the position of political ochlocracy, a return to the analysis of the general aspects will make it possible to amplify our statements.

We all agree that people who form a political unit have a right to determine their collective fate. But before one continues to reason along these lines it will be necessary to define the very nature of a “political people,” or a “nation.” It would be a great mistake to consider a nation, or for that matter every organic community, as a mere arithmetic sum of so-and-so-many noses. Every organism has a hierarchy of its parts. To overlook this fact is a perversion which usually results in a terrific loss of energies, such as might lead to national death and political disaster.

The brain, for instance, is a more important part of the body than the muscles of the arm, and the heart has functions which the liver could never arrogate for itself. The loss of a limb may be quantitatively larger than that of the lungs, yet no being is able to survive the destruction of that valuable inner organ. One can argue that an animal would die in the long run if it would lose all its extremities because it would be unable to find or catch its food, yet there is definitely a hierarchy of the parts of the organism, and while certain aspects of this hierarchy may be subject to debate it is self-evident that these parts have functions which can rarely be interchanged. One cannot hear with the eyeballs or digest with the kidneys; one might walk on one’s hands but this is an art which many may admire but only few will accomplish. There is hierarchy as well as function in every organism. One man may be more important than another just as the eye is more important than the finger. Yet we may not forget in this connection that this discussion is clearly not moving on a theological plane. It would be sinful to destroy willfully an eye as it is sinful to cut off a finger, and so, too, it is sinful to murder a gravedigger, an idiot, or a babe, even as it is sinful to assassinate a king or a president.

If one denies the organic character of the political nations and considers them as sand heaps, it would be difficult to continue this argument. It should not be denied that there are great differences between a national and an animal organism; a national organism is far more flexible and its parts are able to change their functions and their hierarchical values. The person-within-the-nation (the individual citizen) is able to combine several functions of different importance, to lose or to acquire new skills, to take over new and to abandon old tasks. Conservatives must always bear in mind that political nations are made up of persons; of beings who are per se, i.e., exist by themselves. The cells and parts of the animal or of the human body are not per se operans or per se existens. And yet it is a well-known fact that the more primitive the political nation (the tribe, the society) or the animal body the less apparent will be this functional and hierarchical difference of the parts.

Specialization is a characteristic of development and specialization is nothing else but another aspect of functionalism. There is naturally a far greater functional diversity in the human body than in the physical structure of an amoeba; there is equally more specialization and diverted function in Chinese or European society than among the Patagonians or the Central African Pygmees. This in spite of the fact that even primitive societies have a rough outline of function and hierarchy, because they are, more or less, built upon the principle of the family which is functional as well as hierarchical. De la Tour du Pin has pointed out very rightly that democratism (and democracy) is only feasible in either very primitive societies (with a minimum of stratification) or in old and decaying societies who like old people are again reverting to the forms of childhood. The United States obviously belongs to neither of these groups.*

The functions of individual parts have importance for the whole and teleologically their functions may be “equal,” but to all practical purposes their hierarchy is evident. A chimney sweep is a valuable as well as necessary member of society, but his function in earthly relation is to sweep chimneys, to beget children, to pay taxes, to lead with charity and authority his family as well as his apprentices, and to raise his voice in these few public matters which by his education, knowledge, and wisdom he is able to judge. His function is not to operate upon cancer patients, to drive locomotives, or to direct the foreign policy of the country. All these functional divisions are matters of reason and prudence. If we need new clothes we will go to a tailor, if we have a bodily ailment we will call upon a doctor, if the country needs a military or a budgetary reform it is reasonable and prudent to enlist the aid of a military or financial expert for this purpose; it would certainly be sheer nonsense to ask a tailor or a doctor to remedy such situations.

