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By using this Site, you are expected to review these Terms on a regular basis to ensure you understand all terms and conditions governing use of this Site. ### Home URL: https://www.rubiconmag.com/homepage/ Last updated: 2026-08-21T18:14:24.000Z Loading the latest issue… ### Current Issue URL: https://www.rubiconmag.com/current-issue/ Last updated: 2026-07-05T22:37:31.000Z [![Issue cover](https://storage.ghost.io/c/62/e7/62e74585-a8cf-4ed5-a548-87974fbb4bbf/content/images/2026/07/Rubicon-cover--1--1-.jpg) ](https://rubicon-press.myshopify.com/?ref=rubiconmag.com) The Latest Issue ## Vol. 1, No. 1—The Inaugural Issue July 2026 - [Bomb-Throwers, Mass Shooters, and Riot Junkies](https://www.rubiconmag.com/library/bomb-throwers/)Justin Geoffrey - [The German Origins of the Cold War](https://www.rubiconmag.com/library/german-origins-cold-war/)Félix Gonçalves - [The Second Reconstruction and Its Discontents](https://www.rubiconmag.com/library/second-reconstruction/)John Le Verrier - [The Civilization that Sleepwalked into its Demise](https://www.rubiconmag.com/library/world-of-yesterday/)Julius Reinberger - [The Hollywood That Once Was](https://www.rubiconmag.com/library/memoirs-of-a-nobody/)Faisal Marzipan - [The “Other Third Worldism” and its Afterlives](https://www.rubiconmag.com/library/other-third-worldism/)Gabriel Mailhac - [Center Study: An Introduction](https://www.rubiconmag.com/library/center-study/)Rupert Livingston - [The Making of a Nietzscheanism](https://www.rubiconmag.com/library/making-a-nietzscheanism/)Leopold Ostreich [Purchase the latest issue →](https://rubicon-press.myshopify.com/products/rubicon?variant=47681732149426&ref=rubiconmag.com) ### Letters & comments URL: https://www.rubiconmag.com/letters-comments/ Last updated: 2026-07-11T11:06:25.000Z _No content available._ ### Topics URL: https://www.rubiconmag.com/topics/ Last updated: 2026-09-06T21:13:57.000Z _No content available._ ## Posts ### The Historicity of Schmitt's Political Ontology URL: https://www.rubiconmag.com/library/the-historicity-of-schmitts-political/ Last updated: 2026-08-31T20:08:45.000Z Karl August Borg *What the next few years will bring is impossible to say; but I fear that things will not settle down any time soon. It is not the way of the world to be content with what we have; not the way of the great to renounce the abuse of power; and not the way of the masses to accept their mediocre lot in the hope that things will gradually improve. If we could perfect human nature, then a perfect state of affairs might be conceivable. But as it is, the pendulum will continue to swing back and forth; some will suffer while others prosper, selfishness and envy will always be about their work, like evil demons; and party strife will never cease.* — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, quoted in *Conversations with Goethe* by Johann Peter Eckermann Few definitions in twentieth-century political thought have been repeated as often as Carl Schmitt’s dictum: “the specific political distinction is the distinction between friend and enemy.” It is usually treated as the foundation of Schmitt’s accounts of sovereignty, war, and the state, and as the core principle underlying his anti-liberal political philosophy. Yet read closely, the friend-enemy distinction is not the deepest level of Schmitt’s thought. Schmitt built his political ontology on top of a deeper ontology, one that is often overlooked. From *The Concept of the Political*—first published as an essay in 1927 and expanded into a book in 1932—to the end of his life, Schmitt retained this formal definition. But the definition itself points beyond the political to something the political neither creates nor exhausts: a logic of association and dissociation that precedes every public order and survives each one. The political, in Schmitt’s sense, is simultaneously a foundation and a containment strategy—a way of organizing and restraining underlying natural structures—and for that reason it is historical through and through. The historicity of friends and enemies alike stems from the fact that neither exists in the abstract, but arises only in the concrete realm of historical socio-political existence, which is dynamic and ever-changing. It is worth taking a detour to define Schmitt’s formulation. Schmitt maintains that human relations acquire a political character wherever association and dissociation reach an intensity at which the other is apprehended as existentially different—as something alien. This existential other is neither merely a competitor nor something morally bad or evil, nor is it simply economically disadvantageous or unprofitable. The existential other is “other” precisely insofar as its existence makes the possibility of physical violence and death real and conceivable. The friend-enemy distinction is therefore neither substantive nor necessarily institutional. It tells us nothing about who the parties are, how many parties there are, or what constitutive form they take. In this sense, it is purely a formal structure. As Schmitt puts it: > The political can derive its energy from the most varied human endeavors, from the religious, economic, moral, and other antitheses. It does not describe its own substance, but only the intensity of an association or dissociation of human beings whose motives can be religious, national (in the ethnic or cultural sense), economic, or of another kind and can effect at different times different coalitions and separations. But the very notion of a threshold of intensity presupposes something whose intensity can increase. It presupposes an underlying relation of association and dissociation that exists prior to the point at which a particular antithesis becomes political. If the political had no structure beneath it, it would be unclear what precisely was being intensified—or, indeed, what the religious, moral, or national antithesis was an antithesis of. These domains are not neutral materials that are politicized from the outside, as is made clear by Schmitt’s own statement above. They already contain relations of association and dissociation prior to, and independently of, their incorporation into the political. The same point follows from Schmitt’s conception of the state’s monopoly over the political decision. This monopoly does not mean that the state has a monopoly over the existence of enmity; rather, it concerns the public recognition and organization of enmity. When the sovereign state wages war against another state, it does not thereby establish that friend-enemy distinctions cannot arise elsewhere. Such distinctions can and do emerge within and between families, corporations, churches, and other associations. What distinguishes these relations from the political, in Schmitt’s sense, is not the absence of enmity but the public character that makes a relation of enmity politically constitutive. Schmitt’s use of the Christian distinction between *hostis* and *inimicus* makes the same point from the opposite direction. The personal, private enemy (*inimicus*) is excluded from the concept of the political not because the individual does not experience or participate in enmity, but because Schmitt reserves the term “political” for those forms of enmity that have acquired a public character (*hostis*), or, in other words, pose a collective existential threat. The distinction therefore makes sense only if the underlying realm of association and dissociation is broader than its politically recognized manifestations. Otherwise, there would be nothing for the state to exclude and nothing for political recognition to recognize. To use a Heideggerian term, this realm of enmity can be called the *Abgrund*, the unfathomable abyss from which all friend-enemy distinctions emerge. Indeed, it is this “pre-political” *Abgrund* of enmity that, in Schmitt’s view, first produces the pre-political unity necessary for a group to decide upon the particular constitution it will adopt. Political unity thus has a historical origin, but that which precedes history is nature. The political, in other words, cannot be understood apart from some conception of the human beings who constitute it. Thus, Schmitt placed great emphasis on the anthropological foundations of the political. He maintained that political doctrines and philosophies could be judged according to the anthropological assumptions they presuppose. Pessimistic views associated with the Christian doctrine of original sin and with Thomas Hobbes, which regard man as naturally wicked and dangerous, tend to produce doctrines that emphasize hierarchy, order, and authority. Optimistic views, associated with Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Karl Marx, by contrast, regard man as fundamentally good but corrupted by socio-historical conditions, and consequently tend toward doctrines that conceive peaceful coexistence as the truly human form of existence, but this is only achieved if men manage to abolish socio-economic inequality and oppression. Such anthropological positions can be debated, discussed, and justified in the abstract, but, for Schmitt, they can ultimately be confirmed or dismissed through history. Anthropology cannot, therefore, be separated from the historical world in which human beings act. Man is, after all, the constant actor across historical epochs and social formations. Men create culture, and through historical change they transform it; as human beings change, so too does the culture they produce. Every age possesses a particular conception of itself and, consequently, of man, but each age both anticipates a coming one and succeeds a previous one. Each age also has a particular pole around which the political tends to coalesce: theology in the Middle Ages; “metaphysics” in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; economics from the nineteenth up until our own day; and so on. From the perspective of the friend-enemy distinction, however, this succession does not imply progress or regression. Rather, one culture or social formation replaces another, and with it comes corresponding transformations of political order. If human beings are the constant actors through these transformations, however, culture cannot be treated as something independent of human nature. Culture is cultivated from something, and that something is man, for human nature produces culture. Yet culture is always shaped by the existence of others, of friends and enemies, and the relations between them, because there is no such thing as “man” in the abstract; there are only men, each with his peculiar combination of character and intellect. Human beings differ from each other in sex, class, social status, age, religion, conviction, and many other things. These differences generate forms of enmity which are regulated within the state. Yet the state itself exists within a world of other states, each regulating forms of enmity of its own. The interaction of these distinct political communities produces further culture and political differences between states, and thus the possibility of enmity between them. For Schmitt, then, difference—and by extension, strife—is an ontological fact. It cannot simply be abolished through political or social transformation. This is precisely what makes a thinker like Karl Marx dangerous from Schmitt’s perspective. Marx conceives of the possibility of overcoming the fundamental antagonisms of human existence and thereby reaching an end to the struggle that characterizes political life. Yet the attempt to abolish antagonism would therefore itself take on a political form, and in doing so would confront precisely the problems of power, authority, and enmity it sought to overcome. But it does so with absolute moral conviction because it believes it is on the side of “man” and “humanity,” which necessarily means that those who oppose this self-proclaimed progressive force are on the side of the “unhuman.” The fusion of morality and politics produces the most dehumanizing forms of strife and warfare in Schmitt’s eyes. Communism, liberal humanitarianism, and all forms of secular-political messianism totalize the limited distinction between friend and enemy, by transforming a relation between existentially opposed but politically equal opponents into a moral opposition between humanity and that which it needs to negate. The totalization of the political creates an asymmetry so great that the so-called friends come to regard the complete destruction of the enemy as a moral-historical necessity. One of Schmitt’s students, Reinhart Koselleck, continued this theme. In his essay “The Historical-Political Semantics of Asymmetric Counterconcepts,” published in *Futures Past*, he discusses the totalizing aspect in depth. Each group naturally lays claim to an identity of its own, and, by extension, concepts of its own. Despite their differences, friends and enemies have recognized each other as human beings throughout history. As Koselleck maintains, the binaries of Greek-Barbarian and Christian-Heathen never excluded the enemy from humanity. It was only with the Enlightenment that the concept of “human” took on a polemical, negating function. The philosophes had their enemies in the church, the nobility, and the prince. The particular distinctions of the *ancien régime* were thus to be negated by the One, the true Human Being. Thus, with the Revolution, Man was fighting against his enemy, the Unhuman. The historical development of the friend-enemy distinction thus took on a new turn, a potentially more destructive one than ever, and the twentieth century is witness to that. Schmitt feared precisely this outcome. Thus the optimistic view of man, which sees the New Eden on the horizon, brings with it the prospect of a new Flood. It sows not flowers, but death. This was a secular form of messianism: a new eschatology unleashed by the philosophy of history which emerged during the Enlightenment. Earlier eras of European history had been marked by forms of restraint. Wars were considered legitimate and were therefore, in principle, limited. The Westphalian system affirmed the formal equality of states, and general rules and principles regulated human affairs while allowing states and peoples to retain their distinct identities. The dissolution of this plural political order weakened these restraints by introducing universal claims that no longer recognized the legitimacy of political difference. The promise of Salvation *in this world* took root, and the question of what that Salvation would look like—and how the globe and all of humanity were ultimately to partake in Progress—took center stage. Yet the universal claims of the new doctrines—Jacobinism, liberalism, communism, and human rights—did not eliminate the friend-enemy distinction. Instead, they transformed its scale and intensified its stakes. Each doctrine confronted the others as competing visions of the universal, and its opponents could therefore appear not merely as *political* adversaries but as obstacles to the realization of Humanity or History itself. Schmitt’s existential dread stems precisely from the recognition of this paradox: constraint is perpetually necessary because it can never be finally secured, either within or beyond the political order. Every political order is an attempt to contain forces that precede and exceed it and is therefore experienced by its rulers and their friends as good and necessary, even as it remains provisional. The *katechon* must continually be renewed because the possibility of its failure is constitutive of the very order it sustains. History is thus, for Schmitt, neither a linear progression beyond enmity nor merely a succession of stable political forms. Rather, it consists of recurring attempts to contain an ontology whose destructive possibilities—whether as total anarchy or the promise of secular salvation—can never be permanently abolished. The political remains historical because every political order is finite, whereas the structure of association and dissociation that it seeks to organize is not. There is, for this reason, a parallel with Hegel. Hegel’s Spirit does not overcome contradiction by dissolving it, but by recognizing contradiction as a necessary moment of its own constitution. In this sense, the political remains historical in a manner analogous to the way Hegel’s Spirit remains historical even after the “end of history.” It remains so because conflict is not merely a contingent event to be overcome; it is the constitutive element of both Hegel’s Spirit and Schmitt’s state. Every political order, in the Schmittian sense, is finite because the friend-enemy grouping it organizes has no final endpoint. The structure of association and dissociation is not itself a historical stage to be overcome; only the forms through which that structure is contained are historical. In this sense, we can see the shadow of Schmitt’s state in the way the Harvard idealist Josiah Royce once described Hegel’s Absolute in *The Atlantic* in 1891: > Hegel, as we see, makes his Absolute, the Lord, most decidedly a man of war. Consciousness is paradoxical, restless, struggling. Weak souls get weary of the fight, and give up trying to get wisdom, skill, virtue, because all these are won only in presence of the enemy. But the Absolute Self is simply the absolutely strong spirit who bears the contradictions of life, and wins the eternal victory. ### A Church Without a Creed URL: https://www.rubiconmag.com/library/a-church-without-a-creed/ Last updated: 2026-09-01T14:35:04.000Z Edward Lerins *Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America* by Sam Tanenhaus, 2025, Random House, 1,040 pp. One of the great difficulties future historians must face when studying American conservatism is differentiating between all of the Old and New Rights which stud its history. Following the end of the Second World War, an Old Christian Right gave way to a fusionist New Right assembled out of anti-communism; decades later, the New Christian Right Reaganites arrive on the historical stage to proclaim themselves the corrective to the “Old New Right” fusionism that had grown exhausted; and since then, various new creeds have emerged—neo-conservative and paleo-conservative factions—that have each, in turn, declared their predecessors a disappointment, sellouts, or imposters, each rewriting the movement’s history with themselves at the center; and finally with the Trump presidency there arrives yet another right, organized around immigration restriction and re-industrialization, which presents itself as the antagonist of every compromising right that preceded it. The pattern is not merely factional succession. It is a recurring act of forgetting, in which each new right establishes its legitimacy by declaring the previous one to have been no right at all. The peculiar result is a movement with an extraordinarily rich history and a near-total institutional amnesia about itself. Those on the newest of new rights who wish to see their movement written into history would do well to begin with Sam Tanenhaus’s biography of the man who first performed the operation successfully, William F. Buckley. The Buckley whom the newest right inherits as a cautionary byword—a wimpish consensus-seeker, a genial gatekeeper who policed the movement’s boundaries on behalf of the liberal establishment he only *nominally* opposed—is not quite the figure Tanenhaus recovers from the archives. What emerges is a complicated picture of a man at perpetual war with liberal society yet unable to acquire freedom of maneuver against it. Tanenhaus began work on the biography in 1998, after Buckley personally chose him for the project and fresh from his celebrated biography of ex-communist and conservative intellectual Whittaker Chambers. *Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America* marvelously charts the course of Buckley’s life along with the conservative movement he marshaled into such a potent political force. The access Tanenhaus secured was extraordinary: Buckley’s personal papers, his correspondence, and nearly two decades of direct interviews with the subject himself. The result is the most comprehensive account we have of Buckley’s life, his journalistic career, and his forays into politics. Despite his intimate proximity, Tanenhaus’s work never veers away from honestly highlighting the man’s flaws. Buckley’s father, a conservative Texas oilman who had bankrolled anti-socialist forces in Mexico, raised his son on a heady mixture of Catholicism, isolationism, and contempt for the New Deal—an education conducted largely outside conventional American schooling, partly in Paris, and partly in the English boarding school to which the sudden onset of war dispatched the young Buckley. It was not an upbringing designed to produce a man at ease with his country’s direction of travel; indeed, as we shall see, it solidified in him an intellectual contrarianism towards liberal mores that would remain permanent. At Yale, where Buckley took over the *Daily News* in the late 1940s, the contrarian formation crystallized into something that took on a life of its own. He abolished the gentleman’s agreement by which editors declined to criticize named faculty and began an unyielding attack upon liberalism on the campus. While barely in the editorship Buckley published an attack upon Professor Raymond Kennedy and others for “the tendency...to utilize the classroom as a soapbox from which to impose upon their students not the great ideas of great scholars, but their own.” Buckley and his close friend Brent Bozell Jr. proceeded to denounce supporters of the Progressive candidate Henry Wallace for communist sympathies. When evidence was uncovered showing that the FBI was monitoring pro-Wallace groups on campus, he stage-managed—with a flair for the theatrical that would never leave him—a public interview with an FBI officer to rebut charges that the bureau was surveilling them. The book he wrote from this experience, *God and Man at Yale* (1951), scandalized the university and made Buckley famous. Tanenhaus renders this period with particular vividness: here is a young man who does not yet know what he is for but has a prodigious gift for knowing what he is against, and for relentlessly making that opposition felt. The founding of *National Review* in 1955—inspired partly by Willi Schlamm, an Austrian ex-communist whose passage through ideology had left him with an admirably clear-eyed view of its mechanics—is the pivot on which Tanenhaus’s narrative turns. The conventional account, still operative in much popular history, presents Buckley as the slayer of an existing Old Right in its cradle. Tanenhaus argues for something more creative: *National Review* produced, for the first time since the New Deal had scattered the right, a coherent conservative impulse where none had previously existed in organized form. Whittaker Chambers, Willmoore Kendall, and James Burnham are dragged from retirements and unproductive slumps in their careers towards a common cause, that of rolling back Soviet influence from Washington, then Europe. Combined with the mass popular appeal of the Second Red Scare campaign and the McCarthy hearings, Buckley as ruthless moderator of an original pure conservatism is replaced with an image of Buckley the shepherd, concentrating together into a single point of focus varied dormant ideological strands towards the defining issues of the era. The coalition Buckley assembled was implausible on its face. That Buckley held them together, for as long as he did, through the sheer force of his editorial personality and his conviction that anti-communism was an issue pernicious enough to contain their differences, is an achievement that Tanenhaus most persuasively immortalizes. It is also an achievement with a structural flaw built into it from the start. The common enemy held the coalition together; what would hold it together once the enemy retreated was a question Buckley never quite answered. His own anti-communism was a negative program, defined by what it opposed. The absence of a positive vision was not accidental; it was, in some sense, the price of the coalition’s existence. Buckley knew this, which is perhaps why *The Revolt Against the Masses*, his projected systematic statement of conservatism as a philosophy of life, remained unfinished at his death. As the fear of foreign subversives receded, and American politics moved on to seeing the domestic battle for African-American civil rights as the primary issue of the age, rather than retreat into political quietism Buckley forced *National Review* to maintain the Southern line even after the battle was completely lost. After an initial period of studied indifference, James Burnham began making the affirmative case for preserving Southern segregation. Strom Thurmond purchased two subscriptions to *National Review* (one for his office and one for his home) after a recommendation from Buckley Sr. that his son “is for segregation and backs it in every issue.” Only once the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act forced Southern Democrats to admit defeat and the issue faced popular backlash did *National Review* moderate its position on civil rights. The magazine’s retreat from this position is presented by Tanenhaus not as a principled revision but as a tactical acknowledgment of changed political circumstances. Buckley was, above all, a Cold Warrior; the domestic politics of race mattered to him only insofar as they bore on the larger international struggle of rolling back communism. This transition becomes less a heartless betrayal of the Dixiecrat movement and more a pragmatic sacrifice for a victory on a front that was perceived to be more crucial to the international conservative struggle. Tanenhaus also avoids painting Buckley as a simply passive fellow traveler moving along with the trends of American conservatism as he saw them. *National Review* did endorse Nixon in 1968, but it did so reluctantly only after much urging from James Burnham. Afterwards it remained the conservative organ that devoted the most time to critiquing them, relentlessly seeking out the flaws in the Eastern Establishment conservatism from which both drew their support. When Goldwater emerged on the national scene, and once his campaign achieved a critical mass of public support and youth enthusiasm, Buckley and Bozell pushed forwards in supporting their candidate, all in the hope of crippling the future of a soft, accommodationist Rockefeller Republicanism. The 1965 New York City mayoral campaign belongs to this same strategic logic. Buckley’s declaration, when asked what he would do if he won, that he would “demand a recount,” remains one of the more iconic one-liners in American political history. But the campaign was not merely a performance. Buckley’s