Venture into any neoreactionary (hereafter NRx) site or blog, and one thing is clear.  They are unfettered “identitarians” proclaiming “racial realism”, and a withering criticism of progressivism with deep writings about the organic evolution of culture through history.  Any student of philosophy will immediately recognize them for what they are: historicists.  The irony of the NRx assault against progressivism and “the Cathedral” is that they follow the third wave of modernity in recognizing the dangerous precipice of first wave progressivism: Spionza, Hobbes, and Locke’s materialistic universalism, and also the problems of the second wave of progressivism that critiqued the first: Rousseau, Marx, and what we call the “Left” in politics.

Who are the neo-reactionaries of recent fame? Most agree that a Silicon Valley computer programmer and blogger, Curtis Yarvin (aka Mencius Moldbug) was one of the early prophets of the movement in its current form, along with a former lecturer in philosophy Nick Land.  Land coined the term “Dark Enlightenment,” and Moldbug—from his blog “Unqualified Reservations,” began a scathing critique of Whig Historiography and the “Cathedral” of Progressivism: the NRx equivalent of the Marxian concept of Superstructure-Substructure-Subaltern.  The NRx movement also has buzzwords to identify itself, as well as give welcoming space to those who share similar views and would recognize such buzzwords as having entered a sort of “safe space”: Identitarian, Racial Realism, (restoring the greatness of) Western civilization, traditional gender roles, “our people,” and from within the fringes of the movement, “cultural Marxism” and an obsession with Jewry (especially one Leo Strauss).

We’ll parcel out these new revolutionary Jacobins, for that is what they are.  Behind the veils of German Romanticism and Idealism, behind the claims of Western civilizational greatness, and behind the appropriation of romantics like Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Oswald Spengler, Carl Schmitt, and their revival of American scholars like Richard Weaver and James Burnham, we’ll discover the bleeding heart of the NRx movement and the more specific “Alt-Right” phenomenon rising like a tsunami across both sides of the Atlantic.

Among the more polished intellectuals and academics that the NRx movement follows: Friedrich Hayek, any of the Austrian school economists, Murray Rothbard, Lew Rockwell, and the Mises Institute crowd, Hans Herman Hoppe, etc., something becomes patently clear.  Their lead thinkers are mostly Anarcho-Libertarians.  (Libertarianism was originally a philosophy that grew out of the anarchist movement, but in this re-contextualization has embraced open market economics rather than socialism per its original founders.)  Far from embracing the conservatism of the ancient framework—the pursuit of the highest good—the NRx crowd serves the other half of the “jealous god of liberty.”  The difference is, the NRx believe that they have the proper “up from slavery” and “out of serfdom” freedom that went terribly awry from the injection of the modus vivendi impulses of Hobbes and Locke, and the puritanical pursuit of a zealous commonwealth of justice inherited by dissenting Protestants (namely, the Puritans).

It should come, then, as no surprise that figures like Nietzsche and Spengler are often given lip service—if not adored despite misappropriating their philosophies.  This is telling for any conservative for several reasons.

The issue of Romanticism is problematic because Romanticism was not a cut and dry alternative to Enlightenment bourgeois liberalism and progressivism.  The Rousseauian and German Romantic strand, it is true, vehemently rejected the sterilizing, mechanistic, urbanizing, rationalistic, and materialistic (capitalist) tendencies of Anglosphere progressivism and the logical end-point of the philosophies of Peter Abelard, William of Ockham, Duns Scotus, and Baruch Spinoza.  This movement recognized, beginning more with Rousseau, offered a scathing moralistic critique of bourgeois materialism (liberalism).

But at the same time, from Rousseau to Nietzsche, this dissenting strand of Romanticism equally subscribed to Enlightenment ideas: the mastery ethos, the belief in History (progress; they merely think there was a radically break in the past—hence becoming “reactionary” rather than conservative who reject the very notion of Historical progress since conservatism is about the health of the soul and striving of fulfilling the telos of human existence), and the will to power/revolution.  We fool ourselves to think that the fascist and Stalinist movements—filled with their social engineering impetus—are not equally part of the same Enlightenment progressive tradition of reorganizing and reshaping nature and society toward some higher ideal.

In part this was the insight of Leo Strauss.  The romantics, while reasonably terrified by the prospects of bourgeois liberalism, were nevertheless still under the post-nominalist and post-Hobbesian frame of mind.  Per Burke, far from being a conservative in the ancient/classical disposition, he was nothing more than a moderate “organic evolution” progressive who recognized the fragility of human society but equally subscribed to the notion of progress, individualism, and ordered liberty.

Moldbug’s own subtitle of his blog (having now shut down to “mission accomplished”) is “Reactionary Enlightenment.”  Emphasis on the last word.

Reactionary philosophy is quite problematic to understand, in part, because the negativity that surrounds the word.  In philosophy, most scholars no longer refer to reactionary positions as “counter revolutionary” but now designate it as “counter historical,” itself a much more accurate term in my opinion.  What’s the difference?  Following the Enlightenment, and the emergence of the idea of History (History as following a meaningful path toward something, the idea that History itself has a telos), the reactionary was quietly okay with the progress of History until they were “mugged by reality” to borrow a phrase from the neoconservatives to explain their turn away from leftwing politics and an embrace of contemporary institutions and ideals: liberalism, market economics, and the dream of a pan-global liberal super state.