Yet ochlocrats who never tired of accusing conservatives and Catholics of superstition, illogical traditionalism, and “unscientific” procedure make an act of faith in the inner illumination of the individual and the infallibility of numerical majorities. Phrases like “forty million Frenchmen can’t be wrong” display, nevertheless, a gross misunderstanding of logic; never in history has there been a more farcical and insipid amalgamation of Lutheran and Rousseauan confusion than in the interpretations underlying elections and the general franchise.²⁷ Luther already was certain that everybody ought to be his own Pope by making use of his own wits in a private interpretation of the bible after dispensing with expert theological judgment; every interpretation was more or less right and had to be tolerated provided it did not conflict with the general line of the Reformers’ intention, and provided — last not least — that it did not lead back to Rome. The ochlocratic “liberal” is indeed in a difficult position toward the followers of terroristic heresies and his belief that “truth stands by itself” has often proved to be suicidal. He is therefore inclined to abandon his liberalism and to turn ochlocracy into a brutal totalitarianism. Luther with his ducal and baronial disciples was followed by terrorists of the type of Calvin, Thomas Münzer or Jan van Leyden, just as Robespierre succeeded Mirabeau and Noailles.

Rousseau, though holding views diametrically opposed to Luther’s as to the character of man, finally strengthened his hand by his estimate of man’s mind. Luther believed in the utter moral wretchedness of man, but Rousseau believed not only in man’s goodness on the plane of character but he also was convinced (like Luther) that man is by nature intelligent. The “democrats” of the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries deducted from Luther’s and Rousseau’s joint declaration that man is intelligent (either by nature or by an inner light) the further conclusion that the sum total of all minds must be perfection itself. Catholicism, on the other hand, never accepted Luther’s theories about the catastrophical consequences of Original Sin, yet the Church never got rid of the impression although not dogmatizing about it that the average man can be obsessed by an almost limitless stupidity. The Church is in this matter fortunately or rather unfortunately right — depending upon the merits one is willing to attribute either to heart or head.

Happily enough we find that even the most fanatic ochlocrats seldom try to carry out their quantitarian collectivism and egalitarianism and to reduce them to absurdities. There are still some inequalities of a biological order which they must respect; the franchise has not yet been extended to the children — if we do not take into account the efforts to “make democracy work” in certain schools where boys and girls determine what they would like to hear from their teachers and how much work they will condescend to do.

But still, the political franchise is not given to minors and there is little doubt that by this fact the democratic principles are already violated. The Utopia runs into troubled waters. If neither knowledge, nor work, experience, sex, or taxes make any difference, why then, we ask ourselves, should age be taken so seriously? One could imagine that a European university student at the age of nineteen is more intelligent than a street cleaner at the age of thirty, or that a wounded young soldier at the age of twenty has merited more of his country than a prostitute at the age of forty-five. Even if one lowers the age limit there will always be some who are younger and who will complain that they are tyrannized over by a gerontocracy, a rule of old men.*Pure “democracy” is for this and other reasons a political impossiblity and we have to ask ourselves whether it is prudent to adopt such a form of political existence which defies all efforts to make it work without a tremendous amount of alloys. Utopias never mature over a certain transitory stage in which they insure their survival by endless compromising.²⁸“Democracy” under present conditions is bound to compromise with political elements taken from aristocratic and monarchical forms of government. A parliament is always a compromise with the former and a president a compromise with the latter political ideology. Aristocracy and monarchy — both taken in a literal, not a traditional sense — are essential and indispensable political elements; there is even “government” in the case of the population being entirely passive. We have to face the bitter fact that the (inner) consent of those governed is under modern conditions rather an accidental than an essential of government. There may be even a good government without popularity and a bad government enthusiastically supported by the “howling mob.” Not even the moral question is solved by the presence or absence of support, and there will be few political casuists who will argue that the people have an inherent right to wickedness which may be enforced against a good but unpopular government.*

It is certain that worship of quantity is one of the most important characteristics of modern democratism,²⁹ a characteristic which finds its living expression in the increasing interest for the comparison of physical units in the form of statistics. This ochlocratic quantitativism fosters also the belief that the mathematically larger part of the nation has the right to transform its theories into practice. There is nevertheless another element which ought not be overlooked; the element of compromise. The voter in every country has first to make a compromise between his own views and those of the local candidate, who in turn has to compromise with his party.³⁰ In countries without the two-party system the compromise is extended to one between the parties for the sake of coalitions. The coalitions in their turn compromise with “reality.”