enigmatic and strange campaign for mayor of New York City, which Tanenhaus so richly and humorously details, is part of a long series of Buckley’s attacks on the remaining liberal Rockefeller-Javits axis that controlled New York, and it was followed by Jim Buckley’s genuine Senate victory in 1970—proof that the strategic bet, whatever the tactical absurdities, had not been entirely miscalculated. Tanenhaus admirably avoids producing a hagiography of Buckley and thoughtfully dwells on his weaknesses and imperfections, both as a thinker and as a man. Ironically the best explanation of these failures comes from Tanenhaus’s earlier book, *The Death of Conservatism*. There Buckley is praised as a consensus-seeking Republican deftly capable of pushing liberalism towards anti-communism and, consequently, never systematically produced an argument for conservatism as a way of life. All the other strands of the right that Buckley shepherded—libertarians, segregationists, free-marketeers—were similarly oppositional movements. In mastering the ability to maneuver against elements of liberalism from an oppositional view, Buckley produced a movement undecided on what the movement was *for*. A closely related flaw that Tanenhaus carefully draws out from Buckley’s career is his inability to whole-heartedly make the case for the individuals he saw as emblematic of his ideology. The two books that were supposedly meant to embody a positive case for conservatives’ own exemplary figures, *McCarthy and His Enemies* (co-written with Bozell) and *The Conscience of a Conservative* (credited to Barry Goldwater but substantially Bozell’s work), abandon their subjects at critical moments. *McCarthy and His Enemies* devotes enormous energy to caveats about procedural prudence and legal technicalities rather than the urgency of McCarthy’s mission. *The Conscience of a Conservative* barely mentions Goldwater. It is as though Buckley and Bozell, having decided that a given individual was the conservative moment’s necessary champion, immediately became embarrassed by the decision. This embarrassment had consequences. The figure who ultimately cast American conservatism in a popular image—Ronald Reagan—did so independently of Buckley’s patronage, and on his own terms. Buckley’s attempt to change Reagan’s mind on the Panama Canal Treaties was met with a civil but firm rebuff. Reagan did not need *National Review*; *National Review* needed Reagan, and knew it. The populist-personalist energies that made Reagan’s career—and, a generation later, Trump’s—were never within Buckley’s gift. He could assemble a coalition of intellectuals but he could not deliver them the hearts of a people. A movement built on opposition, on the negation of liberalism’s premises rather than the affirmation of its own, naturally tends to produce critics rather than champions, diagnosticians rather than visionaries. *National Review* has not been the animating center of conservative intellectual life for two decades; for much of the right today, Buckley’s name functions less as an inspiration than as a rebuke—a symbol of everything timid and institutionally captured about the conservatism that preceded the present rupture. Tanenhaus’s biography does not exactly overturn this judgment, but it considerably complicates it. The Buckley who emerges from these pages is a man who crusaded against what seemed like the overwhelmingly powerful liberal consensus of his day and, on important issues, won under circumstances that were far less favorable to his project than his later celebrity made them appear. He brought together a ragtag band of seemingly futureless thinkers and appointed them as the intellectual vanguard of the world’s most successful right-wing movement. That the building had certain structural defects is a judgment that the current inheritors of Buckley’s project might find useful to sit with. The church he built was large, and for a time magnificent. It simply never agreed on a creed. ### Mansfield and the Philosopher Who Would Rule URL: https://www.rubiconmag.com/library/mansfield-and-the-philosopher-who-would-rule/ Last updated: 2026-08-09T22:15:00.000Z Justin Geoffrey *The Rise and Fall of Rational Control: The History of Modern Political Philosophy* by Harvey Mansfield, 2026, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 323 pp. The exact origins of philosophy are unknown. As pointed out early in Harvey Mansfield’s latest book, *The Rise and Fall of Rational Control*, Socrates did not create philosophy whole cloth—multiple schools, thinkers, and students predated the Athenian moralist who was forced to drink hemlock by the first democracy for corrupting the minds of its youth. Socrates belonged to an older Greek tradition, but it was his work, along with the contributions of Plato and, especially, Aristotle, that laid the foundations for modern political philosophy. It was the Greeks, specifically the democratic Athenians, who first argued and debated about man’s inherent nature and how best that nature can be controlled by rational actors (i.e., princes and legislators). Thus, political philosophy was born as a discipline within the realm of Hellenic philosophy. Mansfield belongs to this school of Western political philosophy, and despite being a rare conservative on Harvard’s campus, he has continued to enjoy support, respect, and prestige since being appointed as a full professor in the radical year of 1969\. *The Rise and Fall of Rational Control* is Mansfield’s latest contribution to his chosen (and dour) science. Based on decades of lectures dating back to 1968, *The Rise and Fall of Rational Control* argues that the first modern political philosopher is the perennially despised Machiavelli. It was the Florentine republican who, through both his brilliant *The Prince* and his plays like *Mandragola*, articulated a philosophy that de-emphasized Christianity and Aristotle—the two most powerful forces of the mediaeval world—in favor of a kind of “situational” ethics that embraces the necessity of evil, or at least immoral deeds for moral ends. Mansfield argues that Machiavelli was the first to reimagine man’s natural state as devoid of original sin, and it was Machiavelli who articulated methods of rational control (or, more simply, politics) predicated on something other than the pursuit of absolute good or the absolute truth. *The Rise and Fall of Rational Control* expands from Machiavelli and dissects the work of seven other great philosophers of Western history: Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, G. W. F. Hegel, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Nietzsche. Each one of these philosophers takes the genius of Machiavelli and reshapes it, thus producing different conclusions. Hobbes and Locke, for example, saw in natural man a base desire for protection and security from the troubles of existence. Hobbes saw the state as the answer to this dilemma, while Locke argued for private property. Both men, however, agreed that natural rights come before natural law, and thus both are the founders of Anglo-American liberalism. Rousseau, on the other hand, wrote of natural man as pure and uncorrupted, and for individuals to return to that blissful existence, there must exist a broad, irreligious humanism and a socio-political order that is so total as to render disorder impossible. The German philosophers of Mansfield’s work come across as the great disruptors of the Renaissance-to-Enlightenment epoch, with Hegel centering history above philosophy, and Marx and Nietzsche pushing for complete revolutions in both the material world and the mental landscape. *The Rise and Fall of Rational Control* serves as a good introduction to modern political philosophy. Mansfield is adept at discussing the key points of each subject, and although he is prone to using jargon and unnecessarily complex prose, his points are nevertheless clear so long as the reader is paying attention. In a similar vein, this book makes several important assertions about political philosophy: 1) its origins are anti-Christian, 2) it intentionally upholds the creative and individualistic philosopher as the only person equipped to rule justly, and 3) it, as a discipline, is concerned with how best to rationally control nominally free individuals within a society ruled via constitutions, whether republican or monarchical. Thankfully, Mansfield discusses these developments without too much presentism or interjections, although he is guilty of making jokes about grading papers and Nietzsche’s “dangerous” appeal to the right. *The Rise and Fall of Rational Control* is a thorough primer—an introductory monograph—on the history and complexities of Western political philosophy. Mansfield is a master of his craft, and his truest mastery lies in his ability to distill centuries of philosophical thought down into thoroughgoing debates that connect Machiavelli to Marxist communism, and Lockean liberalism to Nietzschean vitalism. ### How Virtue Fell Under Suspicion URL: https://www.rubiconmag.com/library/how-virtue-fell-under-suspicion/ Last updated: 2026-09-03T03:57:20.000Z Félix Gonçalves *Disguised Vices: Theories of Virtue in Early Modern French Thought* by Michael Moriarty, 2011, Oxford University Press, 409 pp. In the second book of the *Republic*, Glaucon and Adeimantus press Socrates with a challenge that has never quite been answered. Strip a just man of every reward of justice, they propose, and heap those rewards instead upon an unjust man clever enough to seem just; then ask which of the two lives is the better. The thought experiment assumes precisely what it sets out to test: that a virtue practiced for its good consequences is not the same thing as a virtue practiced for its own sake. Michael Moriarty, whose *Disguised Vices* is the third and most ambitious volume of a trilogy on early modern French thought, observes that the classical rescue of virtue only sharpens the difficulty it means to resolve. To answer Glaucon by saying that justice is to be chosen because it benefits and completes the just man is, as Moriarty notes, to reopen the very door the argument was meant to close: this argument can be “seized on by the cynical critic,“ for what could be more in one’s interest than one’s own happiness? The suspicion that our virtues are something other than they appear is not a modern heresy. It is coiled inside the oldest philosophical defense of virtue itself. The title draws directly from a maxim, "Nos vertus ne sont, le plus souvent, que des vices déguisés \[Our virtues are most often only disguised vices\]", which appeared as the epigraph to the 1678 edition of La Rochefoucauld’s *Maximes*. To his credit, Moriarty treats this not as a witty aside but as the culmination of a profound intellectual tradition spanning antiquity, patristic theology, medieval scholasticism, and the fierce religious controversies of early modern Europe. The work stands as a towering achievement as a history of moral philosophy and early modern French intellectual thought not because it attempts to tame the sharp aphorisms but because it situates them in the middle of one of the most enduring and corrosive suspicions in Western ethics: that what we praise as virtue is frequently nothing more than vice in elaborate disguise. This is the terrain of *Disguised Vices*. Moriarty organizes his inquiry around a deceptively straightforward set of questions: Under what conditions does a morally praiseworthy action truly reflect virtue in the agent? When, and why, might we suspect that apparent virtue is driven by hidden vices such as self-love (*amour-propre*), vanity, fear, habit, or unconscious passions? The investigation begins with classical antiquity and builds toward the Grand Siècle, where these tensions reached a dramatic pitch amid Jansenist rigorism, courtly culture at the dawn of the absolute state, and emerging secular moral psychology. The opening chapter establishes the ancient foundations with Aristotle as the benchmark. For him, virtue is a stable disposition (*hexis*) involving deliberate choice, not mere emotion. It represents a “good love of self“ directed toward the noble rather than base pleasures or external honors. Motive may disqualify virtue. Eudaemonic self-love, properly understood, aligns with reason and the pursuit of what is best in oneself. The discussion in Book III of the *Ethics* admits virtuous courage even when emotional spiritedness (*thumos*) is at work in a man, but however valiant the act, if the end is not toward the noble (*dia to kalon*), it is not virtuous, for a thing is defined by its end. Cicero, Seneca, and Plutarch extend this framework, distinguishing authentic virtue from its counterfeits, such as the thrasonic glory-seeking that mimics courage or the calculated restraint that passes for temperance. The Stoics notably insist on the unity of the soul, and so for Seneca, who especially aimed his moral critique at the decadence of Imperial Roman society, men have a proclivity toward self-deception that unnaturally partitions the soul and directs it away from right reason (*orthos logos*). Moriarty carefully avoids teleological flattening here; he highlights internal tensions in these systems (reason versus passion, appearance versus reality) and appeals to universal norms that later Christian writers would seize upon in their engagement. _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### America’s Read Guards URL: https://www.rubiconmag.com/library/americas-read-guards-thomas-preston/ Last updated: 2026-08-09T22:14:43.000Z Thomas Preston *That Book Is Dangerous!: How Moral Panic, Social Media, and the Culture Wars Are Remaking Publishing* by Adam Szetela, 2025, The MIT Press, 288 pp. Every moral panic appears as a fait accompli from the inside and inexplicable from the outside. The magistrates of Salem required nothing beyond spectral evidence to hang nineteen of their neighbors, and within five years the colony’s own ministers were ashamed of the proceedings. In 1954 the psychiatrist Fredric Wertham persuaded a Senate subcommittee that comic books were manufacturing juvenile delinquents, and a terrified industry adopted a Comics Code that gutted the medium for a generation; by the time the Code was quietly abandoned, no one could explain why anyone had believed him. The pattern recurs with a regularity that should comfort no one. An anxiety finds an object, merchants of outrage organize the anxiety into a movement, and institutions that ought to know better capitulate. Then, with a swiftness that embarrasses every participant, the apparatus collapses, and the historians move in. The historians are now moving in on American publishing. Adam Szetela’s *That Book Is Dangerous!* is the fullest account yet written of the moral panic that gripped the industry between roughly 2016 and 2024, when accusations of racism, cultural appropriation, and insufficient sensitivity came to determine what Americans were permitted to write, publish, and read. The book is a rigorous and genuinely illuminating anatomy of that episode. Szetela writes as an insider of the world he indicts. He earned his doctorate in English at Cornell, held a visiting fellowship at Harvard, and contributes to the *Washington Post*, the *Guardian*, and *Newsweek*. The book grew out of his dissertation, and it retains the dissertation’s virtues: the research is deep, the interviews extensive, and the prose free of jargon. He spoke with presidents and vice presidents at the Big Five publishers, senior literary agents, executive directors of public library districts, award-winning authors, editors, marketers, and the sensitivity readers themselves. The admission he heard most often from these people—“I wouldn’t have done this interview if it wasn’t anonymous”—belongs to both the book’s acknowledgments and argument. The censor of Szetela’s account is not a government office. It is a diffuse apparatus in which anyone with an internet connection may serve as a commissar, and in which the fear of that apparatus does most of the enforcement. _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### Making a Nietzscheanism URL: https://www.rubiconmag.com/library/making-a-nietzscheanism/ Last updated: 2026-08-09T22:14:37.000Z Leopold Ostreich *The Idiocy of Idealism* by Oscar Levy, 1940, William Hodge and Company Ltd, 155 pp. *The Revival of Aristocracy* by Oscar Levy, 1906, Probsthain, 119 pp. In 1938, from a villa on the Côte d’Azur, Oscar Levy composed an open letter titled “The Excommunication of Adolf Hitler.” Its purpose was to sever Hitler from Nietzsche, and its means were as incendiary as they were bewildering: Levy pronounced the Führer a victim of “Jewish values” and an “Untermensch from a Nietzschean perspective.” The letter went unpublished—Levy had relatives still in Germany—but it survives as the clearest statement of a project he had pursued for three decades: to make Nietzsche the property of an aristocratic, anti-egalitarian elite, and to keep him from German nationalists, whom Levy regarded not as Nietzsche’s heirs but as his vulgarizers. Hitler had by then endowed the Nietzsche Archive at Weimar and accepted the gift of the philosopher’s walking stick, so that demonstrating the vulgar, un-Nietzschean character of National Socialism had become, for Levy, an urgent task. Levy’s case is instructive and worth recovering now because it shows that opposition to National Socialism did not require, and in his instance explicitly rejected the egalitarian premises that later became almost definitional of antifascism. He was no reflexive enemy of authoritarian rule: he had known Mussolini personally, interviewed him for the *New York Times* in 1924, and warned him in 1937 against the German alliance, breaking with Il Duce only after the Lateran Treaty. He despised Hitler as a leveler and a resentful mediocrity, not as a Great Man gone wrong. To read Levy is to be reminded how much wider the field of permitted argument once was, and how strange the map of interwar opinion looks when its coordinates are not the ones we have inherited. German troops massed on the western front soon after the letter was drafted, and Levy moved to England, the country from which he had once been expelled—deported as an alien in 1921 for the imprudence of writing a preface to George Pitt-Rivers’s inflammatory pamphlet *The World Significance of the Russian Revolution*. He returned to old company: Norman Douglas, who urged him toward what became his last book, *The Idiocy of Idealism*; and, from an earlier emigration, D. H. Lawrence, William Somerset Maugham, Aleister Crowley, H. G. Wells, T. E. Hulme, Curzio Malaparte, and Graham Greene, most of them met at the Vienna Café in Bloomsbury after Levy had reached London at twenty-five by way of a voyage round the world as a ship’s doctor. What united this company, beyond temperament, was a shared discomfort with National Socialist Germany’s folkish racism and its revival of an archaic, land-hungry peasant ideal. Levy himself wanted to wed Continental culture to the *noblesse* of British Empire; he translated Disraeli’s *Contarini Fleming* in 1909 for its unromantic portrait of a man mastering hostile circumstance, and he admired Disraeli’s fusion of social politics, imperialism, and race—”other than which there is no other truth,” as Disraeli wrote in *Tancred; or, The New Crusade*, which Levy rendered into German. This range of opinion on race and social evolution is the real subject here. The *Idiocy* and *Revival* are less arguments to be adjudicated than specimens of a lost ecology of thought. Radically different, and yet from a distance oddly similar, versions of Darwinism, “Nietzscheanism,” radical meliorism, and Spencerite liberalism competed for cultural supremacy across the turn of the century, and Levy wanted his stake in the contest. Between 1909 and 1913, at his instigation, an eighteen-volume complete edition of Nietzsche in English appeared—the achievement for which he is now chiefly remembered, and the one on which any judgment of his career must finally rest. He had a predecessor and rival in Alexander Tille, the social-Darwinist who translated *Thus Spoke Zarathustra* in 1896 and issued his own incomplete Works of Nietzsche through 1909; Levy’s edition depended on a team of cotranslators—William A. Haussmann, Horace B. Samuel, Paul V. Cohn, Adrian Collins, J. M. Kennedy, Maximilian A. Mügge, Helen Zimmern, and, above all, Anthony Ludovici and Thomas Common. Common produced a quarterly, *Notes for Good Europeans*, later *The Good European Point of View*, meant to enlarge the English appetite for Nietzsche and to confront what the master called his seriousness: the creation of a new noble caste to rule Europe and possibly the earth. That such a program could be advanced in a literary quarterly rather than whispered is itself a measure of the age’s permissiveness. This intellectual permissiveness flourished on both sides of the Atlantic, the more easily because eugenics and social reform were often treated as synonymous—even in progressive circles, as Thomas C. Leonard forcefully argued in *Illiberal Reformers*. Tille sought to expose the “unnaturalness” of accumulated ethical principles and their tendency to retard progress; against Haeckel and Spencer, he denied that progress and humanity were compatible at all, holding that humanism, Christianity, egalitarianism, socialism, and democracy would together smother the development of superior specimens. This was also the argument of Levy’s first book, *The Revival of Aristocracy*, published in German in 1904 as *Das neunzehnte Jahrhundert*—literally “The Nineteenth Century.” To frame what he called the century’s “nationalistic decadence” and “topsy-turvydom of the masses,” Levy prophesied the rebirth of “classical man” in Napoleon, presenting him, with Stendhal and Goethe as literary counterparts, as the embodiment of higher life. The book’s opening portrays a “new renaissance” trinity of Stendhal, Goethe, and Nietzsche, read in a strongly antipopulist register for their paganism and their cult of the ego. But the century, to the chagrin of those who hoped for a Helleno-Roman revival on the Napoleonic model, went another way, and Levy’s account of its actual tendencies—utilitarianism, socialism, the *salonnières*, early feminism, Millian meliorism—turns at times into scattershot anti-Christian polemic that the book does not fully earn. These economistic ideologies had a latent tendency to outdo the Church in solicitude for the poor and the “undeveloped,” reproaching it for insufficient altruism, a word Levy notes was coined in that period by Comte, the positivist founder of the “religion of humanity.” Such “Hyper-Christians,” on his reading, promulgated a negative vision aimed at forcing the fusion of classes, nations, and finally of humanity itself. Against this prospect Levy proposed a new aristocracy, or several, to reinvigorate the old dynasties under an ethos of human greatness; orations like the Sermon on the Mount, he argued, demand an impossible ideality that, taken seriously, would distort human affairs and ruin the best human types. Here it becomes clear that what animated Levy’s fury toward National Socialism was philosophical and theological as much as political. He felt that the very phrase “Chosen People” was a contradiction, one he indicted Hitler for appropriating. Beneath the indictment lay Levy’s conviction that Abrahamic monotheism, and what he considered its secularized after shoots like Hegelian metaphysics and Comtean positivism, stood below the paganism of Greece and Rome because they made it difficult for ideas or positive values to take substantive hold on a people. It was on these grounds that he denounced the “Aryan” mythology of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the prime contemporary exponent of Western racialist thought. In a foreword Levy wrote in the 1913 English translation of Arthur de Gobineau’s most consequential books, *The Renaissance—*which reads the revival of antiquity through profiles of Savonarola, Cesare Borgia, Julius II., Leo X., and Michelangelo—he deploys Gobineau polemically against Chamberlain, faulting the latter’s “Germanizing” distortions and his vulgar political antisemitism. Levy argued, contra Chamberlain and his National Socialist adherents, that the true followers of Nietzsche had no use for racial scapegoating or nationalistic resentments. Chamberlain, for his part, had earlier charged Gobineau with treating “pure race” as a given rather than a thing to be made and fought for; Levy held that the later Gobineau had ceased to believe in any peoples, equal or chosen, at all. It is not surprising then that Levy and his spiritual kindred viewed the rightwing mass movements of the interwar years as pessimistically as Chamberlain viewed them with hope. He detested Chamberlain’s “nationalization” of race and believed, as he supposed the late Gobineau had, that what survived was only a remnant—an invisible aristocracy of “perhaps no more than 3,500 people in the whole world,” in Mencken’s words. Fused with a settled pessimism about human nature and capacities, this elitism eventually turned against the Germans themselves: Levy scorned their modern pretension to be a “race,” let alone an approximation of Gobineau’s Aryan ideal. In the letter to Hitler, Levy ironically remarked that the only beneficiaries of Hitler’s antisemitism would be the Zionist movement since their racial theories, on the testimony of Theodor Herzl himself, were among the founding ideas of the Jewish state. In that same vein, Levy further took aim at the Nuremberg racial laws: > Only one Nazi grandfather—and as you know, there were many Nazis before you \[Hitler\] — and no descendant is fit to be an honest scribe or an honorable guest in the house of Zarathustra in the mountains. Spirit shapes blood, and blood shapes spirit: the spirit of truthfulness. But this truthfulness is a product of Jewish thought and Christian conscientiousness: Nietzsche was not for nothing the scion of a long line of Protestant pastors. Their piety and honesty blossomed and emerged in him, ultimately driving him to turn against our religion and our morals: It is therefore the spirit of Christianity and the Christian discipline of generations that have killed our God and his morals. Levy lambasts Hitler as “a Jew in spirit,” a heathen trafficking in racial purity after the manner of Ezra, armed “with ideas about the ‘chosen people.’” In Hitler, Levy claimed to see the values of the Jewish people—their grave Old Testament pathos, ideas of election, their will to purification of the blood—arriving at a historical summit just as the Roman gaiety he revered went into eclipse. Germany of 1938, he wrote, retained no Romans but only the romantic kind—Hitler’s own allies: > The lictor who accompanies us has no axe in his bundle of rods, but he has a sharp, deadly weapon: our lictor is laughter. No more crucifixions of gods or lambs, saints or sinners. By the fin de siècle the most consequential arguments had turned from economy and empire toward the arts, symbolism, and poetry, and here Levy’s case grows more interesting than his polemics against Christianity or Judaism alone would suggest. As Nietzsche’s own work already showed, there were deeper problems than the social-Darwinist concern with sterilizing weak bloodlines, eliminating deformed specimens, and administering mating and marriage: the eugenic project was decadent on its own terms, since its technical cleansing threatened to yield only a sterile, mediocre society, and the war on the “weak” might extinguish precisely what mattered in the name of efficiency. Max Nordau, also a physician but, unlike Levy, an important Zionist and a friend of Herzl’s, made the opposing case in 1895 with his influential pamphlet *Degeneration*, arguing that the Parisian fin de siècle’s artistic ferment was a movement toward dissolution and the loss of higher types. Nietzsche himself was numbered among the symptoms, characterized as a nervous dreamer of pathological tendency. Levy spent much of his career contesting Nordau’s book, which had soured Nietzsche’s English reception and anticipated, almost to the word, the conservative hostility to modern art that the National Socialists would later stage in their exhibitions of Degenerate Art. Nietzsche’s anti-Christian passages, more than his advocacy for eugenics, made him a demon to the English press. A prominent newspaper wrote, during the First World War, “Read the devil, in order to fight him the better.” Against this reception the magazine *Notes for Good Europeans* had been founded in London in 1903, laying the groundwork for what Nietzsche called an “assassination of Christianity” on English soil. Levy’s “Good European” was to be the product of métissage aimed at reinvigoration. He pledged himself to something “over-German, over-Protestant, and over-Judeo-Christian,” inveighing against national mysticism lest such loyalties consign Nietzsche’s thought “to obscurity with derisive laughter from the coming youth.” Nihilism, as he most explicitly constructed it in *Revival*, sprang not from decadent life but from the reigning Judeo-Christian values of the age; against them he summoned an antinihilism drawn from Greek religion, Renaissance magnificence, and the permanent beauty of art and nature. None of this is offered to relitigate the exegetical disputes of early-twentieth-century Nietzsche scholarship. It opens a window instead onto a spiritual situation whose range of argument—on eugenics, degeneration, the conscious direction of human evolution, the foundations of states and creeds—was, by any honest measure, wider than anything permitted since 1945, when certain doctrines hardened into a settled orthodoxy. Oscar Levy’s mission to generate a new Renaissance, his “Nietzscheanism”—what his friend H. L. Mencken called the making of “a correlative Nietzschean literature in English”—stands as an extreme antipode to the narrowed field of our own discourse. There is, of course, a Nietzsche apart from Levy’s, one available to cosmopolitan, “masculine-liberal,” antinationalist, and merely Old European readings; Levy’s Nietzsche is a partisan construction, defined as much by what it repudiates—the pan-German and neo-pagan readings of Bäumler, Stefan George, and other National Socialist–adjacent interpreters—as by what it affirms. What these projects share, Levy’s included, is the recognition that human beings require some weight to their existence once unmoored from religious anchors. Beyond his general assault on Christian or Jewish doctrines, Levy singled out one concrete target: the Germans, whom he charged with being the worst kind of Christians for their literal-mindedness, their inability to hear a *sous-entendu*, their habit of taking everything *au pied de la lettre*. Where the English trust blindly in Providence, he held, the Germans must always assist it with their own systems and programs. “It is a characteristic failing of the Germans to look in the clouds for what lies at their feet,” lamented Schopenhauer; they could not take religion simply, but struggled endlessly with the feeling of spiritual election. Levy traced that exceptionalism through the idealisms of Fichte and Hegel into Fascism and Marxism alike—the notion of a Chosen People, he argued, invisibly permeates all these ostensibly secular political philosophies, and could culminate in something more fanatical than anything that had come before. The predicament was especially perverse, on his account, because the Platonic project of Christianity was ill suited to Germanic tribes civilized at a relatively late date: it corrupted, stunted, and tamed a people who lived on thought and theory. Whether elected by the Christian God or by Hegel’s *Geist*, German scholars of the nineteenth century proclaimed themselves the true Semites even as they professed to hate them—the Germans, unlike the English, never having had the luck of a stable synthesis between their national project and their own borrowed Judaism. Four centuries of German theology and philosophy, in Levy’s verdict, stultified exceptional individuals in the name of altruism. Egalitarian-humanitarian doctrines denied the artist the egoism his sublime visions required; sin, he wrote, “had been uprooted as the minds and bodies of the humans are now too weak to transgress.” Germany had grown too servile and “democratic” to host artists, and its classical and Romantic generations died without worthy heirs, leaving only unremarkable epigones. This distaste is sharpest in *Revival*’s fifth chapter, “On Southerners and Northerners,” where Levy is at his most Latinophile, loving the European south’s passionate temperament as Helen Zimmern did, in sharp contrast to what he took for the bloodless, mechanistic character of northern life—a north whose dominance he anticipated would set the direction of modernity. A revived ersatz-Christianity and a harsher climate let the northern genius fully translate its ideals into fact; the dearest wish of England and Germany alike was an art for all, which is to say industry, while the Italian regarded his southern genius as too lofty for the petty study of steelmaking or pottery. The northern spirit commands servile masses through discipline; the southern spirit commands the few through mastery. Levy was no monomaniacal Italophile, however, nor simply hostile to Protestant Christianity: he credited England’s greatness to “the new faith,” holding English Protestantism and the civilization of machines to be natural allies, even as he insisted that the prosperity such nations prize “may also be a sign of the lack of higher qualities, because these conditions are unfavorable to genius.” Levy took a pessimistic view of the northern spirit’s direction because he thought it would inevitably concretize into a form of socialism. The Puritan revolution in England, the French Revolution, and the Russian Revolution were, in his historical narrative, all carried by retrograde “*jüdisch-christlich*” ideas of revolt against what is strong and great. He drew this directly from Nietzsche, who described the people of the nineteenth century as half-hearted and gauche for denying the radical seriousness of Christianity while clinging to its old moral habits, reducing it purely to a one-dimensional religion of “empathy.” Levy attempted to publish his last book, *The Idiocy of Idealism*, in America in 1938, fearing that publication in England would invite blasphemy charges. Even with the help of Mencken, one of his generation’s most influential social critics, no American publisher agreed to take it. English publishers, previously wary, eventually insisted on issuing this “truly offensive tract” once they saw its commercial potential—and it succeeded as one, helped by a foreword from George Bernard Shaw, who praised Levy as “an entirely tactless Nietzschean Jew”—meaning that tactlessness was necessary if one wished to be useful as a Nietzschean. *Idiocy* traces the religious and political preachers of salvation, from the Old Testament to Marx, and argues for a common cultural logic underlying both the Jewish religion and National Socialist idealism. Levy read Fascism, communism, and National Socialism in particular as little more than old myths of racial salvation inherited from the Old Testament. That the Germans adopted a foreign, Eastern pagan symbol as their flag alongside Hebraic racial motifs was, for Levy, further evidence that the European monotheist tradition had lost command of men’s consciences; socialism and communism, similarly, were meta-narratives of collective salvation inherited unreconstructed from the Old Testament. In the case of communism, the sanctity of race or nation was merely supplanted by the sanctity of class. *Idiocy* is a polemical tract, not a rigorous study in intellectual history or *Begriffsgeschichte*: it opens with a sweeping account of Jewish history and interprets the Protestant Reformation and French Revolution as a reemergence of the “Jewish spirit,” with Cromwell and Robespierre as its quintessential figures. Beyond this somewhat simple genealogy, Levy claimed an opponent beyond any particular historical doctrine: the timeless human tendency toward utopianism and messianism—which culminated in National Socialism. Interestingly, Levy maintains this German idealist “idiocy” found its institutional beginning in the Second Reich of Bismarck. This view avoids portraying National Socialism as a radical anomaly and sees it in a continuum with modern and ancient ideas. War is not just a result of militarism whipped up by harmful demagogues, but is founded in an essentially religious nationalism with deep historical roots. To a reader steeped in postwar conservative and liberal polemic none of this will feel new at a cursory glance. The intellectual bankruptcy that accompanies the end of apocalyptic narratives coincides with a widespread disbelief that meaningful stories remain to be told. Without discipline and mission, individuals and nations alike fall into ruin. Technical mastery and scientific conquest of nature have lost their enchanting force. Modern society, Levy argued, cannot handle the luxury it has created because it effaced the great individuals that could undertake the Herculean endeavor required to sustain it. The pacification of intellect, ambition and imagination at the foundation of modern Western regimes, continually informed in the negative sense by past civil wars and by inhuman or superhuman evil—what Judith Shklar called the “liberalism of fear”—cannot ever give way to a truly life-affirming social order. The moral play-acting of the present is shallow, amounting to what Nietzsche called *tartuffery*—vain and hypocritical piety for something essentially dead. Universal claims, especially from contemporary ideologists, require a homogenized audience to carry any force at all. His mission was meant to produce a new, unprejudiced intellectual aristocracy and renaissance, not a mass-training totalitarian scheme: the best part of a nation should keep its distance from the necessarily vulgar public, resisting equalization, so that the desire for superiority, present in any healthy period, might remain within every national community. All his polemics and offenses can charitably be read in that key. None of this amounts to a case one can accept, and Levy’s own method—a sweeping genealogy in which two ancient religions and three centuries of German philosophy collapse into a single explanatory idea—repeats the very totalizing move he condemns in his opponents. But the case is worth considering precisely because of that overreach. It shows an antifascism, if the word applies to Levy at all, built entirely on hierarchical and aristocratic premises: a man who despised Hitler not for excluding but for leveling. Read against postwar accounts that treat hierarchical organization of society as inherently proto-fascist, Levy’s case is an inconvenient exhibit. His life’s genuine achievement— the eighteen-volume Nietzsche, and the labor of Ludovici, Common, Zimmern, and the rest that made it possible—survives its author’s crankier ambitions and remains the reason English readers today have Nietzsche at all. A reader interested in following this further might turn to the sympathetic recent commentary of Leila Kais, Dan Stone, and Steffen Dietzsch, the last of whom credits Levy with a “nomadic reason” set against the “sedentary reason” of his contemporaries — an image Dietzsch borrows from Friedrich Kittler, who observed that the opposite of democracy is not barbarism but nomadism. It captures something true of Levy: a mentality bent always toward the new, mistrustful of the fixed and the long settled, closer in temperament to the men who discovered continents than to the men who governed them once found. ### Bomb-Throwers, Mass Shooters, and Riot Junkies URL: https://www.rubiconmag.com/library/bomb-throwers/ Last updated: 2026-08-09T22:14:21.000Z Justin Geoffrey *Biopsychology of Marxist Fanaticism* by Antonio Vallejo-Nagera, 2014, Patria Publishing, 165 pp. *Days of Rage* by Bryan Burrough, 2015, Penguin Press, 608 pp. The year 1938 was a tense one across Europe. On March 12, the Federal State of Austria was formally annexed by the German Reich following Chancellor Schuschnigg's call for a snap referendum. Following the May Crisis, when Prague partially mobilized its armed forces to counter a potential German invasion, the leaders of Great Britain and France initiated negotiations that culminated in the Munich Agreement of September 1938\. Under this agreement, London and Paris permitted Berlin to annex a portion of the Sudetenland—the ethnically German region of northern Bohemia—and incorporate it into the Reich. Peace was secured, but only for another year. Popular prewar mythology often depicts events as follows: conniving Germans hoodwinked the cowardly British and French leadership, who were willing to sacrifice Europe's smaller states to avert another global conflict. The enduring condemnation of their "appeasement" policy is predicated on the assumption that Europe's wealthy and democratic powers prioritized peace with a perceived monstrous evil over armed conflict. This perspective, however, overlooks the presupposition that pre-1938 Europe was peaceful. This was demonstrably not the case. Indeed, France's neighboring Spain was embroiled in the later stages of a brutal civil war even as Chamberlain and Daladier articulated their pronouncements about peace. The Spanish Civil War (1936–39) receives comparatively scant attention in the Anglophone world for various reasons; however, it is plausible to surmise that it is rarely taught because the right-wing forces ultimately won. Despite garnering support from significant segments of the international press, academia, and the governments of France, Great Britain, and the United States, the left-wing Spanish Republicans were decisively defeated by the Spanish Nationalists, who comprised a strange *mélange* of monarchists, traditionalist Roman Catholics, Falangists, and conservatives. By 1938, a Nationalist victory was all but assured. Earlier that year, in the spring of 1938, the Republican government began to exhibit signs of public fracture. On April 5, Minister of War Indalecio Prieto was dismissed from his post by the Soviets and their Spanish communist allies, reportedly owing to his perceived lack of conviction in the inevitability of a Marxist victory. Less than three months later, the Comintern instructed foreign volunteers to return home, thereby depriving the Republicans of some of their best troops. In July, Nationalist forces commenced their bloody crossing of the Ebro River. By December, Barcelona, the last significant Republican stronghold, came under attack from over 120,000 Nationalist troops and their Italian allies. The city would fall the following month. Around this same time, Spanish psychiatrist Antonio Vallejo-Nagera conducted a study of captured Republicans. His groundbreaking study of left-wing psychology was eventually published as *Biopsychology of Marxist Fanaticism*. In the volume, Vallejo-Nagera clinically analyzed the pathologies of both native-born Marxists and the many foreign volunteers who flocked to Spain during the war. He categorized subjects into groups such as Spanish Marxists, Hispanic revolutionaries, North American radicals, European volunteers, and female Republicans. Regarding Hispanic volunteers, Vallejo-Nagera observed that most had "degenerative temperaments," were more introverted and "social imbeciles," were predominantly irreligious, and primarily received their political education via newspapers. This pattern was repeated across many of Vallejo-Nagera's subjects, with some notable exceptions. Chief among these were the Americans, whom Vallejo-Nagera described as intelligent but lacking in culture, politically immature, and heavily influenced by the press and cinema. Unlike other groups, they tended towards teetotalism rather than alcoholism. Additionally, American subjects were characterized by their sexual debauchery and dedication. Vallejo-Nagera found no virgins among them; unlike their European or Hispanic counterparts, American subjects reported multiple sexual partners and rarely relied on prostitutes. Notably, American prisoners in Nationalist custody largely maintained their political fanaticism despite re-education attempts. Vallejo-Nagera also theorized that the New Deal's emphasis on equality, democracy, and egalitarianism made Americans particularly susceptible to Marxist propaganda. Finally, Vallejo-Nagera believed the American subjects most convincingly supported his thesis that Marxism primarily appealed to those perceived as professional, social, and sexual failures. The findings in *Biopsychology of Marxist Fanaticism* would be replicated time and time again, with only the terminology differing. Eric Hoffer's *The True Believer*, which examined all mass movements, regardless of political alignment, found that "true believers" tended to be submissive personalities whose many failures led them to "willingly abdicate the direction of their lives to those who want to plan, command, and shoulder all responsibility." Later, the anonymous poster Spandrell coined the term "Bioleninism" to describe left-wing politics as a "Coalition of the Fringes" uniting the physically deformed, the spiteful, the resentful, and the spiritually ugly against orderly and beautiful civilization. In essence, being left-wing is a matter of biology rather than ideology. The biological explanation for leftism is not entirely sufficient. Vallejo-Nagera found in 1938 that many American Marxists came from solidly Anglo-Saxon and Protestant backgrounds, and most were from either the middle class or the upper echelons of the working class. Bryan Burrough's *Days of Rage* similarly notes that many violent radicals of the 1960s and 1970s were children of privilege—well-educated, financially stable or wealthy, and often physically attractive. What united the American bomb-throwers of the 1960s and 1970s was a firm belief in the inevitability of a revolution and a commitment to "black liberation." As Burrough notes early in his narrative, the Vietnam War was a secondary matter to true believers in left-wing violence. To the men and women of the Weather Underground and the other urban guerrillas of the period, it was always about black Americans: > Every single underground group of the 1970s, with the notable exception of the Puerto Rican FALN, was concerned first and foremost with the struggle of blacks against police brutality, racism, and government repression. While late in the decade several groups expanded their worldview to protest events in South Africa and Central America, the black cause remained the core motivation of almost every significant radical who engaged in violent activities during the 1970s. For leftist radicals in the 1970s (and the same demographic today), America's history of racial injustice provides the necessary framework for the expression of their maladaptive impulses. The mental illness of the left "can be understood as the result of a conflict between a dysgenic mythos and natural psychological tendencies which seek realization within an orderly mental and cultural framework." In other words, the unique socio-pathology of leftism may be inborn and biological, but it requires a certain cultural milieu to truly flourish and gain mass influence. And, as Josh Neal has written, "subversion of religious, national, and ethnic mythos grant a tremendous capacity for political and social control." Since the end of World War II, leftism has been the dominant ideology in the West, and it has multiplied its true believers via various methods of propaganda, all of which work to underscore the notion that leftism is the normal, default philosophy for all moral individuals. One of the more prevalent and successful variants of this propaganda has been the villainization of the Western world and its people by the professional, technical, and elite classes. For such individuals, the forever-looming specter of renewed fascism or National Socialism is a permanent crisis. So, even before the end of the Second World War, the left began identifying conservative and right-wing ideologies as murderous and inevitably leading to horrors like Auschwitz. Marxist theorists like Hannah Arendt began pathologizing formerly healthy attitudes like patriotism, while others, such as Herbert Marcuse, popularized an exclusive definition of tolerance requiring intolerance towards exclusionary ideas (racism, sexism, colonialism, etc.). These ideas primarily spread on America's university campuses, where most left-wing radicals are cultivated and supported. Andy Ngo's *exposé* of American Antifa, *Unmasked*, decisively shows that the university campus is ground zero for left-wing indoctrination and radicalization. Of the many radicals profiled in Ngo's book, a large portion are either students or professors. The contemporary university program, where Western civilization and its people are excoriated as part of a broader attempt to "de-centralize whiteness" or "de-centralize capitalism," provides philosophical justification for those individuals who are already predisposed to antisocial feelings. Such left-wing individuals over-identify "with the other" and under-identify "with the self." This mental paradigm makes it easy to identify with the oppressed in any situation, and to in turn hate the perceived oppressor. For the predominantly white members of Antifa and other anarcho-communist organizations, this paradigm of hatred is an expression of self-hatred, i.e., to atone for the sin of being born an oppressor, they make amends by becoming vehicles of anti-whiteness, anti-capitalism, etc. For non-white radicals, the paradigm is a simpler one of revenge. America’s left-wing radicals are first born, but to fully flourish, they require a cause, a justification, or societal permission to commit acts of antisocial violence. Often this permission comes from the radicals themselves. "Antifa knows the effect that smashed windows, breached businesses, and fires have on crowd mentality," Ngo writes. Such a scene of disorder "serves as blood in the water" and can turn "protestors into rioters." Left-wing radicals know this, and their literature instructs followers to smash shop windows and start fires to intentionally incite the more animalistic and transgressive elements of the crowd. To smash a window may seem like a far cry from targeted assassination, but both acts fulfill the notion of "propaganda of the deed," whereby violence is committed to stir other left-wing radicals into action. This degenerative cycle, where natural malcontents use political violence to inspire others and to express their own desire for self-expression, self-annihilation, or self-redemption, has plagued the American Republic since the nineteenth century. Violence existed in North America long before the first European colonists came ashore in Florida, Virginia, and Massachusetts. However, not long after the establishment of permanent colonies, racial warfare erupted along the frontier, with several massacres (the Jamestown massacres of 1622 and 1644) and even wars (King Philip's War). The first instance of political violence, Bacon's Rebellion, began in Virginia in 1676\. However, the first recognizable stirrings of left-wing radical violence did not begin in the United States until the nineteenth century. During this epoch, left-wing labor agitators, spurred on by harsh working conditions and inspired by the Marxist and socialist philosophies coming from the Continent, carried out violent strikes and other acts of industrial terrorism. The Great Railroad Strike of 1877, the Haymarket Riot of 1886, the Burlington Railroad Strike of 1888, and the Homestead Strike of 1892 all featured left-wing labor unions engaging in armed clashes, often involving guns and dynamite, with private police forces and later state militias and even the US Army. These events continued well into the twentieth century, with certain events standing out for their extreme violence. These labor battles were mostly the domain of the native-born working class and were ostensibly justified by awful working conditions, low pay, long hours, and abusive labor practices. These grievances were championed by a small coterie of primarily foreign-born anarchists who advocated "propaganda of the deed" to incite a socialist revolution. One such anarchist, Leon Czolgosz, a mill worker and son of Polish immigrants, assassinated President William McKinley on September 6, 1901\. A wayward loner, Czolgosz shot the president after hearing Emma Goldman, a Russian Jewish immigrant radical and former lover of Henry Clay Frick's assassin, speak about how capitalist society and religion enslaves working men. On October 1, 1910, twenty-one people were killed when a dynamite bomb exploded inside the *Los Angeles Times* building. This act of terrorism was carried out by a pair of brothers—James and John McNamara—who belonged to a union (the International Association of Bridge and Structural Iron Workers) that had been detonating bombs nationwide. Between 1906 and 1911, the union damaged over 100 ironworks sites as part of their campaign. The attack on the *Times* was carried out specifically because of the owner's stridently anti-union stance. The long investigation into the McNamara brothers revealed a sordid world of union corruption, free love communes guarded by anarchist militants, and a new radical consciousness wherein liberal lawyers, filmmakers, and newspapermen deliberately ran cover for left-wing terrorists. No figure on the left better represented terrorism and propaganda of the deed