Thus it is the outcome of the election which finally decides whether the individual voter belonged to the ruling or the ruled group. Parliamentary governments are now unfortunately always governments of numeric majorities; a supporter of the Conservative Party in Sweden has no more opportunity to influence the destinies of his country than a Russian or an Italian citizen in spite of the fact that Sweden is a “democracy” and the other two countries dictatorships. There is at present as much chance for the Swedish Conservatives to gain a majority as there is hope for the Constitutional Democrats in the Russian emigration to be readmitted to a reopened Imperial Duma. This is a shortcoming of modern Representative Government which should be remedied.

Yet the question may be raised whether “democratic” states are not far more conscious of civil liberties as regards private or public opinion. It must be remembered in that connection that liberty and democracy are not synonymous in spite of the fact that these two terms are frequently confounded in “democracies” with an aristocratic-liberal historical background. Numerical majorities are not necessarily keen to preserve civil liberties;³¹the demand for civil liberties (and privileges) always arose from select minorities. Genuinely “democratic” societies can be brutally cruel to those who dare to be “different” in an unconventional way.³²

If we look now at the individual from a political point of view in a “democratic” setup, we can consider him as entirely “lost” in an ocean of votes and voters. There are, for instance, in the United States millions of voters who out of a feeling of disgust, laziness, or hopeless despair refuse to go to the polls. There are thousands in every country boasting of a popular representation who do not even faintly agree with any of the existing political parties. These people are to all practical purposes deprived of any participation in government. Whereas almost everybody was excluded in the times of absolute monarchies from having a share in the government, the Parliamentarian Monarchies and Republics invited eagerly everybody to take a hand in the shaping of the political destiny of his country. Yet the effort contributed by the individual in America or in prewar France will only be, respectively, one seventy millionth or one twelve millionth of the sum total of the popular “decision.” If one would compare the total of all possible votes in the United States with the height of the Empire State building in New York, the individual vote would be in proportion roughly 5 μ, i.e., the five-thousandth part of an inch; thus the importance of the individual is practically nil. He is only important as an atom in a mass. And Modern Constitutionalism prided itself that it attaches importance to the individual who in his turn embraced Parliamentarianism to be important. This farce becomes more apparent when we remember with what pitying contempt the citizens of “great democracies” looked down at the “subjects” of European monarchies as mere chattel, forgetful of their submicroscopic importance in their own political system.*

Of course, there are people in countries run by representative governments — some voting, some not — who try to influence the policy of their government in the traditional way. By dining out with a cabinet minister or with the secretary of the premier, by chatting with the President or submitting to his collaborators a memorandum, they have a far greater influence than by casting a mere vote. There is little doubt that men like Metternich, the Cecils, Araktcheyev, Colbert, Grotius, Ximénez, Brühl, and Talleyrand (some of them of humble origin) influenced the destinies of their States under absolute monarchs more than millions of voters today. The thought that a vote has only a value if it is cast together with millions of others should have for thinking persons something rather depressing than uplifting. Yet the defenders of general franchise subconsciously take into consideration that thinking human beings form only a tiny minority in the herdist ocean.