than Italian anarchist Luigi Galleani. Forced into exile for his involvement in Italy's violent anarchist movement, Galleani fled to New Jersey and then Vermont. Galleani did not renounce anarchism in any way, and not long after stepping foot on American soil, the Italian radical began participating in strikes and violent actions. In 1903, Galleani began publishing an Italian-language newspaper, *Cronaca Sovversiva*, which spread anarchist ideas alongside bomb-making instructions. Galleani's followers in the United States became known as *Galleanisti*, and during what has become known as America's First War on Terror, Italian-born anarchists proved responsible for several high-profile and deadly attacks on Americans and American institutions. Some of the most notorious *Galleanisti* crimes were the November 1917 bomb attack that killed nine Milwaukee police officers and two civilians, a rash of bombings in 1919, and, most infamously, the September 6, 1920, Wall Street bombing that killed thirty-eight people. This latter event was likely linked to the case of Sacco and Vanzetti, a pair of Galleani associates and known anarchists who became international celebrities for the left despite (or maybe because of) their responsibility for the murder of a security guard and paymaster during an armed robbery in Braintree, Massachusetts. Eventually, American authorities deported Galleani to Italy as part of a wider roundup of aliens and political subversives in 1919. The First War on Terror would later have a parallel in the so-called "Days of Rage" during the late 1960s and 1970s. Instead of Italian anarchists, this period saw an unprecedented number of bombings (2,500 between 1970 and 1971 alone), targeted assassinations (mostly of police officers), and incidents of political and racial violence (e.g., the Zebra Killers in San Francisco, who murdered approximately fifteen people between 1973 and 1974 simply because they were white), all carried out by a hodgepodge of radicals, from university-educated white Americans to black nationalists and Puerto Rican separatists. The unifying cause of these radicals was a belief in an imminent revolution, and in response, they formed "underground resistance movements" that acted like guerrilla armies. Rather than mere terrorist cells, radicals like the Black Liberation Army and the Weather Underground used armed robberies, kidnappings, and other criminal enterprises to fund their war against the United States. These groups, which continue to inspire today's crop of left-wing radicals in the US and abroad, only began to dissolve thanks to aggressive police work by local, state, and federal forces. Unfortunately, an uncomfortably large number of these radicals were pardoned or accepted by society, with several becoming professors at prestigious universities. Bernadine Dohrn, who helped to make bombs and commit crimes as a member of the Weather Underground, became a clinical associate professor at Northwestern University. A fellow Weather Underground radical, Bill Ayers, found work as a professor at the University of Illinois, Chicago, and in this position, he helped to foster the early political career of Barack Obama. Others found sanctuary in Cuba, which began accepting black nationalist from the United States for propaganda purposes as early as 1961. The lesser-known radicals of this era returned to polite society, and many took up positions of prestige and power. Many became teachers and government bureaucrats, and a significant number remain in these roles today, explaining the left's near monopoly on education and governance. Yesterday's radicals educate today's nihilistic youth, and their commonalities extend beyond politics. D*ays of Rage* makes it abundantly clear that many radicals of the 1970s did not have specific goals in mind. Yes, they had enemies (white people, the American government, capitalism) but few specific goals. The point was pain—using propaganda of the deed to terrorize and harass as many people as possible. There were differences between the groups in organization and discipline, but the results were always the same. The previous year alone has been a watershed for political violence. On June 14, 2025, Democratic state representative Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark were killed in their Brooklyn Park, Minnesota home by a gunman wearing a latex mask and dressed as a police officer. Following a multi-day manhunt, the shooter was arrested and identified as Vance Luther Boelter, a former appointee to a state workforce development board. Despite finding flyers for the anti-Trump "No Kings" protest in Boelter's car, and his admission in a confession letter to the FBI that he was involved in a plot by Democratic Governor Tim Walz to kill Senator Amy Klobuchar, the prevailing belief is that Boelter was motivated by anti-abortion politics. Months later, on August 27, Robert Westman, another Minnesota shooter, attacked the Annunciation Catholic School during morning mass, killing two children. Like Boelter, Westman's motivations appeared to be more schizophrenic than logical. Westman had legally changed his name to Robin in 2020 as part of his new identity as a trans woman. He also left behind a manifesto that contained demonic imagery, suicidal ideation, and a hatred of Christianity. The manifesto specifically lashed out at his mother, a member of the Annunciation parish, for telling him not to transition. Westman's firearms also provided clues to his motivations, as he had written both extreme left- and right-wing messages that included threats against Donald Trump, support for the Palestinian cause, and even absurdist jokes taken from internet memes. It remains possible that Westman was radicalized by Telegram chat rooms dedicated to accelerationism, Satanism, and the nihilistic subcultures that foster "fandoms" around mass shooters. On September 10 of that year, the Turning Point USA co-founder and CEO Charlie Kirk was assassinated while hosting an open forum debate on the campus of Utah Valley University. The alleged assassin, Tyler Robinson, was turned in by his family, who later told authorities that their son had become increasingly political over the last few years. Despite current attempts by leftists and right-wing conspiracy theorists to obfuscate the facts, shell casings found at the scene contained messages such as "Hey fascist! Catch!" and "Oh Bella, ciao, bella, ciao Bella ciao ciao ciao" make it clear that left-wing politics inspired the assassin. Further evidence indicates that Robinson was a member of several far-left chatrooms and had a trans live-in partner. Even more important than the motivations of Kirk's assassin is the fact that the murder has been and continues to be publicly celebrated by hundreds of thousands of people online. Shirts, toys, and posters feature gruesome images of Kirk with a fatal gunshot wound to the throat. In response, right-wing online accounts launched a massive doxxing campaign, resulting in an untold number of terminations for individuals caught posting or recording jubilant responses to the cold-blooded murder. While the investigation into Kirk's assassination is ongoing, it indicates that a new age of political terrorism is at our doorstep. The new age will not look like the last. Instead of well-organized political militias, America will see more mass shootings, more targeted assassinations, and more generalized violence that may at times seem beyond politics. To our civilization's chagrin, the near-total atomization of the youth and the easy dissemination of antisocial ideas via the internet mean that more dysgenic types will be pushed to carry out acts of violence. And as the Kirk episode continues to show us, the far-left's embrace of nihilistic violence is not just a problem of an active minority, but rather a deep-seated rot within a substantial segment of society. This is a disaster for American civilization, and it must be countered. To prevent another assassination and to head off a third wave of radical terrorism, the Trump administration must face a stark reality: illiberal means are necessary to protect the last remnants of liberal democracy. As the great Polish philosopher Ryszard Legutko notes in *The Demon in Democracy*, liberal and mass democracies are ill-equipped to defeat left-wing authoritarian movements because they accept far too many of the same assumptions as their Marxist, anarcho-communist, etc**.,** foes. For all involved, equality is the basis of society, and any attempt to establish natural hierarchy is declared "fascist." To overcome this, the Trump administration and various right-wing organizations must participate in anti-democratic measures that will be invariably challenged by the courts. These should include the arrests of left-wing financiers and members of left-wing gun clubs, political organizations, and NGOs. The continued deployment of the National Guard in Democratic-run cities and renewed deportations by ICE must continue and increase. There must be a full-court press against the left that hits them from different angles all at once. Fostering a complex, well-funded, and motivated anti-leftist coalition of NGOs, bureaucrats, businesses, and members of the armed services like the one that was born following the Bolshevik Revolution is also a must, and so too are possible government programs like the CCC of the New Deal or other federal or state**\-**sponsored plans to get American youth offline and back into the real world. If the latter cannot be done, then the United States must face the unsettling reality of pervasive online grooming and left-wing radicalization, and new laws should be implemented to address this reality. Parental authority alone cannot fill the gap when radical materials, "gore porn," and other such content are so easily accessible to those already bearing the true believer mental type. The penultimate solution to this equation will shock more than a few comfortable souls in the United States. This solution was identified by Carl Schmitt in reference to the works of French jurist, political philosopher, and demonologist Jean Bodin, who proffered the concept of a "commissary dictatorship," or a classic, Roman-style dictatorship of prescribed length, as a countermeasure against democratic instability. Such dictatorships have been a feature of republics since the age of Cincinnatus, and many diverse civilizations have recognized the utility of temporary authoritarian rule during times of crisis. Those of us who lived through the horrors of 2020 are wise to be wary of such talk. After all, classic libertarian arguments against unchecked power ring true, especially since any future Democratic administration will not hesitate to implement severe anti-Republican measures, yet that is precisely why a commissary dictatorship in the US is so necessary. The Trump administration, with increased executive power, could effectively decapitate and dismantle America's left-wing networks so thoroughly that their re-emergence would be halted for at least a generation or more. Such measures are necessary given the visceral reality of the left's growing thirst for political violence and must be implemented before events spiral out of control. A popular and limited dictatorship, with several viable successors waiting in the wings, is essential for a new golden age not only in America, but throughout the West. To confront and defeat left-wing violence in the United States, the usual solutions just will not do. A large portion of the population is not interested in dialogue and harmony, and in fact believes that certain opinions warrant capital punishment. This status quo cannot fester any longer. We need drastic solutions to prevent an even uglier future. First, the Trump administration and federal and state law enforcement should be granted greater legal powers to disrupt, dismantle, and destroy left-wing organizations seriously threatening America's delicate republican order. These same forces should also be unleashed against common criminals, as left-wing radicalism flourishes in degenerative environments. Second, more mental hospitals should be opened. Third, re-industrialization and a new Great Awakening must be encouraged as panaceas for the toxic culture of isolated and embittered individuals, particularly youth prone to antisocial behaviors. And finally, "blue" laws, which typically govern moral behaviors, should be reinstated. A society cannot defeat antisocial cancers without first being moral itself. No, this does not mean a return to puritanical strictures or overly harsh curtailments of personal liberty, but rather a solid and prejudicial structure whereby certain behaviors, activities, and even consumption patterns are heavily restricted. The defeat of left-wing radicalism is not just a policy, but a necessity—a necessity for the American Republic, her people, and her progeny. ### The German Origins of the Cold War URL: https://www.rubiconmag.com/library/german-origins-cold-war/ Last updated: 2026-09-03T03:57:29.000Z Félix Gonçalves *A Constructed Peace: The Making of the European Settlement* by Marc Trachtenberg, 1999, Princeton, 440 pp. What follows is less a conventional book review than an abridged summary of Marc Trachtenberg’s *A Constructed Peace: The Making of the European Settlement, 1945–1963,* along with some essential contextualization. Trachtenberg’s singularly comprehensive account of the Cold War, backed by his exhaustive command of the documentary record and a compelling narrative, renders such an approach entirely appropriate. At the center of the work stands a single thesis about the purpose of the NATO system: the dual containment of the Soviet Union and of Germany. It could well be summed up by the NATO Secretary General Lord Ismay’s famous adage that the alliance existed “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in and the Germans down.” The first half of the book traces the disintegration of the Washington–Moscow concords following the Second World War. Trachtenberg attributes the demise of this entente in a bold tone-setting assertion: “The Cold War did not develop out of the quarrel over eastern Europe. It was the dispute over Iran and Turkey that instead played the key role in triggering the conflict.” With the Red Army occupying half of postwar Europe, Stalin was ever more emboldened to press Soviet claims in keeping with his conviction that the bourgeois powers would sooner or later turn on one another. As a result, he abandoned his demand for a Soviet occupation zone in Japan and turned instead against British interests in Turkey and Iran. It was American firmness over Turkey, in the crisis that peaked in August 1946, that induced the Soviets to withdraw their demands—among them a rather imperious claim to the former Italian Libya. Those demands did much to bury the original conception of a four-power Germany administered under a common import-export program. _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### The Second Reconstruction and Its Discontents URL: https://www.rubiconmag.com/library/second-reconstruction/ Last updated: 2026-09-01T14:35:37.000Z John Le Verrier *The Unprotected Class: How Anti-White Racism Is Tearing America Apart*, Jeremy Carl, 2024, Regnery (Skyhorse Publishing), 369 pp. Jeremy Carl’s *The Unprotected Class* sets out to invert one of the governing pieties of American public life. For half a century we have been told that post-1960s America remains a white-supremacist order, a structure of entrenched racial advantage that only a radically utopian anti-racism can hope to dismantle. Carl argues the reverse: that the American state is, in nearly all of its major functions, ideologically anti-white—sometimes by open avowal, more often by quiet institutional habit. On his account the left-wing political and cultural upheavals of the past decade are not a departure but an acceleration of tendencies fixed in American political economy for more than fifty years. From the preschool to the university admissions office, from corporate hiring to military training, from housing to immigration, and at last to the national self-understanding itself, the same anti-white disposition is at work. America, in Carl’s telling, has become an anti-white nation, and has been one for some time. Carl follows the Claremont Institute senior fellow Christopher Caldwell, whose *The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties* (2020) supplies much of the underlying argument. Both men concur that the Civil Rights Act of 1964—and, more consequentially, the administrative apparatus assembled in its wake—amounted to a kind of national refounding. What C. Vann Woodward called America’s “second Reconstruction” functioned as a rival constitution, not merely as a new body of law but as a new national teleology. The country’s animating aim was now the redress of anti-black discrimination, conceived not as a remedy for a finite set of specific wrongs but as the overcoming of the whole of American history up to that point. Anti-racism became a Great Commission, occupying the place that freedom had once held in the nation’s self-conception. None of this arrived at a single stroke. The new constitution, for Carl, cannot be located in any one event—the 1964 Civil Rights Act or a particular court ruling—except as the planting of legal and institutional seeds that began at once to grow far beyond their original bounds. The new regime is best understood as a constellation of executive action, statutes, judicial decisions, and bureaucratic expansion. The first pillar is affirmative action, which took form in 1965 under Lyndon B. Johnson’s Executive Order 11246\. The order required every contractor generating more than $10,000 of revenues from business with the federal government to “take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, color, religion, sex or national origin.” The language, like most of the foundational documents of the second Reconstruction, explicitly forbids discrimination. Yet the same order, together with the federal machinery around it, brought into being a civil-rights bureaucracy that secured the opposite result. The logic of equal opportunity, pursued far enough, comes to license the pursuit of equal outcomes. What the 2010s would christen “wokeness” is already present here, half a century early, in germ. Buttressing this first pillar is the landmark Supreme Court case *Regents of the University of California v. Bakke* (1978), which held that while fixed racial quotas in admissions were unconstitutional, race might still be weighed “as a factor in admissions in so-called affirmative action policies.” Allan Bakke—a white Vietnam veteran and engineer with strong MCAT scores—had been refused by the University of California Davis’s medical school in favor of less qualified black applicants; or so he alleged in his lawsuit, which resulted in the court ordering him admitted. Carl dwells on Patrick Chavis—frequently presented in the press as the black student who had taken Bakke’s place and initially touted by figures as prominent as Ted Kennedy as a vindication of affirmative action promise. But the promise did not hold as Chavis’s subsequent career did not at all comport with the glowing media coverage he received. By 1997, he had been sued for malpractice by some twenty-one patients, one of whom died under his care during a liposuction, and in the following year California revoked his medical license for gross negligence. In 2002 he was killed in an attempted carjacking. The celebratory coverage was likely to invite its own rebuke: Chavis’s life trajectory. The choice of a symbol was governed by everything except a candid assessment of Chavis’s character. The second pillar is the doctrine of disparate impact, established by *Griggs v. Duke Power* in 1971\. Duke Power was a North Carolina utility company that had relied on a battery of IQ and mechanical-aptitude tests to determine internal promotion. This practice, the Supreme Court ruled, was in violation of the Civil Rights Act simply because the white employees passed the tests at markedly higher rates than the black employees. No intent to discriminate was alleged, let alone proven—the incidentally unequal disparity alone rendered the practice illegal. After *Griggs*, under Title VII, every private firm has operated at the sufferance of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, free to be prosecuted according to the Division’s own shifting measures of equal outcome. Naturally, the incentive followed: a firm would avoid any practice that might, even inadvertently, advantage white applicants or employees, since disparate impact doctrine is wholly indifferent to intention. These first two pillars converge upon a third: the dismantling of a right that liberal societies have always assumed without quite naming, the freedom of association. Caldwell traces its erosion further back than Carl does, to *Brown v. Board of Education* (1954) and the unconstitutionality of “separate but equal.” The Court, little troubled by the text of the Fourteenth Amendment, found that segregation was “usually interpreted as denoting the inferiority of the Negro group,” resting its judgment on “intangible considerations” and “qualities that are incapable of objective measurement.” The reasoning bears an unmistakable resemblance to the judicial activism conservatives have long deplored. Set within the larger civil rights edifice raised in the years that followed, these pillars amount to the abolition of property rights and of the very idea of a private sphere beyond the reach of the state. The proposition that a polity must perforce tolerate some measure of discrimination in order to preserve individual autonomy and to allow genuine communities to flourish outside state encroachment is an entirely reasonable one; and yet to state it in public is now *verboten*. Whenever the question of limiting the state’s reach into society is aired in public, the same scene recurs. An interviewer asks his guest—ordinarily a professed champion of libertarian freedom—whether a free society must include the right even potentially to discriminate, and the guest abandons his own premises on the spot lest he be cast out as a pariah. The damage this recurring capitulation did to libertarianism as a movement is difficult to overstate. It demoralized the faithful, many of whom would go looking, in the 2010s, for a sturdier political philosophy that did not collapse under media censure and, over the generations, resulted in a movement which forgot how to defend the most basic conception of freedom—easing libertarianism’s passage into its present nominal form, a movement whose loftiest vision of freedom is the *soma* of banal self-indulgence (e.g., marijuana legalization, decriminalizing prostitution, etc.). Carl’s chronicle of the erosion of freedom of association leads naturally to a fitting subsequent subject: the history of violence and racial displacement that followed the Civil Rights Movement in America’s cities. His pages here are the beginning of a needed correction to durable myths—that the period’s anti-white violence and the ethnic cleansing of the great cities either did not occur, or were somehow the doing of white Americans unduly resistant to racial integration. To measure how unprecedented the transformation was, he begins with Michelle Obama. On the 2019 tour for her memoir she reproached the white Chicagoans who had abandoned neighborhoods such as South Shore, where she was raised: “unbeknownst to us, we grew up in the period—as I write—called ‘white flight.’ That as families like ours, upstanding families like ours . . . As we moved in, white folks moved out because they were afraid of what our families represented.” Her family may indeed have been upstanding; but, that is not what their arrival was taken to represent. The figures are stark. “The South Shore of Michelle Obama’s youth had a remarkably rapid transformation, going from 96 percent white in 1950 to 94 percent black in 1980,” Carl writes; “in 1960, just four years before Michelle Obama was born, South Shore was still almost 90 percent white, and by 1970 it was 70 percent black.” Carlo Rotella’s *The World Is Always Coming to an End* (2019), a study of the neighborhood, records what came with the change: crime that climbed “from well under the citywide average to double and almost triple that average, among the city’s highest.” South Shore became one of the most dangerous quarters of a dangerous city, its residents reduced to marking time “by the last crime I experienced, heard about, or read about in the neighborhood,” staying indoors after dark “like a character in a vampire movie . . . scuttling from home to car and back again, as if on a planet with hostile wildlife and unbreathable air.” Rotella’s witnesses make the point in their own voices. Donda West, in her 2007 memoir, recalls a group of children slashing the tires of her 10-year-old son Kanye West’s bicycle and trying to make off with it; the family soon left the neighborhood. Another witness reminds us that this state of affairs still persists to this day. Jedidiah Brown, who took a job as a private security guard after having lost an earlier job after he was filmed storming the stage at a 2016 Trump rally in Chicago, provides a harrowing testimony: “South Shore is the first place where I saw dead people in the street and other people just going about their business around them. Not even Englewood was like that.” Carl’s larger purpose is to dismantle the vocabulary by which the Civil Rights Era and its aftermath have been explained away. Neither denying nor excusing the interracial violence of the period, he takes up in turn the terms that have served to deflect attention from it—“white flight,” block-busting, redlining, gentrification, and the now-forgotten experiment of forced busing—and declines to let them function as rhetorical decoys obscuring the part that violent crime played in what E. Michael Jones called “the slaughter of the cities.” Block-busting—the practice by which agents played on racial and economic fear to induce owners to sell cheaply—was real enough. But it was parasitic upon rational calculation, and upon well-founded alarm at the crime that followed closely behind demographic turnover. And this is to say nothing of the psychological toll on white homeowners detailed in “Confessions of a Block-Buster,” the 1962 *Saturday Evening Post* exposé which Carl quotes in his discussion of the topic: > Actually, block busting probably is tougher on the whites than the Negroes. Nobody who has lived in a neighborhood for years, seen his children grow up there, remodeled his home exactly to his liking and become accustomed to nearby school, church, and shopping facilities likes to be uprooted . . . Several elderly persons have died because of the anguish and upheaval involved . . . Once a block has been busted, some white owners simply stare, almost dumbfounded, as we draw up sale papers for them. Others break down and cry. Redlining—the denial of mortgage credit to designated homes and neighborhoods—is so routinely offered as a clear case of anti-black discrimination that Ta-Nehisi Coates made it a central lynchpin in his case for reparations in *The Atlantic*. Yet, Carl reports, “ninety-two percent of homes in the lowest rated areas for redlining between 1930 and 1940 were owned by whites”; even granting some racial motive in the drawing of the lines occasionally, the conventional narrative does not survive the figures. Then there’s the policy of forced busing, mandated by *Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg* (1971), which wrecked neighborhoods and school systems in the name of a coerced desegregation that consigned white children to schools they had reason to fear. When parents did the predictable thing and withdrew them into private education, they were branded racists—though these were the same families still underwriting, through their taxes, the public schools they no longer dared use. They paid twice: once for the private schooling that kept their children safe, and again for a deteriorating public system rife with violence against students and teachers; and they were lectured, all the while, on their prejudice. The period found an unlikely opponent of busing in Joseph Biden, who in 1975 went so far as to float a constitutional amendment against it. “Biden would eventually join forces with arch-conservative North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms to offer an amendment to a 1975 school funding bill that would have banned busing,” Carl writes; “he would later attempt to bar the Department of Justice from effectively mandating court-ordered busing,” and in 1976 he cosponsored a measure to strip the federal courts of their jurisdiction over desegregation. His objection to forced busing plans was cast as anti-racist in its own right: > That, to me, is the most racist concept you can come up with. What it says is, in order for your child with curly black hair, brown eyes, and dark skin to be able to learn anything, he needs to sit next to my blond-haired, blue-eyed son. That’s racist! Who the hell do we think we are, that the only way a black man or woman can learn is if they rub shoulders with my white child? Joe Biden would later earn the bitter reprimand for these comments during the 2019 Democratic Party primary from none other than his future vice president, Kamala Harris. Carl does not confine the anti-white character of American government to the simple black-white axis. Immigration, he suggests, may matter still more to the diminishing standing of white America within the nation as a whole. As with the civil-rights settlement, the immigration regime inaugurated by the Hart-Celler Act of 1965 has been discussed almost exclusively in the language of celebration, its demographic consequences admissible only as cause for praise and never for critical scrutiny. Yet immigration is precisely a question of who is to belong to a political community—who shares its collective voice and its common destiny. The irony is that the question ought to press hardest in a democracy that grounds all its authority and legitimacy in the consent of “the people,” yet questioning who “the people” even are has been, until very recently, treated as totally impermissible. American immigration policy, like Western Europe’s, is close to unique in the world; so too is the self-conception it has produced. Japan and China admit very few newcomers, most of them from elsewhere in Asia; immigrants are under 1 percent of Mexico’s population. The notion that America is “a nation of immigrants,” Carl argues, is itself an artifact of “1950s ethnic group pressure”—no older than that. When Tocqueville wrote *Democracy in America* in 1835 “he did not mention the words ‘immigrant’ or ‘immigration’ once.” In 1830 the foreign-born were under 2 percent of the population, and until nearly the twentieth century the overwhelming majority of arrivals came from Britain, Ireland, Scandinavia, and Germany. “Before 1881, a period encompassing approximately two-thirds of our history, Northwest Europe provided 86 percent of American immigrants,” Carl writes. After the larger European waves of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries came the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, which sharply curtailed immigration for decades. When John F. Kennedy, in the late 1950s, pronounced America a nation of immigrants, immigration stood near “one of its lowest points in history.” Those who did arrive were largely skilled; there was then—and had never before been—anything resembling a welfare state to underwrite their coming and settling, and many in the end returned home. But whether they stayed or left, from the first settlements to the late twentieth century, across more than 350 years, the people in question were almost entirely white: > Virtually all of the even modest Latin-American immigration to the United States before the Mexican-American War in 1848 was into states and territories on the border. There were only 25,000 Hispanics living in the historic core of the United States outside of states bordering Mexico, out of a population of approximately 24 million. That’s a bit more than 0.1 percent of the population, 240 years after the first European settlement. Another 85,000 were incorporated into the United States after the Mexican-American War. The Chinese American population, which made up the vast majority of early Asian Americans, was just 4,000 in 1840 and in 1940 was just 106,000, also less than 0.1 percent of the U.S. population. Meanwhile, the first Indian to gain U.S. citizenship did so only in 1909, and he was a “white” Parsi (that is, an Indian of Persian descent). Fewer than 50,000 Indians total immigrated to the United States before 1965\. Today, there are well over 6 million South Asians living in America. There were just 130,000 African immigrants in the United States as late as 1980. Prominent Democrats—Lyndon Johnson, Edward Kennedy—misrepresented the likely effect of Hart-Celler and the magnitude of the demographic change it would set in motion. To be charitable, though not excessively so, the civil-rights settlement and the law built around it display a recurring phenomenon: a logical and bureaucratic inertia, something like Hegel’s “cunning of reason,” that does not halt even when later developments plainly contradict a law’s original spirit. Few sponsors of the 1964 act would have endorsed disparate impact; few sponsors of Hart-Celler would have endorsed the scale of third-world immigration now seen. Nevertheless, there is a political and psychological process of evolving justification in history that serves as a pretext for continually more novel and radical changes than what the mere text of a law would suggest, but as they unfold they are interpreted as more closely fulfilling the true spirit of the initial act. Whether by design or not, Carl argues, the long process of mass nonwhite immigration has allowed the Democratic Party—now the repository of unassimilated minority interests—to achieve something without precedent: > They have achieved electoral preeminence while consistently losing the votes of the supermajority ethnicity. (This supermajority has ranged from an 89 percent white electorate in Jimmy Carter’s victory in 1976 to a 67 percent white electorate in the 2020 victory of Joe Biden.) Over this time, the Democrats have won six presidential elections and the popular vote in two additional elections without once winning the vote of white voters. There is no other modern multiracial democracy of which I am aware where a party has achieved electoral success while perennially losing the votes of the supermajority ethnicity. Here again the twisted asymmetry holds: demographic replacement may be named freely when the naming is celebratory, but to discuss it critically is to be charged with paranoia and conspiracy. For the most part it has simply been excluded from public discourse, and those who broached it have met severe ostracism. Only the felicitous combination of social media and the iconoclasm of Donald Trump has won the argument against mass immigration—legal and illegal—even a hearing. The book ranges further—through school curricula, entertainment, technology, medicine, religious bodies, and the military—and finds the same animating principle wherever it looks: public and private institutions that increasingly serve the anti-racist, which is to say anti-white, project rather than their nominal purposes. The purpose of that project, for Carl, is reparation—“to create an intellectual and cultural environment to justify the expropriation of land, property, and other wealth from whites while instituting a permanent regime of anti-white employment and legal discrimination.” The only sure defense, he concludes, is to refuse the principle of mass racial reparation entirely, for the demand—indirect now—will in time grow explicit: > The final destination is a world in which whites have been stripped of political power and resources, which are then redistributed to nonwhites using both “legal” and “democratic” processes. Again, this is already underway, but its speed and scale will dramatically increase as white political power diminishes. On the practical question, Carl frames his proposals with the assumption that the new reality of a multiracial America is not going to change any time soon. He brings up a few ideas. One builds on Eric Kaufmann’s notion of “whiteshift”: encouraging those already here to identify with white America rather than with a minority category. This would mean, among other things, retiring “Hispanic” from the census—a classification that dates only to 1980—in favor of linguistic markers (native Spanish speaker, or born in a Spanish-speaking country), and reforming civil-rights law so that such groups are no longer rewarded, by a system of preferences, for identifying as nonwhite. A second proposal is outreach to Asian-Americans, a group for which Carl reserves some of his harshest words. Although they sit awkwardly within the anti-racist coalition, the task of persuasion remains difficult: Carl faults Asian-American activist organizations for subordinating their own communities’ interests to the Left’s good opinion—above all, he argues, in letting their public account of the early-2020s wave of anti-Asian violence follow an ideological script rather than the data. Few minority activist lobbies in recent memory have behaved more deceitfully than Asian-Americans, who engaged in a years-long campaign of misleading the public about who was perpetrating virtually all the assaults, robberies, and murders of innocent Asian Americans in the early 2020s, further inflaming the anti-white hysteria of the time. The deeper irony is that the group whose very success in America most refutes the “white supremacy” narrative has chosen to further commit itself to a coalition built upon it, rather than reckon with the contradictions implied by its own status. More concrete suggestions include a “massive lawfare operation” against institutions that discriminate against poorly represented groups like whites and Asians, citing America First Legal as a paragon; net-zero or even net-negative migration; the abolition of affirmative action; a “wholesale reform” of civil-rights law; the dismantling of the DEI apparatus; and a broad empowerment of law enforcement. While *The Unprotected Class* is an unparalleled resource in its rich documentation of anti-white policies and has much to offer to policymakers seeking concrete solutions, its true significance lies in the fact that it exists at all. The American right is undergoing a transformation wherein previously under-discussed or forbidden ideas—ideas that, not too long ago, were defensible on their own merits—are now finally palatable. This is a positive development, but it is also crucial that these ideas are carefully ushered in by someone who understands the delicate nature of the subject and one who appreciates how explosive the implications of these ideas are. Jeremy Carl manages to express both in this timely book. ### The Civilization that Sleepwalked into its Demise URL: https://www.rubiconmag.com/library/world-of-yesterday/ Last updated: 2026-09-01T14:35:44.000Z Julius Reinberger *Die Welt von gestern: Erinnerungen eines Europäers* by Stefan Zweig, 2013, Anaconda Verlag, pp. 576 I have lived in the Austrian capital of Vienna my whole life. It is a beautiful city with a melancholic spirit lingering above it. A city whose relatively minor role in the twenty-first century is in an uneasy tension with the still very visible relics of its grand imperial past. The old Kaiser, Franz Josef, who ruled over a far bigger Austria for sixty-eight years, continues to cast a long shadow through statues. Such monuments leave an unmistakable suspicion that one is strolling through the ruins of a great civilization. It was the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) who introduced me to that vanished civilization. He witnessed the old order at the peak of its glory and its complete destruction during the First World War. When the consolidation of National Socialist power in Germany forced him into exile, he found himself cut off from his notes, library, his circle, and the cultural atmosphere that had sustained him decades. In Brazil, where he eventually settled, he composed his memoirs *The World of Yesterday* (*Die Welt von gestern)*—which are also, and perhaps more importantly, a portrait of an entire civilization. His sense of irreversible loss was evidently so overwhelming that he chose not to survive it: he died by his own hand in Petrópolis in February 1942, before the war's outcome was known, persuaded that whatever peace eventually came, the world he had loved was forever lost. The subtitle of the book, *Memoirs of a European*, hints at how Zweig saw his place in the world. He was a Jew and an Austrian, but he considered himself a European before anything else. The Jewish dimension of his identity requires a word. In the 1780s, Kaiser Josef II had issued his Edicts of Toleration, pressing the Jews of the Habsburg lands—who had until then lived largely apart—to assimilate into German-Austrian culture. The process, conducted across generations, was substantially successful. By Zweig's time, the Jews of Vienna and the other western cities of the empire numbered among the Kaiser's most loyal subjects and his most culturally productive: in literature, music, and art, their prominence had become, during the late nineteenth century, something close to disproportionate. When Theodor Herzl (1860–1904) embarked on his campaign for a Jewish homeland, the assimilated Jews, like Zweig, characteristically did not see the appeal. Why have our own country when we can live here under good Franz Josef? Herzl's Zionism found a far more receptive audience among the Jews of the empire's eastern provinces, who were then migrating westward in large numbers and who had never undergone the assimilationist passage that distinguished Zweig's milieu from theirs. The rising antisemitism of those decades was directed principally at this population of Jews; yet it did not spare the assimilated Jews, who had, according to Zweig, long since ceased to think of themselves primarily as Jews at all. Zweig was born into a wealthy family and thus was able to attend the *Gymnasium*, the most selective and prestigious of the secondary schools. One expects chapters about school to be tedious, and is surprised: the gap between Zweig's world and ours shows itself even in these unremarkable matters. Zweig is not a romantic glorifying the past: he acknowledges the school’s shortcomings without hesitation. The teachers, though better educated than their contemporary counterparts, were in the main uninspiring, and maintained with their pupils a distance that was formal to the point of coldness. School even then was mass instruction—a smaller mass than today's, but a mass all the same. The kind of intimate education a young aristocrat once received, a private tutor cultivating a master-and-apprentice bond around the boy's strongest subject, was simply not on offer at the Gymnasium, which served the upper class without quite serving the upper estate. After a few years, Zweig confesses, the stale lessons had lost him entirely. Yet formal instruction was, for Zweig's generation, almost beside the point. One's peers can often have a stronger influence on a pupil’s education than teachers. Zweig and his classmates were interested in everything. He describes them sneaking into the *Burgtheater*—one one of Europe’s most illustrious theaters and an institution that has since degenerated into a subsidized amenity for the academic left—to see rehearsals for the newest plays. They sought out the newest literature and tracked down obscure poets their teachers had never heard of, who would only become famous decades later. Zweig captures with particular brilliance the aspirational, if at times competitive, intellectualism of adolescence—the quoting of newly discovered thinkers not to illuminate but to provoke curiosity, to send one’s peers off in pursuit of the same sources. Nietzsche, then largely unknown to the public, was a hero of Zweig's class. The point he is making is larger than the anecdotes. The decisive element in any education is the pupil himself. The finest school will achieve little with incurious students but even a mediocre school, one staffed with tired and tedious teachers, can produce great individuals. Zweig's life as a writer began at school, where he published poems in newspapers under a pseudonym. After his graduation in 1900, he decided to study at the university to please his parents, who wanted their son to get a doctorate—titles being, in Austria, then and now, a serious matter. However, Zweig was not particularly interested in his studies and traveled to Berlin, where he met artists and took the measure of the wider world. He still managed to get his doctorate, largely thanks to his professors’ indulgence, who could see his talents and let him pass despite his mediocre academic work. That indulgent attitude is another part of *The World of Yesterday* that is completely lost to us. Our universities are managerial, bureaucratic institutions that leave no space for individuality. A Doctor of Philosophy today may have more facts at his disposal than Stefan Zweig ever did, and still it is fair to ask whether he is the better educated of the two. While it is easy to be nostalgic for the old world, an honest view also takes into account the defects. Franz Josef, who had come to the throne at eighteen to crush the national-liberal revolutionaries of 1848, was an old man by the century's end, and the empire had aged with him. Society came to be dominated by the old. Advancement in the imperial service required one condition: outlasting everyone else. Zweig recalls that the appointment of Gustav Mahler to direct the state opera was nearly a scandal on the grounds of his youth—he was thirty-eight. The formal elites were old, and they governed as old men in charge of large institutions tend to govern: conservatively, in the least attractive sense of the word. This rigidity extended into the domain of sexual morality. In a chapter entirely dedicated to the prudish character of that age, Zweig recounts the case of a woman, married at around thirty and entirely ignorant of the facts of the matter, who fled back to her family on her wedding night in tears because her husband had expected her to undress in front of him. Extreme, perhaps; but the tension between natural instinct and enforced repression had its entirely predictable consequences, among them a substantial underground market in prostitution. Coinciding with this gerontocratic rule is another phenomenon: the feeling of an "end of history.” While Zweig viewed this positively in his opening chapter, I find it disquieting. We associate the phrase with the years after the Cold War, but the 1890s knew the feeling well. Major wars had been absent for some time; technological progress and political stability were improving the material lot of everyone, even dissolving the grievances of the proletariat. Zweig cites the proliferation of insurance schemes—against accidents, against illness, against every conceivable misfortune—as an index of civilizational progress. His judgment here, I think, is inverted. It was precisely this security, this sense that the future had been settled in advance, that fed the conservative gerontocracy he deplores in other chapters. A society persuaded that history has little reason to renew itself. Excluded from power and impatient with stasis, the youth of that time grew rebellious. To Zweig's delight, the prewar years saw an eruption of avant-garde movements across the arts. His own rising fame as a writer brought him into contact with artists and thinkers across Europe. Travel, by then, had been made easy by the railways. For the cosmopolitan upper class to which Zweig belonged, Europe was already becoming a lived reality rather than a geographic abstraction. Europe was becoming a single place, and Zweig and his friends felt themselves Europeans in earnest. The petty nationalisms that had periodically disrupted earlier decades seemed to be receding. This sense of convergence, of a common civilization moving together into an open future, was the dominant mood of Zweig’s circle—until, in a moment, it was not. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand would mark the beginning of the end to this buoyant European optimism but the significance of the event wouldn’t come to be appreciated until later. The shock passed quickly, the Archduke was forgotten, and ordinary life resumed even as, in the back rooms, the diplomatic games went on and the ultimatums were drafted. According to Zweig, decades of apparently serious crises that had ultimately resolved without catastrophe had produced a widespread conviction that this one too would pass. People had grown accustomed to apparent escalations that amounted to nothing. The peace had bred what we in our own century would call a *"*nothing ever happens" complacency. Zweig was in Belgium visiting friends when mobilization was announced. Even then he resisted belief—until he found himself racing to catch the last train back across the German border, arriving at a station already full of armed soldiers. Zweig recalls in great detail the euphoria for war: the cheering crowds, the masses of young men volunteering in their thousands, eager to be part of a great adventure after decades of bourgeois tranquility. He certainly wasn’t hesitant to record his disgust at such a spectacle. Writers he had taken for friends set to producing the most vulgar war propaganda. Nationalistic sentiment led to an irrational loathing of the enemy nations. European unity was dissolved almost overnight into mutual loathing. Nations he had loved, peoples he had traveled among, became the enemy. That this happened so quickly, so completely was the revelation that never quite left him. A pacifist and a cosmopolitan, Zweig found himself increasingly isolated. Judged unfit for military service, he was given a post as a war correspondent, in which capacity he saw the trains of the wounded returning from the Eastern Front, and was later sent to neutral Switzerland, where he remained until the war was over. Perhaps the most poignant scene in Zweig’s memoir takes place at Feldkirch train station, the first Austrian station one encounters coming from Switzerland. Zweig's train came to an abrupt halt as another train approached from the opposite direction: it was the Kaiser's private train. People had gathered on the platform to pay their respects. Karl, Kaiser for only two years and the last monarch of an eight-hundred-year-old line, was deposed by the social democrats and forced into exile. With him departed an unbroken dynastic line of eight hundred years and the end of a civilization. The land Zweig returned to was barely recognizable. The train was run-down, overcrowded, and stripped of every spare piece of leather and metal. The country was in ruins, its people starving, and every material was scarce. Zweig's own house in Salzburg could not be heated due to the unavailability of coal. There are Austrian monarchists today who still console themselves with fantasies of how things might have gone “if only we had won the war,” but the First World War was not a war that could be won. The disaster was not that the Central Powers lost it; the disaster was that it was fought at all. Four years of war had turned imperial Austria and Germany—once the apogee of nineteenth-century civilization—into miserable, impoverished disasters. Hyperinflation soon followed. A population, once the wealthiest and most secure in its history, was reduced to bartering for survival. Families traded wealth accumulated over generations for meager amounts of food to stave off starvation. Yet, these economic troubles were only a minor aspect of the old order's demise. Something far more profound had been shattered: trust in authority. The illusion of competent elites and durable political systems crumbled. The question that followed—how could they have failed so completely to avert the cataclysm?—had no reassuring answer. The young, who had been handed this wreckage as their inheritance, did what the young do in such circumstances: they rejected everything the previous generation had used to legitimate itself, experimented with what had been forbidden, and declined to obey their elders. The latter parts of the book take place in the interwar years, with Zweig's career reaching its peak and achieving worldwide fame and recognition. Read almost a century on, the comparison that feels most salient is not with his vanished Europe but with our own present. The interwar period, for all its obvious instability, still retained forms and institutions that connected it to what had preceded it. We have no such umbilical cord. For Zweig, the world of yesterday was living memory—recent, personal, concrete. For me, it is a foreign country, obscured by time and catastrophe. Zweig is critical of his lost world at points, but it functions for him essentially as a utopia. And it is worth being precise about what kind of utopia it is, because Zweig was not a reactionary. When he mourns the world of yesterday, he mourns the fall of nineteenth-century liberalism—peace, widespread prosperity, the relatively free movement of people and ideas across a continent that shared, beneath its surface-level quarrels, a common cultural core. The difficulty is that these goods were historically inseparable from the gerontocratic conservatism and repressive social norms that he also criticizes. What Zweig seems reluctant to confront is the possibility that history cannot be arrested—that the very conditions that produced the world of yesterday were already generating its destruction. Truly great things are rarely created at the end of history. The greatest works of German and Austrian music were composed in the late nineteenth century, not the early twentieth; the cultural productivity Zweig celebrates was already in decline before the war that is usually blamed for killing it. The title, in this light, acquires a second meaning: it was, quite literally, the world of *yesterday*—not the world of the past, but a transient phenomenon, a narrow interval in time that had barely come into being before it was gone. Many aspects of the world Zweig describes are, by any reasonable measure, superior to what has come after. Personally, I would welcome the return of the theater to its position at the center of cultural life and to enroll my children in a *gymnasium* of the kind Zweig attended. The general climate of intellectual curiosity and tempered optimism he depicts during the *Belle Époque* strikes me as something genuinely worth recovering, if such a thing were possible. Would I prefer to live in the world of yesterday? My instinct is to say yes—and yet, it is an instinct I distrust. For I am a German man and German men are men of tragedy. Our national mythos is the *Nibelungenlied*, our old pagan religion foretells our defeat in an inevitable apocalypse that ends the world. Zweig, well-assimilated and admirable as he was, was not of this inheritance. I can love the world of yesterday and simultaneously understand its place in history: it was not built to last and the longing for it—however genuine—must be held at some distance from the practical work of living. In this spirit, let me end with a passage from Goethe’s *Faust*, encapsulating the German spirit as no other work has ever done: > *Denn alles, was entsteht,* > > *Ist wert, daß es zugrunde geht.* > > For all that comes to be > > Deserves to perish wretchedly. ### The Hollywood That Once Was URL: https://www.rubiconmag.com/library/memoirs-of-a-nobody/ Last updated: 2026-09-01T14:35:49.000Z Faisal Marzipan *Hollywood Samizdat: Notes from Below the Line* by Rambo Van Halen, 2025, Passage Press, 240 pp. While reading *Hollywood Samizdat: Notes from Below the Line*, an autobiography from an author writing under the nom de plume Rambo Van Halen, I was haunted by a vision of a video depicting the legendary film director David Lynch in a studio directing an episode of *Twin Peaks: The Return.* Every member associated with the production, including its financial sponsors, was present to witness Lynch bringing his craft to bear. Later, during a discussion, one of the team members pointedly addressed Lynch to emphasize time was limited to exactly two days before they had to complete the production of a particular scene. Lynch, visibly irate, launched into a passionate monologue championing the artist’s inviolable right to creative autonomy and lamenting how little time the studio allowed him to “go dreamy” and “experiment.” According to protocol, such a vehement outcry had to be reported to the studio and crew members dispatched to assuage Lynch’s sense of aggrievement. What drives one to write an autobiography? Ulysses S. Grant’s autobiography was composed during his retirement when, impoverished and lacking a pension, he turned to Mark Twain to support his writing venture. Soon after its publication in 1885, salesmen, dressed as Union army soldiers, ventured across the country to promote the book and, as a result, Grant’s finances were set aright again. In our time, however, the paradigm of an accomplished older man reflecting back on his life has been replaced by something else; now, a successful autobiography precedes worldly success. This paradigmatic shift was best exemplified by Barack Obama in his autobiography, *Dreams from My Father*, published in 1995 when he was thirty-four and preparing to run for a state senate seat. In his early thirties, J.D. Vance also wrote an autobiography which, like Obama’s memoir, delved into the challenges of his upbringing. In both instances, the autobiography served as their “thesis statement” of the character of ambitious men who were intending to run for president at an early age. What, then, drives Rambo Van Halen, who covets neither fame nor prestige—or at any rate will not surrender his day job to obtain them—to set down his life anonymously, forgoing the celebrity and the wealth that an autobiography might confer? For Van Halen, the answer may be that as a “below the line” man—that is, a member of the nonperforming crew—in what was once among the most glamorous and lucrative of American exports, he can offer an illuminating perspective on current-year America. Leaving questions concerning Van Halen’s motives aside, what kind of an autobiography is this? Its character is difficult to categorize into any established literary subgenre. To fairly characterize what type of book this is, it’s worth contemplating two wildly popular but contrasting genres that emerged out of the internet in the late aughts, when YouTube democratized the production and dissemination of the moving image. The first genre was dubbed the “shoot interview,” in which a professional wrestler divulged the behind-the-scenes stories of the wrestling business. From world-famous wrestlers like Scott Hall or Jim Cornette one could gain insight into how a captivating persona was created, the expertly choreographed “kayfabe” antics or outright violence that went on backstage. In contrast to the smooth, sober tidiness of the analytic video essay, the shoot interview is chaotic, frequently bloody but, in its own way, very compelling. For instance, there was an incident where Arn Anderson and Sid Vicious fell into a heated bar argument in Blackburn, England, that, after a brief cool-off, escalated further when Sid opted to arm himself with a broken leg torn from a hotel chair and proceeded to confront Arn in his hotel room. Unfortunately for Sid, he had little time to react before Arn opened the door and immediately proceeded to stab him with a pair of scissors. The wrestler Big Van Vader recalled Sid descending into the hotel lobby in visible distress before collapsing onto the floor. Vader rushed to press on Sid’s severed artery until the paramedics arrived, thereby saving Sid’s life (and Arn’s career). The second was the long-form video essay, most memorably represented by the frame-by-frame exegeses of Stanley Kubrick by Rob Ager, among the form’s most prominent practitioners, and the sardonic but entertaining critiques of *Star Wars* mounted by Red Letter Media. YouTube executives disliked the long form, for the simple reason that an advertisement sells best in the instant before a video begins; an hour-long disquisition on the set design of *The Shining* affords far too few of those instants. The film studios, for their part, professed that close analysis of this kind infringed on their copyright. This solicitude for their copyrighted productions intersected with YouTube’s financial incentive to check the popularity of long videos on its platform, ultimately leading to the demonetization of such content. One can make a comfortable living acquainting people with facts they are pleased to hear or, if they lack any compunctions of conscience, amass vast fortunes soothing them with lies they wish to hear, but those who set about revealing too many truths that no one wants to see run the risk of bankruptcy, homelessness, or worse. The film critique genre, which reached its apotheosis in the 2012 documentary *Room 237*, takes a final, polished object like, say, *The Shining* and proceeds to scrutinize it frame by frame and imbue it with themes and concepts the director may have meant to convey but left somewhat implicit or veiled. It is easy, and lucrative, to read too much into the films. Such in-depth film evaluations can certainly captivate the public, but the deeper the analysis goes, the more it shades into sensationalism, obscurantism, and conspiracy-mongering. An example that illustrates this genre’s excesses was one video essayist’s claim that Kubrick must have been involved with a NASA plot to stage the moon landing. He drew this conclusion from the fact that Danny, one of the film’s main characters, wore a knitted sweater bearing the mission emblem of Apollo 11. *Hollywood Samizdat*, Rambo Van Halen’s polished and remarkably thoughtful debut, resolutely falls into the first genre. This is a confessional account; it airs the dirty laundry of an industry that is, by his account, in terminal decline and increasingly supplanted by TikTok. There is another quality in this account that’s found in the “shoot interviews” and in another equally eccentric source—Penn and Teller, the magician duo featured on a popular TV show where they explain the mechanics of a magic trick while simultaneously performing it. Like the two entertainers, Van Halen enchants his audience with his craft even as he exposes its inner workings. The successful application of the filmmaker’s craft, like the magician’s, demands a degree of charisma and technical prowess immense enough to entertain an audience into suspension of disbelief. After seeing “how the sausage is made,” one begins to share in Van Halen’s profound adoration for this art form. Filmmaking was the one vocation that could hold a middling student possessed of large ambition and a willingness to work long hours. Like many of his Gen X cohort, he worshipped the films of John Hughes, *Ferris Bueller’s Day Off* above all, and in one essay he weaves the memory of his father with his love for the movie business: > Of course, great cinema has that effect. It has that power. You get hypnotized by the moving image. It’s not real, it’s just light reflected off a screen. But you think it’s real. I’ve said this before. I repeat it because it’s true. You don’t look at a film, you look into it. And it hypnotizes you. And it implants ideas into you. Plants them deep. Most people don’t even know they’re there. And those ideas change you. If you think this sounds like the plot of Christopher Nolan’s *Inception*, you are correct. Because this is the plot of *Inception*, which is a movie about how movies work. Movies play with time and space and hypnotize and implant ideas. Movies can be insidious tools of propaganda. Some people intuit this, and they don’t trust the film or the filmmakers. And then they come up with wild conspiracy theories . . . Van Halen’s enchantment with the movies, contracted at a young age and abetted by a few family connections, eventually led him to secure a foothold in the last frontier town of the American Wild West: Hollywood. Having long resided within that world, he describes it with the white-knuckled tension and vivid clarity of a man newly sober. The eighteen-hour days, the obtuse egos of the talent, and the irascible directors serve to impart to the reader a richly textured sense of how movies are produced, even if the picture isn’t so pleasing at first. A latently chaotic environment regularly inflamed into abject turmoil by the most unexpected vagaries or by the clash between egos on set leaves one struggling to believe how a single screenplay was ever produced into a film in Hollywood, much less how its studios could possibly manage to concoct and carry out a conspiracy. A veteran of this mythmaking industry such as Van Halen is perhaps the ideal man to wipe off the mystical and obscurantist mist surrounding society’s views of Hollywood and, most significantly, political elites more broadly. This approach, which as social critique is refreshingly original, is exemplified in “Patronize Me,” an essay first published on X in 2024, in which he recounts the case of a celebrated director of animated films who, granted his own studio and asked to deliver a script, simply declined to do so! From the floor, Van Halen explains, the crew’s labor is “everything”: they exist to make the director appear competent and to forestall his disastrous missteps, while the director’s reciprocal duty is to keep the lights on and the next job booked: > This was many years ago and Luminary Director hasn’t worked since. He’ll probably never make another movie. And this is sad because you like his movies, remember? Again, I wasn’t there. But if I had been there (and if they would have approved my very reasonable salary request) I would have done the following: 1\. Stayed up all night and typed up a script 2\. Sent the script to the suits, followed by daily production reports 3\. Done all of this without Luminary Director knowing. Why? The obvious reason is to save everyone’s job. But the bigger, related reason is that my role (and everyone’s role) in the Hollywood Patronage System is this: Take care of the people above you, and look out for the people below you. From here Van Halen draws an illuminating analogy with the Biden debacle of summer 2024, in which—he insists—there was neither a grand design to dispossess Biden of his presidential nomination nor a plan to install Kamala Harris as dictator for life, only the haphazard scramble by subordinates to manage a political campaign in crisis. This was, in Van Halen’s diagnosis, a salvageable campaign that simply required the saving grace of a show-business visionary because—and this is a recurring theme—political mythmaking differs very little from the cinematic kind. Measured against the golden age of the studios, the political class are, to Van Halen, mere amateurs at mythmaking. Perhaps the strongest argument in his favor is the failure of both Hollywood figures and political elites to artfully conceal their melodramatic tantrums in public. In sharp contrast to the just-so stories of methodically orchestrated conspiracies, the actual daily life in the filmmaking world is a maelstrom fraught with unpredictable conflagrations of hostilities between egos at the most crucial points, the seemingly futile cat-herding of crew and performers, and a habitual tendency to fall behind schedule, often redeemed only by the inexorable imperative of “getting the shot right while the sun is going down or we waste another fucking day.” This anarchic condition is not incidental but necessary to the workings of the film industry and sits oddly against the ubiquitous consensus-guided, bureaucratic ethos of the modern economy. Hollywood, in Van Halen’s telling, was the last untamed frontier of American commerce, surviving the formidable onslaught of advancing columns of private equity, bloodless consultants, and, most disastrously, the prioritization of “appropriate” levels of racial and gender workforce diversity above all other personnel selection criteria—longer than any other sense-making American institution. Private equity and consulting firms promise large gains in efficiency and superior returns on investment, while in truth they have presided over the managed decline of whichever studio they’ve touched. Efficiency, we are told, is also why films are now shot digitally—to economize. Physical raw film stock once routinely consumed between a fourth and a third of a production’s budget; yet when the studios switched to digital platforms, the quality declined, the budgets did not shrink, and, most significantly, piracy was made trivially easy. Save for a handful of notable intransigent holdouts like Christopher Nolan and Quentin Tarantino, the analog cinematic film is all but dead today. Despite drastic overhauls of the studios’ corporate governance structure and a significantly more “diverse” workforce, box-office revenues have fallen precipitously since Covid and remain down nearly 40 percent compared to 2019; only about two-thirds as many films were made in 2025 as in 2018\. The decay of the American film, Van Halen contends, mirrors the decay of America itself. One is hard pressed to say he is wrong. To produce films, to prosper in filmmaking at all, is ultimately a matter of “making things happen,” which necessarily requires a command of institutional knowledge no customer-relations database can reliably capture, let alone impart. Editor’s note: *This review was written and accepted for publication before the book under discussion went out of print. Readers wishing to consult the text itself may find it through secondhand booksellers or library holdings.* ### The “Other Third Worldism” and its Afterlives URL: https://www.rubiconmag.com/library/other-third-worldism/ Last updated: 2026-09-01T14:36:03.000Z Gabriel Mailhac *L’autre tiers-mondisme: Des origines à l’islamisme radical* by Philippe Baillet, 2016, Akribeia, 475 pp. It can only be difficult to present to an Anglophone audience a work that is massive, yet to be translated to English, and provincial in scope—as it concerns itself primarily with intellectual currents in France, Italy, and Germany—by an author as obscure as his editor. However, it would be a mistake to ignore Philippe Baillet’s *L’autre tiers-mondisme: Des origines à l’islamisme radical* (The Other Third Worldism: From its Origins to Radical Islamism) as he examines the genealogy of strains of thought dominant within contemporary radical right movements—particularly varieties of so-called “Third Worldism”—and the extent of their influence. The narrative in *L’autre tiers-mondisme* begins with the short-lived Free State of Fiume, founded in the aftermath of Italy’s defeat in World War I, by the charismatic Gabriele D’Annunzio. In this ephemeral polity, Baillet argues, one sees the first concrete manifestation of a nonleftist Third Worldism—most acutely in the Lega di Fiume, D’Annunzio’s proposed international alliance comprising the “League of Oppressed People” under Western colonial rule, as well as racial minorities in Europe and America, who would all partake in a revolutionary struggle against the order represented by the League of Nations. Regarding India, Baillet identifies “a true Paleo-Third Worldism” at work in Fascist Italy’s relations with leaders of the Indian independence movement, especially Subhas Chandra Bose. Here was a first attempt at a broad anticolonial internationalism coalescing against a victorious America, Great Britain, and France. D’Annunzio summed it up, in October 1919, when he announced a “new crusade of all poor and free men, against the nations usurping and hoarding all riches, against the races of predators and against the caste of usurers who exploited the war yesterday to exploit peace now” (translations throughout are the reviewer’s own). Around the same time in Germany, National-Revolutionary voices, some of them core members of the “Left” wing of the NSDAP such as Gregor Strasser in 1925, advocated participation in the anti-imperialist initiatives of the Lega di Fiume. Nonetheless, mainline fascist movements would not follow this line in their foreign policy—aiming to supplant the British Empire’s position rather than calling into question the legitimacy of imperial rule or colonialism. Just like the Italian Fascists, the National Socialists would soon clarify their hostile stance to this new doctrine, with Hitler even calling the idea of a League of Oppressed Nations nothing but an incapable “coalition of cripples” in *Mein Kampf*. Although this trend was marginalized in Germany after the purge of SA leaders, this did not stop some from pursuing its ideas in think tanks, publications, and congresses, establishing relations with not only Third World nationalists but also communists. Within the National-Revolutionary movement, Baillet shows that a fascination with Islam emerged, extending far beyond geopolitical considerations. According to his typology, this other form of Third Worldism has two distinct facets: one political and strategic, “secular and realist-Machiavellian,” focused on building alliances to fight “imperialism”; and another, “idealist and metapolitical,” nurtured by a deeper interest in non-Western cultures, sometimes fueled by a disdain for the West and often leading to bizarre life choices. This latter variety is first illustrated by National-Revolutionary Friedrich Hielscher, a close friend of Ernst Jünger (whose attraction to the Islamic world could merit a whole chapter, especially given his ties to figures studied here), who was also involved in organizing underground networks undermining the Third Reich after the NSDAP’s left wing was banished—networks that likely collaborated with the Soviets during the Second World War (i.e., the Red Orchestra). However, Hielscher did not go as far as Johann von Leers—who also introduced Hielscher to the Islamic world. Von Leers pushed his sympathy to its limits by converting to Islam, taking the name Omar Amin in homage to his friend Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. Philippe Baillet begins the chapter on Von Leers by dispelling some of the legends surrounding him. Many misconceptions, prevalent in both popular and radical worldviews, stem from exaggerating the importance of “second fiddles.” These figures, due to the chaotic circumstances following the Axis’s defeat, were able to push their own agendas as if they represented the German regime, thereby creating a warped picture of what National Socialism truly was. Most importantly, he refutes the myth that Leers was a key member of Goebbels’s entourage. In fact, as Baillet shows, their relationship was poor; Goebbels considered him a mere “jack of all trades.” Born in 1902 in Western Pomerania, Johann von Leers studied law and later spent a short stint working as an attaché to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in charge of the Far East from 1926 to 1928\. His fluency in multiple languages compelled him to consider a career in diplomacy, but he ultimately chose the more lucrative path of political writing, becoming one of the most prolific writers in the Third Reich. In 1927, he met Syrian engineering student Muhammad Nafi Tschelebi, founder of the first Islamic Center of Berlin (*Zentralinstitut Islam-Archiv-Deutschland*), and introduced him to Hielscher, whom he met that same year at the Berlin *Hochschule für Politik*. After leaving his diplomatic post, he joined the NSDAP in 1929 and became close to the influential Berlin left wing of the party, which later put him in a difficult position as this faction was ultimately suppressed. Baillet highlights both his position within the regime (to the left, with modernist views on culture and society, making him relatively marginal) and the roots of some theoretical views he maintained throughout his life, which could be found in these National-Revolutionary circles (notably: “anti-imperialist solidarity, a sympathy for Islam, and Russophilia”) and his spiritual evolution. Having been involved in Völkisch circles, Leers was particularly influenced by Herman Wirth’s literature on a “Nordico-Atlantic” tradition, which combined a matriarchal tendency with the belief in an ancient primordial monotheism—an element that resonates with certain teachings of Islam. But another element in Leers’s worldview was absolutely central: his fanatical antisemitism (or rather, as he insisted on calling it out of admiration for Arabs: “anti-Judaism,”) which extended to an opposition to Christianity on the basis of its Jewish heritage. In a 1959 letter to Ernst Jünger, he wrote: > Considered from the spiritual point of view, the way more and more important groups of Germans turn to Islam, the religion of freedom and of zeal for God, would represent a successful evasion from the “Christian West” internment camp that the imperialists and their lackeys impose by force. It would be an escape to God and in freedom. His opposition to the Christian West also led him to develop sympathies for the communist bloc, at least out of strategic considerations. In an earlier letter to Jünger, he stated: > Despite all my reluctance, I am of the opinion that we could escape these desolate lands we find ourselves in if we oriented ourselves towards the East rather than towards the West. We could talk, in brief, of two imperialisms, one capitalistic, the other socialistic. I would tend to lean a lot more towards the second rather than for the first, were I to make a decision. The Third Reich classified antisemitic writings into three categories: *Kampfschriften* (combat writings,) *Aufklärungsschriften* (informational writings,) and *wissenschaftliche Schriften* (scientific writings.) Leers was decidedly in the first category, which was relatively vulgar and often polemical. Baillet notes, referencing Leers’s biographer, that he was a unique case; he was likely the only author who openly called for not only expelling Jews but also for their complete extermination. He described Judaism as “biologically hereditarian criminality, religious syncretism with a strong influence of belief in demons,” and viewed it as his “duty to apply the right of hot pursuit towards the Jews in all countries in order to destroy and exterminate them;” further adding that: > \[I\]n so far as it is possible to prove the hereditarian criminal aspect of Judaism, each people has not only the moral right to destroy hereditarian criminals, but more than that, any people that fosters and protects the Jews becomes guilty of the same crime as a person cultivating cholera bacillus without respecting the mandatory protective rules. After the defeat of the Axis powers, Baillet speaks of the inauguration of an “era of networks.” Some Germans and collaborators of the Axis first found refuge in South America and the Orient. Johann von Leers, for example, spent time in Argentina before being invited by the Mufti of Jerusalem, a prewar acquaintance, to Egypt, where he died in 1965\. There, he became an advisor to President Nasser, converted to Islam, and developed ties with radicals through extensive correspondence. Among his close friends were Jünger, Maurice Bardèche, and Francis Parker Yockey. The Axis powers would fall but not this new virulent idea. To return back to Baillet’s typology, another significant figure is studied, one who represents the realist-Machiavellian strand; a relatively obscure Belgian whose influence was strong and very lasting: Jean Thiriart. Formerly a Trotskyite, he would go on to become a Nazi collaborator during World War II and devoted much effort in the postwar era to give this “realist” Third Worldism a perfected doctrinal form in order to create an elite cadre of revolutionaries he named the “Political Soldiers.” To achieve this, he devoted the small fortune he made as a pharmacist to the diffusion of his ideas, which were coupled with strategic efforts toward building effective alliances with the Third World in favor of creating a Pan-European unitary state against both the capitalist and communist blocs. One can look to his declaration in 1967 that the United States of America, or as he termed it “American