One might object that anybody is free in a liberal and “democratic” state to start a new party of his own. But to start a new party money is needed. It is true to a certain extent that money may be substituted by wild, irresponsible demagogy which necessitates a total prostitution of the leader and his ideals before the masses. The history of the National-Socialist Party — the greatest success story of a party within the framework of democracy — shows that it is wise to combine both elements; empty oratory “intelligible” to everybody as well as hard cash. A party, furthermore, with high and lofty aims which could not be properly understood by the uneducated and semieducated masses, would not have a dog’s chance to succeed in an ochlocratic atmosphere and there are a few things more depressing than to study official party programs. Parties, however just and noble though they may be in their ultimate goal, have always to keep within the “spirit of the time” of which the masses, and in democratic cultures the “intellectuals,” also, are the most docile slaves. To keep the large variety of political opinions within large nations in the fold of only two parties may be rather depressing from an intellectual point of view but the establishment of third and fourth parties in the two-party countries of today would mean in all probability the death knell to liberal “democracy.” (One must not forget that under present conditions the sole beneficiaries of such an action would be the nonliberal democrats of the totalitarian brand in Berlin, Moscow, and Rome.)

Certain ideas and ideologies can never be successfully represented by parties. We know the history of the endless failures of conservative parties. It was Spengler who first pointed out that there is no such thing as a successful conservative party. A party is a political body built specially for the purpose of fitting into the structure of a nineteenth century parliament.³³ A conservative “party” is just as miserable as a third “estate.”³⁴

Integral ochlocracy of course favored the one-man one-vote system because it hoped to crush a surviving oligarchical rule by the weight of sheer numbers. Marxism started more or less as a revolutionary movement, but it retained its revolutionary character only in countries with slow industrial development where the laboring classes remained a minority. The Second International in western Europe allied itself eagerly with the “democratic” forces thus hoping to repeat the attaqueen-masse of the bourgeois democrats by bloodless, constitutional means.

We have represented in the last paragraph ochlocracy in juxtaposition to monarchy; we must not forget in that connection that the intimate alliance between monarchy, aristocracy, and clergy was unknown prior to the French Revolution. Only second-rate historians would consider the coalition between throne, altar, and nobility a standard phenomenon. These elements formed usually a triangle of opposing forces. The bourgeoisie largely benefited from the tension between these three powers. Kings and emperors usually received support from the urban elements in their struggle against the powerful aristocratic oligarchs, and in some religious rebellions we see similarly a coalition between the First and Third Estate against the Second. It is perfectly true that the aristocracy was usually the bitterest enemy of monarchical power, but on the other hand there is equally little doubt that no class contributed more to the cause of freedom than the First Estate, the Nobility, which fought every centralism with determination and everywhere laid the foundation stones for constitutional government. This is specially true of the English, French, Hungarian, Polish, Spanish, and Baltic nobility.

If we look at France prior to the outbreak of the Revolution we must bear in mind that the larger part of the French aristocracy was toward the end of the eighteenth century an aulic nobility, an agglomeration of moons who received their light from the monarchical sun. A Henri IV, a James II, an Ivan the Terrible, or the Portuguese Monarchs of the fifteenth century had still endless troubles with the representatives of the First Estate. The better part of the French aristocracy was inebriated by a feeling of liberty when Louis XIV died.* The Polish kings after 1572 were the mere heads of a republic (Rzeczpospolita) of noblemen, and the relations of kings of Hungary with the native aristocracy were characterized, on account of the Golden Bull and the right of armed resistance, by numerous frictions, risings, and rebellions. The Hungarian “Golden Bull,” issued in 1222, only seven years after the Magna Charta Libertatum, is together with this great English document of privileged power, one of the most important pillars of antidemocratism in Europe. The Whigs in England were, till the beginning of the nineteenth century, an aristocratic party having unfortunately slightly too intimate relationships with the moneybags of the city; yet they may readily have been a more genuinely independent aristocratic party than the Tories who represented the aristocracy of the court, consisting sometimes of titled people who had risen as scribes from the ranks of the lower bourgeoisie, together with that part of the landed aristocracy which put loyalty before liberty.

The older Arragonese or Castilian aristocracy showed hardly a lesser spirit of independence than the Spanish cities which were so proud of their ancient privileges, the fueros.³⁵ The rigid absolutism encouraged by the Reformation infected finally even the rulers of the Iberic Peninsula and the Basque privileges were the only ones that survived till the Carlist wars and after.