imperialism,” is “the main enemy” of Europe. This new enemy, Thriart implored his followers, ought to be fought by an alliance of European nationalists and non-European anti-colonial forces. Thiriart was a pioneer in this regard: the French New Right only started to develop such a line a decade afterward. However unsuccessful his efforts were politically speaking—which, according to Baillet, might have been partly caused by his profound lack of interest in and even disdain toward the non-European world—his framework has been a major inspiration for intellectuals such as Alexandr Dugin and many others on the Western radical right, especially in Italy. In the 1960s, at the margins of the Italian Social Movement (MSI), the legalist neofascist party founded in 1946, National-Revolutionary groups emerged that were no longer content with it, first under the combined influence of Julius Evola and references from the “Fascist Left,” and then of Thiriart and local antennas to his movement. In French Evolian circles, a “revolutionary Traditionalist” group congregated around the magazine *Totalité* (1977–1987), sharing much with these Italian radicals, and in particular with one figure: Claudio Mutti. With such figures, we find ourselves again returning to the idealist and metapolitical type of Third Worldism. Born in 1946, Mutti emerged as one of the earliest militants of the Italian branch of Thiriart’s Young Europe during the 1960s. His sustained interest in Islam, evident in his writings from the 1970s, culminated in his conversion—likely in the mid-1980s—when he adopted the name Omar Amin in honor of Johann von Leers, sharing a passionate anti-Judaism with him. Unlike previous figures, Mutti is not only a militant but also a distinguished author and editor. Philippe Baillet, a cofounder of *Totalité*, published articles and, most crucially, translations from Italian in the journal and met with Mutti several times. While Baillet offers a retrospective critique of this period, he does not shy away from expressing admiration for this controversial figure: > I will not conceal the fact that, as a young militant, I was fascinated for several years by this fanatical and polyglot intellectual (he speaks or reads French, English, German, Latin, Greek, Romanian, Hungarian, has some knowledge of Russian and now masters Quranic Arabic), able to go with ease, be it in a conversation or in his works, not only from Guénon to Evola, but also from the Neoplatonists to a particular Sufi master, from Sombart to Spengler, from Walter F. Otto to Mircea Eliade. Moreover, throughout the “Years of Lead” Mutti faced ruthless repression—which ended up in a lifelong “professional ban” for thoughtcrime, since he was excluded from the scholarly career that was opening to him—with great courage, never bending the knee. However interesting and talented Mutti is, Baillet stresses certain practices of his that are all too common in these militant ideological circles, and in particular, the “undue manipulation” of certain authors or currents, through cherry-picking quotations and exaggerating their significance. As an example, he notes the way authors such as Julius Evola or Friedrich Nietzsche are characterized as Islamophiles in Mutti’s works, through the use of decontextualized quotes which lose almost all value when put back in their original place and when confronted with the author’s broader worldview. Among other practices, the use of references to emblematic anti-Christians who can be misconstrued as Islamophiles, such as Frederick II Hohenstaufen, or the emphasis on a cultural continuity between Europe and Islam, with the idea of a pre-Christian monotheistic tradition that they conciliate with the Islamic idea of their faith as recapitulatory, as a return to a primordial, Abrahamic belief. Another aspect, more tied with the Traditionalist framework, is stressed by Mutti: greater cohesion could be attained if militants all adhered to a common tradition, easily practicable as Islam, due to the absence of clerical mediation needed in the execution of its demanded daily rituals. With the idea of a primordial tradition, it was impossible not to mention the name of a far more famous convert to Islam whose influence, although covert, was extremely important in the twentieth century in all fields of culture: René Guénon. Baillet does that in the two next chapters, on Guénon first, and then on two important followers of his: Frithjof Schuon and Michel Vâlsan, the former representing a shift from Guénon towards syncretism, and the latter, strict Guenonian orthodoxy coupled with Islam. Despite having been notably indifferent to politics, Guénon has been part of the radical right’s canon for decades, a state which Baillet questions due to serious empirical shortfalls in his work. Several aspects of Guénon’s work are overlooked on the right, Baillet stresses. For example, Guénon’s deep contempt for the West one finds in his 1921 *Introduction to the Study of the Hindu Doctrines:* > The West, at least from the outset of the period called historical, in so far as it has had an intellectual life at all, has lived primarily by borrowing from the East, directly or indirectly . . . \[Westerners\] own civilization hardly goes any further back than the Graeco-Roman period This sentiment was typical. Guénon envisioned the West’s redemption through an invasion by Asian powers, harbored a complete disregard and ignorance of Indo-European studies, an aversion to all European traditions except the Latin, and an idealization of the East: > \[O\]nly a delusion and a blindness begotten of the most ridiculous prejudice could allow a man to believe that the Western mentality can win over the East, or that men who acknowledge no real superiority save that of the intellect will allow themselves to be seduced by mechanical inventions, which inspire them with a strong disgust and with not the slightest admiration. Although he criticizes Guénon strongly, Baillet has great esteem for the man, whom he considers “one of the greatest French minds,” but he cautions that in order to combat Guénon’s questionable views effectively, “one should actually know them and take the exact measure of their influence,” especially since they tend to evidently foster Islamophilia in wealthy and powerful milieux in Europe and America. After these prominent Third Worldists are presented, the book then delves into more recent ideologues, of far lesser interest in terms of originality, yet influential in France. Several names are evoked, such as Roger Garaudy, prominent communist intellectual who converted to Protestantism, Catholicism and Islam, and became involved in anti-Zionist causes and Holocaust revisionism in his last years; Carlos the Jackal, the Marxist terrorist and convert to Islam; and the ex-communist Alain Soral, a self-declared pickup artist (PUA) who appeared on TV regularly and authored several best-seller books—although his success would be cut short after he voiced antisemitic remarks, leading to his blacklisting from French media. Following this, in 2007, Soral founded *Égalité et Réconciliation*, a fusionist “right” (its motto being “values of the right, left of labor”) internet platform and publishing house catered to Muslim and traditional Catholic alike with anti-Zionist talking points, interviewing historical revisionists, conspiracy theorists, Russian nationalists, Eurasianists, and Duginites—Soral for example wrote a foreword to the French translation of Dugin’s *Fourth Political Theory* in 2012\. Just a few years prior, he had taken up the position as a speechwriter and advisor for the Front National, advocating for building bridges between native French workers and immigrants, seen as natural allies due to their moral conservatism—which was ultimately a failure; he would quit the Party in 2009 after a clash with party leadership. These figures illustrate the diffusion and popularization of Third Worldist tendencies in various strata of the French intellectual and political landscape, often at the cost of extreme simplification. One can also see some cross-generational doctrinal and even psychological constants among adherents to this tendency: a frustration with “the System,” the USA, Zionism, or Jews; the romanticization of foreign cultures and religions as saviors of a decadent European civilization (be it the Third World, the “Eurasian bloc” or Islam,) a conspiracy-centric framework, a morbid fascination with the occult, and an attraction to “spirituality” and “tradition” in a loose sense. One feature Baillet also emphasizes is how polymorphic the “Islamophile party” is in the West: he cites influential members of the media and cultural world, high-ranking officials and diplomats, NGO personnel, businessmen, and scholars who all agree that a demographic displacement of Europe via immigration from the Third World is not only inevitable, but maybe even beneficial. Some go as far as to even endorse a wholesale Islamic conquest of European society. The last chapters, less pertinent to the topic of Third Worldism, explore several other paths and currents that Baillet considers instructive in their advantages but limits too. Among them, what he calls Anglo-Saxon conservatism and its emphasis on the importance of prejudice, seen as a collective immune system to noxious foreign influences; but also more recent militant European intellectuals. For example, Guillaume Faye, who was a Third Worldist in the 1980s—although of the Machiavellian-Realist variety—before pivoting towards a rather prescient rejection of multiculturalism, and Renaud Camus, who has a great talent in describing with cutting simplicity—sometimes coining new terms—the taboo subject of demographic displacement in Europe: the feeling of dispossession among native Europeans, the dreary atmosphere induced by mass immigration, the decline in standards of living and aesthetic decay, and the general apathy of Europeans, obsessed as they are with more with abstract economic metrics rather than their concrete future: “\[A\]s if the survival of a nation as such was less important than its comfort as it makes its way to the dustbin of history,” wrote Camus in his 2011 best-seller *Le Grand Remplacement* (The Great Replacement.) Insights from American thinkers are also taken into consideration, in so far as they can offer prescient analyses of Europe’s changing demographics and maybe even political solutions: for example, Wilmot Robertson’s forgotten masterpiece on *The Dispossessed Majority* (1973,) Samuel Francis’s concept of Anarcho-tyranny, and Arthur Kemp’s *Nova Europa* (2013.) This exposition cannot possibly do justice to the richness of a work on such an understudied topic, abounding with fascinating bits of history, references or insights. Recent world events and the evolution of several factions on the Western right make it an especially useful tool for analysis and perhaps even prediction of ideological trajectories. It would be wrong to dismiss a potential recrudescence of Third Worldism on the right. Often presented as a “Third Way” against both international communism and an American-led capitalist order, the fact that Third Worldism appeared in Europe was no mere accident. Europe’s own interests, especially when they seem to be threatened by subjugation, can induce alliances and sympathies that could seem puzzling from abroad or in hindsight. Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front was well-known for its opposition to immigration and Islam while simultaneously maintained a friendly attitude to the Muslim world in its international relations, often taking its side in its deadly clashes with the United States. Strange bedfellows, indeed. ### Center Study: An Introduction URL: https://www.rubiconmag.com/library/center-study/ Last updated: 2026-09-01T14:36:10.000Z Rupert Livingston *Anthropomorphics: An Originary Grammar of the Center* by Dennis Bouvard, 2020, Imperium Press, 202 pp. Purely in terms of empirical observation, however, it’s clear that humans are unique. No other species has religion or art, not to mention culture and language. If an alien species visited us from another star system, surely the most notable feature of life on earth would be the vast difference between humans and all other species. And what is this difference? Consider this: in a ritual, the human community is present to itself as a community. — Peter Goldman, “Why Generative Anthropology?” If there is a sense to this essay, it is to render a community present to itself as such. Said community is an inchoate and nameless assemblage of frustrated technocrats and listless literary dilettantes; engineers who would rather be classicists and classicists who would rather be engineers; theologian-investors and the West’s equivalent of Meiji modernizers—*in summa*, men looking for a historical task and thrown together by a historical task looking for its men. This community lacks formal organization and has no membership rolls, but is instead a community of the spirit; predicated on intellectual inquisitiveness and a bias toward a historicist mode of thought. If not thrown together by the crisis of industrial civilization, its members would each have carried on his own way oblivious to one another’s existence. My hope is that center study will provide this community with a language through which to know itself. Center study is a mode of thought (alternative terms like a “system” or a “philosophy” are not entirely appropriate) developed by Adam Katz in order to reground the humanities, the social sciences, and ultimately society itself in the imperatives emanating from what Katz calls “the center.” The discipline’s origins lie in the earlier field of generative anthropology (GA) pioneered by Eric Gans, a student of René Girard who, while borrowing much of his teacher’s conceptual vocabulary, took Girardian thought down a very different path. GA begins where Gans parts with Girard; namely, with the “originary hypothesis”—the idea that language originated in a specific event on an “originary scene.” I have refrained from defining any of these concepts because to do so requires an understanding of the purpose of center study, which by extension necessitates some preliminary discussion of the scene on which center study itself originated. Generative anthropology is by now a mature intellectual tradition whose fundamental axioms Gans and his followers have been teasing out and applying to ever-new realms of cultural history for several decades now, and Katz’s assumption of familiarity with these deep roots on the part of his readers often renders his prose opaque. Nor does it ease the novice’s path that Gans and Katz, in speculating on the origin of language, have judged it necessary to mint an original technical vocabulary for the humanities. As with all texts occulted within a cryptic language, it is not immediately apparent to the uninitiated what precisely is at stake, or what is to be gained by sounding its depths—the scholar poring over a tablet written in Linear A can never know if the text holds the answer to some burning historical conundrum or merely an unremarkable bureaucratic circular. Katz asserts that human language is a source of mythification, and his peculiar idiom is intended, if not to wholly demystify it, to at least provide the language user a greater degree of reflectivity. To demythify language is to craft our utterances in direct reference to our being on a scene, and ultimately in reference to the first scene, or the originary scene. As Katz explains: “The way we would all be coming to speak of things if we were all in the process of incorporating the originary hypothesis and all its implications is the way, I find, I am speaking here . . . the reader is thrown *in medias res*, with regular recallings of the beginnings in the middle.” This is all well and good, but I am going to speak as if I were not incorporating the originary hypothesis in order to allow the reader to more easily orient himself in Gans’s and Katz’s work, though this may come at a loss of greater precision in articulating the originary hypothesis. It goes without saying that my commentary cannot substitute for a thorough reading of the primary sources, above all Katz’s book *Anthropomorphics* (published under the pseudonym Dennis Bouvard). A new mode of thought that can only be entered “in the middle of things” and whose implications run to a total reform of language—this has the sound of systematic philosophy. But Katz proposes no totalizing complex of internally coherent doctrines akin to that spoken by Hegel’s Wise Man; there neither is, nor can there be, a “Katzism” analogous to the totalizing edifice of Marxism. Katz does not claim to have developed a system, but simply to offer a new frame of reference—“If originary thinking fulfilled its wildest ambition, which is, it must be said, to reframe all frames, it wouldn’t be a monolithic discourse describing everything in an abstracted meta-metalanguage; rather, it would be a world of originary inquiries, undertaken wherever people are, within their languages, discourses and traditions and through the new idioms the inquiries themselves would generate.” The point, in other words, is to address the present situation with reference to the originary scene, or to do what political philosophy has always done—to take up fundamental questions of human coexistence in a way that offers actionable solutions to the problems facing the specific political community posing said questions. Katz is not the first in our time to have taken up these questions in this way. While generative anthropology originated in dialogue with the vernacular of what Americans peculiarly call “French theory,” there is much to be said about Gans’s and Katz’s engagement with that tradition that the present piece cannot cover (for our concerns are primarily with political thought.) Center study took shape in the “neoreactionary” milieu that emerged out of Silicon Valley in the late aughts. It would be beyond the scope of this essay to survey the entirety of the political philosophizing done in this latter sphere, and any attempt to do so would surely provoke no end of disputation and correction from its participants—better to wait until everyone involved is safely dead. Yet there is a canonical text; an “operations manual” in which the perennial questions Katz addresses were first posed in the context of an as yet unconsummated process of security state-directed, software-augmented industrialization that promises no less than a wholesale transformation of the modern state and of the very concept of sovereignty—a wave of “palantirization” that shall come to define the twenty-first century and refashion every aspect of human culture in line with the values of its avant-garde. The text is Peter Thiel’s essay “The Straussian Moment,” whose exact date of publication is unclear but was certainly first presented at a small Stanford symposium on “Politics and the Apocalypse.” I will not rehearse the arguments of this wide-ranging piece, assuming the reader has already read it, for—quite appropriately in a text dealing with Leo Strauss—it is what Thiel does not directly say that is of greatest interest. Thiel’s essay rests on an unstated assumption without which his entire argument would fall apart: that there exists an imperative to defer violence. Thiel does not explicitly give any reason for why the nihilistic violence of the 9/11 attackers should be condemned. Since Thiel is evidently familiar with early modern political philosophy, and since he takes the civilizational problem of 9/11 to lie in its rupture with the founding political assumptions of the modern age, we may infer his reason to be that the disavowal of such acts of mass murder is already presupposed in the act of reasoned discourse in which he and his readers are engaged. Beginning with Hobbes, early modern political philosophy understood the drive to violence to be man’s natural constitution. The purpose of political order was the repression or deferral of those natural urges; and since such deferral runs counter to nature, it must then have sprung from a conscious act of reason. Leaving aside for the moment whether this act was truly conscious, this binary between reason and violence is intuitive—violence is so sublime and unmediated an experience as to render reason superfluous. Violence is the pure consumption of matter; it takes what is given to be taken, whereas reason is a kind of “economics” concerned with its proper ordering (according to systematic criteria) through the analysis of causes and effects. Violence consummates itself without the need of mediation via language; it is an enclosed circle of itself. Reasoned discourse, logos, begins only where violence is deferred—yet to say so tells us nothing of how the deferral comes about, and leaves open the possibility that logos itself originated by accident. This understanding of violence as the ever-compulsive satiation of a desire is a fundamental axiom on which center study rests. Consumption, in the natural world, is directed toward the satiation of material wants and involves the destruction of lower forms of life. Among men, the needs that impel violence are more complex, such as the “desire for recognition” that we first encounter in Hegel; that is, in the desire to occupy the position of an object of a desire by a subject whose desire itself is desirable—this cannot occur without displacing that object, and since the object presumably does not want to be displaced, the attempt to do so will necessarily involve violence. René Girard speaks of mimesis, the imitation of a person occupying some desired position within a group (let us say: the esteem of the group’s members,) but here he differs from Hegel more in vocabulary than substance. In both Hegel’s and Girard’s accounts desire is liable to spiral into violence: if everyone occupied the desired position, the recognition granted would be so general as to be meaningless, and so desire is by nature intensely rivalrous. The violence that this rivalry threatens to unleash will consume the entire group absent an act of deferral by one or all members of the primitive human community (Hegel suggests the former, Gans the latter, while Girard posits the existence of an unwilling third party; the “scapegoat” made responsible for rivalry within the group). Since man’s natural state is violence and consumption, deferral must in some way involve the renunciation of nature; in other words, the activation of the logos—hence we find ourselves back where Hobbes began. We might alternatively understand this in economic terms: human culture begins with a low “time preference”: that is to say, the willingness to forgo immediate satisfaction of desires in order to attain a significant reward in the future. Consumption and violence cannot be expunged from human life altogether—there is no such thing as zero time preference, and to suggest otherwise would be to repeat the antichrist’s false promise of “peace and security”—but they can be so structured to hold truly destructive consumption, and conflict, indefinitely at bay. Having so established that it was by way of the logos incarnated in an act of deferral that nature passed into culture, let us return to the question of where the logos actually came from. As we already established, the answer of early modern political philosophy was that it did so in a conscious decision—the classic formulation to which all later theories owe a debt is that of Hobbes, who conceives of a group of men endowed by nature with equal right of contract hashing out a primitive constitution. Whatever its merits as an allegory for the origin of absolute monarchies, the Hobbesian social contract is wanting as a theory of man’s exit from his natural state, because it presupposes that sufficient mutual understanding already exists between men for there to be a common language in which the terms of the contract could be negotiated. Girard’s theory of the origin of humanity—which assumes that the murder of the scapegoat has a moral significance that requires a moral sensibility and presumably a moral language within which the community can validate it—is rejected by Gans and Katz on the same grounds. As Katz writes in *Anthropomorphics*: > The limit of Girard’s account is that there is no reason for the event in question to become meaningful and memorable. Why should the killing of a conspecific, not a very unusual event among mammals, transform the group in any way? I used the word “murder” in my description of the scene, but “murder” presupposes a moral order, and nothing in Girard’s scenario accounts for how the scene would create such an order. This is another way of saying that Girard doesn’t account for the emergence of language, which would itself be a prerequisite of a moral order and a community to share it. We are here led to the insight that the founding act of humanity must occur simultaneously with the emergence of a system of symbols through which humans may communicate with each other and understand themselves as self-understanding beings. Language itself is the “social contract,” but language cannot beget itself, since there can be no agreement to construct language that is not haggled out in some existing language, and no volition sufficiently sophisticated to construct something as complex as language where language does not already exist. Thus we must conclude that language emerges simultaneously among the members of a group by accident. How can language arise by accident? According to Gans, it did so in an event where some small group of primitive men is gathered around an “appetitive object”—he quite reasonably suggests the carcass of an animal killed in a hunt, but we cannot know what it was for certain, and the details are in any case of secondary importance. Were it only animals on this scene, the alpha of the pack would move in first to claim his portion, followed by the beta, and so on down the Greek alphabet, and there is no reason to assume that among primitive men things would be handled otherwise. But here, according to Gans, mimetic desire has increased to the point that everyone envisions himself as the one occupying the singular position at the head of the pack. As each simultaneously moves in to claim the alpha’s portion, one member of the group—seized, perhaps, by a Hobbesian terror in the face of the impending “war of all against all”—holds back, and the others, motivated presumably by a mixture of their own terror and the mimetic intuition that this member has seen or anticipated something that they have not, imitate his behavior. Gans calls this the “gesture of aborted appropriation,” in which “the order provided by the animal pecking order is replaced by an order mediated by the sign, which defers violence through representation.” No reasoned decision to defer violence is taken, because man in his natural state is incapable of doing so (here Gans parts not only from Hobbes but also Hegel;) instead “each \[member of the group\] is only repeating the others’ reference to the central object.” What is significant on the scene is not the object itself (hence why it does not matter to Gans whether it really is an animal carcass or some other item), but the group and its presence—this is what prompts the deferral embodied in the gesture, and as such what the members of the group are really gesturing toward. It is from the center—the group’s collective acknowledgment of its presence—that humanity emerges, and it is in reference to the center that man is always and everywhere constituted as such. As Katz puts it: “All we do is try to follow what the center is telling us to do. Even more, we are of the center, which speaks through us.” The first sign, in Gans’s terminology, is an ostensive sign. What is meant by this, according to the online Glossary of Generative Anthropology compiled by an anonymous internet user with Katz’s authorization, is “a gesture or utterance issued where its signified is present”—this includes any sign that meets this simple criterion, and not only the original sign. Now, it will be apparent to the reader that our language can express a great deal more than mere ready-to-hand phenomena, and Gans will trace the development of an “originary grammar” across three additional “tenses”: the imperative, the interrogative, and the declarative. Unlike the hypothetical construct of the originary scene, Katz proposes to take the theory of originary grammar “quite literally”—“there is no way we could ever be doing anything that is not following an imperative within a network of imperatives deriving from an ostensive world and explicated by declaratives.” This network fits together in what Katz calls a “grammatical stack”: the manner in which sentences are constructed out of these elements—and “your speech is good when your Declaratives answer the most precise questions that emerge from the most urgent Imperatives that were generated by the most anomalous Ostensives.” What is important for our purposes is less how this phenomenon operates at an individual level but rather how civilizations construct their “grammatical stacks”—Gans has applied this frame extensively to the analysis of different episodes in the history of culture, although a detailed discussion of these would fall outside the scope of this essay. In order to grasp Katz’s political philosophy, we need to understand the grammatical stack that makes up Western civilization, but to do this we must first review the tenses. The latter three tenses—imperative, interrogative, and declarative—all emerge at some later point than the ostensive. The usage of these terms in GA broadly corresponds to their meaning in ordinary language, although the Glossary defines “declarativity” more narrowly as “speaking about something detached from its physical presence.” Since there is no inherent property of the ostensive that impels the existence of these later tenses, and since Gans and Katz reject a decisionist theory of linguistic origin—the contention that language emerged out of a conscious decision—this leaves them to conclude that these must have originated in a mistake or a misunderstanding. That this mistakenly issued sign will not simply dissipate into the ether but instead be productively repurposed is ensured by what Gans calls “linguistic presence”: once the community interprets the things present on the scene through signs, the appearance of some unknown element precipitates a crisis to be resolved through the creation of a new sign; the appearance of a new sign a crisis to be resolved by the creation of some new meaning. It is easy to imagine, for example, how an ostensive directed at an object not actually present might be repurposed as an imperative, or an imperative concerning an object that cannot be proffered instead transformed, in a face-saving maneuver, into an interrogative, and eventually into a mere statement of fact, although how the process unfolded is of secondary importance. That human culture has come quite far since the originary scene should be apparent to the reader—otherwise there would be no need for Gans and Katz to re-clarify it. Yet if the center is no more than the representation of the community to itself, it must still be with us in essentially the same form it took on the originary scene, even if the possibility of expressing oneself in tenses other than the ostensive has obscured it. If—as the theory of linguistic presence asserts—changes in the structure of language correspond to the appearance of new elements on the scene (with the causality working in both directions), then the expansion of the originary grammar serves the practical work of representing such changes to the community in such a way as to defer the potential violence that a breakdown of the previous composition of the scene could occasion. Since it was a moment of simultaneous restraint by all members of the group that allowed the center to emerge qua center, a movement to occupy the place of the central object would presumably cause this “social contract” to implode, unless some new gesture of deferral were to be performed. Such an attempted usurpation would generate an imperative: an imperative to react—affirmatively or negatively—in a way that would somehow carry forth the deferral of violence manifested on the previous scene. Whatever configuration emerged would have to be justified by reference to the usurped scene, which, as it would no longer be present, would require a more complex grammatical form than the simple ostensive; i.e., a declarative. The tenses and the grammatical stacks constructed with them are thus what allow the center’s presence and authority to persist despite periodic usurpations thereof. One such usurpation holds a special place in generative anthropology: the so-called “Big Man revolution,” a term borrowed from the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins and transposed by Gans into GA in *The End of Culture*. Katz will name the Big Man’s emergence as “the second most important originary event in human history”—second only to the appearance of the ostensive itself. Only since the Big Man revolution has humanity been able to expand beyond the group into more complex forms of organization. This Big Man is for the most part what he sounds like—an exceptional individual who, by means of the outstanding wealth he amasses, places himself at the center of the community and maintains his presence by controlling the distribution of resources. Yet Gans uses the term in a specific sense, bound up with his distinction between what he calls the “producer’s desire” and “consumer’s satisfaction.” The Big Man accumulates his capital because he defers consumption in order to produce indefinitely (how else is capital amassed?) We may infer—consistent with this motivation—that he spends his largesse to usurp the center in order to better reap the advantages of scale that the central place confers on his production. The readier appetite of his fellows for consumer’s satisfaction is what lets the Big Man purchase their loyalty; yet his gifts breed resentment as well. Here the declarative comes into its political own, in the entreaties that he ensure a “just” distribution corresponding to the memory of the previous scene. The Big Man’s usurpation of the center is the dawn of human political history. It is in dealing with its consequences that Katz parts from the politically quietist Gans and lays out the political implications of originary thinking in which Gans, for the most part, is uninterested. Let us recall once more the dictum that “your Declaratives answer the most precise questions that emerge from the most urgent Imperatives that were generated by the most anomalous Ostensives.” The Big Man revolution is one such ostensive, in that it is an event whose consequences we live with, and one that continues to shape our political reality—there is always a “Big Man” that we can point to. From here, it requires no great leap of logic to deduce that, since the Big Man’s ethos is to scale up deferral, the imperative his presence generates is to do so in perpetuity. Thus we have the essence of Katz’s political program: “The West,” he writes, “is the ongoing perfection of the ‘Big Man’ (Marshall Sahlins) revolution across all spheres of life—that is, power held by one person (almost always a man) who continually stakes that power on the results of his use of it.” The person who continually stakes that power on the results of his use of it—we might think here of Faust, who wagers against his “consumer’s satisfaction” (which is, as per our earlier definition of consumption, an act of annihilation) and constantly “wins the bet” through cycles of creative destruction. Thus, while Katz provides an original formulation, he stands within an eminent tradition of thinking about the West. Politics, as Schmittians posit, is about friends and enemies. Katz, with a clear definition of the West in hand, proceeds to say who these are. “What is ‘anti-West,’ then, is to swamp or flood that power with exercises of power that are untraceable and unaccountable. Untraceable and unaccountable sources of power, such as the ‘masses,’ or, for that matter, ‘the people,’ or some historical process or law.” The West’s enemy is liberal democracy and what Katz will call “post-Nuremberg international law”—the attempt to found a new nomos (again, in the Schmittian sense) or system of deferral by means of the establishment of an international society in which nation-states would be integrated as equals, in deliberate contrast to the order of mastery and slavery (to use Hegel’s terms) to which Hitler had attempted to subject the German nation’s neighboring populations. This nomos Katz judges to have failed, for the repudiation of mastery—or of anything that might be mistaken for it—has decayed into the delegitimization of the nation-state as such whenever it asserts authority over some subaltern group. The master-slave relationship, as the ultimate moral prohibition handed down at Nuremberg, became the language in which every group at practically every level of society in every country has since cast its claim to legitimacy against every other group to the point of absurdity. While custom and law have thus far prevented this form of legitimacy from cannibalizing society, the directionality is clear, and only the assertion of a genuine nomos—the center—can prevent the slide into chaos. What might this nomos be? Recall that to carry on the Big Man revolution means that producer’s desire must continuously trump the consumer’s satisfaction. By re-clarifying the opposition between production and deferral on the one hand, and consumption and satisfaction on the other, we possess a standard with which to evaluate political doctrines, social theories, metaphysical claims, and the realities that they either defend or seek to bring into being in terms of their compliance with the instructions from the center. Doctrines that promote deferral—what Weber called the “Protestant ethic” and which appears today most faithfully practiced by the Chinese state—can be assimilated into the praxis of center study (or their pure forms recovered—I am not suggesting, nor does Katz, that we must all embrace communism or become Protestants.) Doctrines that emphasize man’s entitlements to some form of satisfaction—perhaps a metaphysical belief or a legal dogma that affords him some inherent rights, or an economic theory that recognizes an individually determined utility, but this is hardly an exhaustive list—are to be rejected. Center study may not of itself be able to provide the technical knowledge required to “defer consumption” on a meaningful scale, but it can re-clarify the terms and integrate other disciplines into a synthesized understanding of history and man’s place in the world that flows naturally into a simple and practical course of action—no less than Protestantism has done in various epochs and Marxism does in China today. We might think of center study, whose “clarification of the terms” is none other than a “rectification of the names” as a kind of “Confucian characteristics” optimized for the West, waiting to be scaled up beyond a scholarly tradition by courtly mandarins into a civilizational operating system on which everyone in society runs. Reindustrialization—that is, civilizational expansion through scaled-up deferral—is the most urgent imperative generated by the center, but the “rectification of names” is a far grander and more permanent task. But why do the names need rectification in the first place? This, in short, is an externality of the Big Man revolution and the expanded use of the declarative. A group organized by a Big Man is capable of producing such a surplus as to draw other populations into the Big Man’s sphere of control. Katz describes a shift from “sacral kingship,” i.e., a Big Man regime in which “everyone shares the same ritual order” (that is to say, is “named by the center,”) to a “divine kingship” where the king’s rule extends beyond the scene and takes on the characteristics of an absent deity who can only be referred to in the declarative. The same scale that necessitates indirect speech (not in the sense of vague speech, but speech concerning things that are not present) also requires new, indirect techniques of rule, along with mechanisms of distribution to and among the center’s vassals beyond simple gift-giving. These exigencies give rise to the market: Katz agrees with David Graeber that “markets are established, and money provided to make those markets functional, for the purpose of provisioning soldiers stationed in foreign territories.” But money, as a derogation of the figure occupying the center’s authority, also subverts it and allows alternative loci of power to form. “The pluralization of power within the polity,” writes Katz, “means that power centers can align themselves with or against the king, and the king can align himself with some power centers against others. With money, markets and plural power centers comes justice systems, secular thought and at least the beginnings of technology.” What Katz is trying to do is no less than to find a “master key” to explain the dawn of the Axial Age, when speculative, universalistic thought emerged hand in hand with a political pluralism and a monetary economy. For the originary thinker, the apparent problem that explaining the emergence of the Axial Age represents is in fact quite simple. This “problem,” as Katz sees it, presents itself only because we are still tied up in derivations of Axial Age thought, which is by design declarative and thus unable to grasp the ostensive in reference to which it appears. We can observe this in microcosm in the problem of tyranny—a problem first posed by philosophy, and whose referent cannot be understood but in connection with philosophy, with which it shares roughly the same hour of birth. This is not to say that tyranny is a mere spook invented by the philosophers. Tyranny, according to Katz, is a corollary of the political pluralism that emerges from the overextension of divine kingship. The tyrant does not derive his authority from the center as the sacral or divine king does, but persists “through the manipulation of conflicts between social groups.” Tyranny always rests on fragile foundations; in short, the tyrant is not a producer but a rentier on others’ resentment, whose authority both requires (and is equally easily disarmed by) discourses of legitimacy that cannot be uttered but in the declarative, for there is no “center”—no community representing itself to itself in ritual—in a tyrant’s political economy and therefore no ostensive except in banal contexts. Philosophy, and by extension secular thought, emerges in connection with the problem of tyranny when “the post-priestly class of philosophers makes a bid to become a new source of power by presenting itself as in command of the concepts that make ruling “legitimate,” that is, non-tyrannical: nature and justice.” At this juncture, it’s worth digressing slightly to note a contemporary of Katz, Costin Alamariu, who likewise links the origin of philosophy to tyranny in his 2015 doctoral dissertation, “The Problem of Tyranny and Philosophy in the Thought of Plato and Nietzsche”: > It is precisely this teaching of nature so corrosive of all convention and all morality, that is politically explosive, and that explains the deep connection between philosophy—the criminal study of nature outside the city and outside the myths and pieties of the regime—and tyranny—the criminal and feral regime of rule outside and above all law and all convention. While the relationship he postulates between tyranny and philosophy differs from Katz’s account, Alamariu’s understanding of “nature” (and, presumably, justice) as a concept that in classical antiquity had to assert itself against “the myths and pieties of the regime”—Katz would say “the center”—makes his account ultimately reconcilable to that of Katz. Tyranny, in Katz’s schema, is “the central problem the foundation of political thought aims to solve, and it remains the problem political thought has yet to solve”—unsolvable, at least, “without the creation of a social order grounded in the imperatives issued by an originary center—and such an order cannot be grasped by political thinking derived from the problem of the tyrant.” It is, of course, precisely this order that Katz aims to restore, yet this must be done in a world where the serpent of secular thought has already entered the garden. Katz is not trying to restore the sacred to a disenchanted world, critiquing the concept as an unnecessarily mystifying representation of human sociality, but merely to re-articulate it at a higher degree of generality; to tease out the pure form of the sacred in the idea of the center. What he does is to attempt a dialectical synthesis between secular thought and the originary scene. We are too steeped in the legacy of the Axial Age, whether in its Hebrew or Greek stream, (both of which culminate in secular thought,) to simply cast it off, and yet the center always remains with us and can be returned to or re-clarified at any moment. I cannot be more clear than Katz when he writes: > It’s easy to see, though, that nothing has replaced, with any unanimity, the sacred aura of kingship. We can see modern politics as a series of replacements for that sacral legitimation, from “freedom” to “the people,” to individual rights, to the “nation,” some oppressed class or group, and so on. These terms are the source of endless arguments because they are in themselves nothing more than signs of resentment towards some previous form of sacralized empire, now marked as “tyranny.” If you ask someone what “equality” means, you will inevitably be told that it means someone can’t take something from you—the concept itself has no substance. It merely marks a presumably inviolable center to be protected from tyranny. Moreover, these modern forms of legitimation have never corresponded particularly well to actual social relations, which remain every bit as hierarchical and, in most areas of life, “dictatorial” as most historical “tyrannies.” Demands for more democracy or equality are demands that the state act on your behalf against some of your enemies; it thereby empowers the state, and whichever agencies are best able to access and leverage the state. It follows, further, that the way for the more powerful players in the modern world—state agencies and corporate leaders alike—to enhance their power is precisely by leveraging such concepts against their rivals. Indeed, we can see that “equality” can’t really mean anything more than the same in relation to central power, and that for central power to treat everyone the same it must acquire ever more power over all of them. So, we see in the modern world, in democracy and liberalism, not the continuation of the repudiation of sacrifice enacted in metaphysics and (more completely) in scripture, but its revival, as violent centralizing is “laundered” through the institutions that, in purporting to balance powers against each other, actually unleashes them against each other. So, what is to be done? > Insofar as a social crisis is transcended or resolved, it is done so through a retrieval of the originary scene. The retrieval of the originary scene means an assembling by deferred desire for some central object—the central object that is the most dangerous in the given social setting. Scripture and metaphysics are such retrievals of the originary scene within the crisis of the ancient imperial orders. The organization of communities around intellectual practices resistant to sacrificial mobilization, around saints, around wise men, around dialogue focused on conceptual paradoxes, around sacred texts and revelatory events: these are the disciplinary orders of late antiquity which retrieve the practices of deferral and revise and neutralize decadent sacrificial practices. The study of these disciplinary orders is itself productive of disciplinary orders. While these disciplinary orders of the Axial Age exposed the decrepitude of divine kingship, they operated exclusively through a withdrawal from questions of power. Only this way could they sustain their practices of deferral, but this limits their usefulness as models for solving the problem of restoring a kind of working amity between the signifying center and the occupied, governing center. The need to solve that problem is imposed upon all of us, because if there would be one thing we could come close to unanimous agreement on, it would probably be that there is no space of withdrawal from power struggles. We are all of us implicated in various forms of direct and indirect violent centralization, and all of our language is unmistakably marked by this violence. The task with which the unfinished Big Man revolution presents us is thus to “retrieve the practices of deferral and revise and neutralize decadent practices” through “organization of communities around intellectual practices” that would directly address questions of power. “The civilizational project I am proposing for the disciplines,” writes Katz, “is the one I suggest they have really been pursuing all along: inquiring into the meaning of imperatives issued by the central authority.” In political terms, this means the dismantling of the declarative order, manifested today in liberalism, because it provides false instructions to the agents of the center. Since, as we have established, the center is always with us, and its instructions can theoretically be retrieved at any time, the reason we must assume this is not being done is because of an infelicity of speech: it is for this reason that center study begins and can only begin with a reform of language. Katz has no intention of making up his own private jargon and forcing it upon humanity, and emphasizes that this reform must occur on rational, scientific grounds: he suggests beginning with the linguist Anna Wierzbicka’s “natural semantic primes”—words which can be translated directly into any language—and which point to the center by “purifying” what is essential and always present in language from the self-perpetuating additions grafted on by specific cultures for their own long since forgotten purposes. If “public discourse in modern democracies can be reduced to each side purporting to demythify the other” on the authority of the disciplines (or their “critical” shadows), as Katz charges, the semantic primes model an escape from the samsara of disciplinary mythification and demythification by relativizing all language and “constituting our utterances on a scene, with a center.” It may seem that in recommending “organization of communities around intellectual practices,” center study is preparing the ground for an epistemic community to take power in lieu of the occulted Big Man. Communism, which organized communities around intellectual practices in preparation for the day when the contradictions would be resolved and the world clarified, underwent precisely this fate as the vanguard party “usurped” a proletariat that in reality never arrived. In practice, this risk cannot be completely hedged against (though this should not prevent anyone from trying) now any more than it was in the Axial Age, even if the present state of information technology affords the Big Man a wider sphere of direct control beyond that which divine kings possessed, since he will invariably rely on a large organization that he cannot completely oversee. But the “trump” which the Big Man possesses is the right to name his successor—what Katz calls “singularized succession in perpetuity.” Singularized succession in perpetuity is the crystallization of all that has hitherto been discussed. It acknowledges the prerogative of the center through its occupant while casting the center’s authority in terms of its absolute right to make arrangements for the future; in other words, its capacity for deferral. It frames the task of government as a kind of “selective breeding”; as constantly preparing for its own succession through the education of suitable candidates to fulfill roles in the Big Man’s administrative-academic bureaucracy, and by fine-tuning the mechanisms of selection as required by the new situations in which humanity finds itself. > The most obvious way of doing this is by establishing special academies to produce high-level government officials, and having the top 1 percent or so of graduates enter more grueling training and competitions to further narrow the number down. The ruler would take an intense interest in these academies, ensuring that they inculcate the most important political skills and traditions. Lower-level schools would have special programs training especially qualified students to apply to those academies—the academies, then, would set the tone regarding moral, ethical and political education across the system. This pedagogy and the elites it produces will mostly reflect the present state of technology, although not necessarily; there might arise, for example, transitional periods where man can go no further on a particular trajectory or he has lost his way, and humanistic and artistic talents will be called upon to undertake the creative work of charting a new path or representing society back to itself. In any event, the point of SSIP is to hold the world in perpetual equilibrium; to continually defer its own self-annihilation through reasoned discourse—or, if need be, until the inconceivable moment of misunderstanding where a new form of speech appears on the scene and the Big Man can hand over his well-tended garden to an heir of a new type. *Alles Drängen, alles Ringen, ist ewig Ruh*’*n in Gott dem Herrn.*