Neither is the spectacle of noblemen embracing the cause of Republicanism rare. There were numerous noblemen fighting in the American Revolution and a fair amount of Polish as well as Russian aristocrats who were fiery republicans and even anarchists. The larger part of the Hungarian nobility dropped their titles in 1848–49. Pactically all the leaders of the nationalist rising against Austria belonged to the gentry or the aristocracy. Kossuth, Damjanich, Klapka, Batthány, Teleki, Leiningen-Westerburg are just a few names of many. It was a Count Károlyi who proclaimed Hungary a republic in 1918. Yet the reason for the failure of the national revolution in 1848 has to be found in the circumstance that the broad masses did not cooperate in spite of many democratic concessions. The same thing was true of the Polish risings in 1830 and 1863. The Polish gentry finally learned that a levée en masse can only be successful with the cooperation of the lower classes. There was a turn to socialism, and Józef Pilsudski was such a socialist with a gentry background who helped to found the last Polish Republic.

There is no doubt that a republic is the ideal form of government for an aristocracy. An aristocracy which wants to rule directly (instead of serving a ruler) has practically only the choice between an ephemeral monarchy of the English type or a downright republic after the pattern of Venice, Genoa, or early Florence. Monarchy was historically always the best protection against any sort of obligarchical rule and it was the historic role of monarchs to side with the lower classes against the nobility.³⁶ (This “system” had the unfortunate consequence, of weakening federalism* and of strengthening centralism, with its ultimate herdist excesses.) The existence of a powerful Second Estate completed the quadrangle of heterogeneous factors which made a balance of powers and a mutual check possible which was the very foundation of medieval liberty.

Every vigorous and independent aristocracy is “republican”; only a weakened and degenerate, or a very wise aristocracy stands for Monarchy. The American whiggish aristocracy of 1774 belongs to the first category, the vigorous and independent type. Needless to say that there were many squires who had a stronger sense for loyalty than love for independence. The clash between Whigs and Tories on American soil was a clash between the two noble passions — freedom and loyalty.

The great merit of aristocracy in the past was the jealous preservation of their privileges. Privileges were and are “liberties,” if not for any other reason then certainly for their anti-egalitarian character. It makes good sense that the coins of the United States display the word liberty, but not the word equality. Liberty is the ideal of aristocracy, just as equality stands for the bourgeoisie and fraternity for the peasantry.**One can combine liberty with fraternity but neither of them with equality.

It must be stated again in all candor that equality presupposes force on account of its unnaturalness. Force is the end of liberty as well as of fraternity. In order to level a landscape full of mountains and valleys one needs dynamite, tractors, picks, and shovels. By filling the valleys with the mountaintops a level with a uniform altitude could be established. Thus there is only liberty or equality.³⁷ The fact that the ochlocratic utopia of the year A.D. 3000 contains both elements is hardly able to contradict this truism effectively. Yet the more sinister aspect of the problem lies in the circumstance that democratism and its allied herd movements, while remaining loyal to the principle of equality and identity, will never hesitate to sacrifice liberty.*

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* In our pagan civilization it is “indelicate” to speak of the death of a person, death being for the atheist an irreparable catastrophe.

* “Democratic societies respect nothing more than nobility of birth.”—Anatole France, Penguin Island, I.

** Read the excellent analysis of E. W. F. Tomlinson in Vol. LXVI of the Criterion. This is one of the best exposures of the inner contradiction of Marxian dialectics in relation to the final Marxian goal.

* An early number of Colosseum had a cover printed all over with the words: “Utopias are opium for the people. Utopias are opium for the people. Utopias are opium for the people. . . .”

** There seems to be, though, a conflict between the never completely extinguished thirst for adventure and the coming millennium of miraculous inventions (and comfort); one has only to study the comics displaying pictures of semiarmored Martians and half-naked inhabitants of Venus shooting each other with magic rays, to see the projection of a cocktail of death and refrigerators into a half apocalyptic, half-millenarian future.

* There is an excellent attack on “Comfortism” in Werner Sombart’s Der deutsche Sozialismus (1934). An English translation of this valuable book has been published under the title A New Social Philosophy, by the Princeton University Press (Trans. Carl S. Geiser).

* This does not imply that it is therefore subject to state interference.

*That the United States is not an ochlocracy, i.e., consists neither of savages nor of degenerate Sybarites the reader will readily agree. Our genuine Ochlocrats (most of them Leftists) would like to combine savagery with decadence.

* Democratic rights for school children have been postulated by the disciples of John Dewey, while David Lloyd George demanded in all earnestness plebiscites for the Central African jungles (in a public speech on Jan. 5, 1918).

* About the problem of “democracy” in relation to the popular representation in the United States. See pp. 247–248.

* While man living in the old, traditional form of culture is a dreamer, modern, ochlocratic man is frequently the victim of illusions.

The dreamer, or the man of phantasy, creates his own world. He is creative. The illusionist believes in a statement or a formula which he does not analyze critically or put to a test. He is a victim of exogen influences and shares these influences with others. There are mass illusions but no mass dreams. Dreams are personal and supra-rational. Illusions belong usually to the “rational” order and their acceptance is due to mental laziness. If a man believes that he is in a democracy not only a citizen but also a “ruler” he must be clearly unaware of the fact that his alternative is either to be ruled by millions of his fellow citizens in the person of their choice (a very totalitarian control indeed) or merely to share as a microscopic agent in the election of his own choice. The person in a political system based on masses or numbers is always the loser.

We find a thundering condemnation of the idea of ochlocratic elections in a contribution of René Schwob, the well-known Jewish convert, in F. Mauriac’s and Eugenio d’Ors’s symposium “L’Homme et le péché” (Paris, 1938, pp. 121–122).

“The electoral hypocrisy,” he writes, “is for me the very symbol of the hypocrisy of all times. Its gravity depends on the fact that it is directed at naïve masses which are easily flattered. All our personal hypocrisies are derived from this central form of imposture. At least this is true of France. . . . The hypocrisy which surrounds us is the imposture of number and quantity. It subjects us to the least human forces and powers.”

Not in vain has a noted Austrian thinker called the nineteenth century the century of illusion and the present age the century of lie. This change corresponds to the transformation of democracy to party dictatorship; illusion enforced is lie.

* Cf. Bernard Fay’s excellent Freemasonry and Revolution. (Boston, 1935.)

* By federalism we clearly understand a tendency which is the very opposite of federalism in the American sense. We have to distinguish between centralism, federalism, and separatism; centralism wants the whole concentration of power in a single body, federalism demands a division of power with a marked influence of local administration, separatism recognizes local power only and stands thus clearly for the dissolution of the state into independent parts.

** This idea has been well developed in Josef Leo Seifert’s brilliant work Die Weltrevolutionäre (Von Bogumil über Hus zu Lenin), Vienna, 1930. This work is based on P. Wilhelm Schmidt’s and Gräbner’s Kulturkreislehre. It is also symptomatic that the leaders of the republican movements of Italy, Hungary, and Austria are all titled; Count Sforza, Count Ferdinand Czernin and Count Michael Károlyi. A scion of the princely family Löwenstein represents German republicanism in the United States. (The reader is warned that the terms “First Estate” and “Second Estate” for the Nobility and Clergy are interchangeable as they are not really historical. Only the term “Third Estate” is unequivocal.)

* Montesquieu expressed in his De l’espirit des lots (Livre XI, Ch. IV) the belief that neither the aristocratic nor the democratic form of government are “free” by nature. See also the criticisms of Vilfredo Pareto in his The Mind and Society, §§ 1608, 1609, New York, 1935. The urge for uniformity in his Trattato Della Sociologia is discussed, §§1115–1130.