For reactionaries, they are implicit progressives—agreeing with the premise that History once had a glorious tract that civilization was progressing toward until something terrible happened.  From Cato to the French Counter-Revolutionaries, to the contemporary NRx crowd, there is a long tradition of this scapegoating of some virus infection that ruined everything.  This too reflects a certain historicism since Cato, the French Revolutionaries, and the contemporary NRx crowd all believed that their traditions and customs were unique to them and threatened by something foreign.  This implicit acceptance of History, as well as the two-fold criticism of Spinozan-Hobbesian materialism and Rousseauian moralism and leftism allows all students of philosophy to immediately recognize the NRx as the revitalized “third wave of modernity” per Strauss’s seminal 1975 essay “The Three Waves of Modernity.”

This too is the irony of German philosophy post-Hegel.  Even though Nietzsche and Heidegger, in particular, are criticizing the Hegelian mentality and process, both are equally revisionist Hegelians in their own right offering a Hegelian tale of decline rather than progress.  Both offer a sweeping philosophy of history, an ebb and flow, and rise and fall (they’re concentrating on the fall) of civilization as understood through the lens of History.  Whereas progressive historicism sees itself as rooted in a culture of liberty, equality, and freedom of choice—leading to an ever greater expansion of all concepts, third wave historicism was unmistakably counter-historical and “reactionary.”  Third wave modernism believed History had gotten derailed, gone off the tracks, and was now spiraling toward the Abyss of destruction.

Nietzsche was the most poetic and stern critic of modernity, but he was equally the child of the philosophy he was criticizing.  Nietzsche placed the blame on Christianity, believing that Christianity did away with the old gods of the nations and produced a transvaluation of values away from heroic and noble sacrifice (the Greeks, Romans, and broader Near East) and subverted it with “slave morality.”  The morality of pity, compassion, and love as Nietzsche famously expressed.  But this morality of Christianity was premised on the belief in the God of Abraham.  Christian philosophers regarded God as the supreme metaphysical Being, the Being that grounded all being to which one’s mind was called to understand whereby knowledge, power, fullness, beauty, and happiness abounded (cf. St. Bonaventure, The Mind’s Road to God, is the most explicit in this understanding of God, see Ch. V).

But when civilization realized that the God of Christianity was just another myth (myth being the central claim/story), “God [was] dead.”  This, for Nietzsche—contra the new atheists—was not something to be celebrated.  It was terrifying.  The old pagan customs were gone having been replaced by Christianity.  Now the Christian customs and morals were gone too.  It was not that people didn’t believe in God, per se, but that the “new god” was like the old grandmother god who wasn’t stern, didn’t rebuke, and didn’t care what the children did.  Nietzsche’s death of God remark was his witty observation that the God of Judgment was “killed” in order that the ugly and animalistic side of man was freed to do as he wished.

Oswald Spengler, a disciple of Nietzsche, in his work The Decline of the West takes a similar but perhaps “more positive” approach to religion.  Embedded in Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity, nevertheless, is the recognition that religion gives people meaning and a purpose to direct their energies and faculties of life toward something. (Nietzsche thought this direction of energies and faculties from the Christian perspective, however, were porous.)  Spengler, likewise, identified the nobility of ancient religion (including early and medieval Christianity) as producing an ethos of creativity and life.  This, however, was subverted by the materialistic and godless metropolis which is a slave to capitalism and economics (society’s incarnation of liberalism of Spinoza, Hobbes, and Locke).

Nietzsche’s response was the Übermensch.  The Übermenschen were not a racially or genetically superior race of beings—as sometimes misappropriated by the racialist far right.  Far from it, this highlights Nietzsche’s own indebtedness to modernity.  Beginning with the medieval nominalists, reaching a full expression in William of Ockham, there was a revolution of the mind.  As God’s mind was absolutely free, so too was humanity’s will absolute free and creative since humanity was created in the image of God.  The freedom of the will (as opposed to classical free will per Sts. Paul and Augustine) became a new norm that reached a fuller expression come Hobbes, Locke, and the Enlightenment philosophers.

For Nietzsche, anyone could be an Übermensch.  An Übermensch was simply anyone who recognized—especially with the nihilism wrought by Christianity—that one’s will was completely free and creative, free from all constraints (both material and supernatural).  Thus, one only need to will oneself a future to overcome nihilism and the potentiality to become the “Last Man.”  The Last Man, a concept in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, was Nietzsche’s explanation for what nihilism and materialism (liberalism) was working to produce: a civilization of insects concerned only with material security and improvement.  The thrill of life was destroyed.  And as Strauss notes, this wave of modernity culminated in fascism, while the second wave culminated in Marxist Leninism and Stalinism, while the first wave gave birth to what we now today as bourgeois liberalism/progressivism.

Again, the third wave was unique in that emerged after the second wave.  It inherited the criticism of bourgeois liberalism, but was equally terrified by the universalism of Rousseau and Marx.  This was the key “break” between the second wave and third wave of modernity.  While both assailed the materialism and universalism of bourgeois liberalism, both did so for different reasons.

Rousseau, in both his Discourse on Inequality and The Social Contract, launched a devastating critique of liberalism from a moralistic position.  Indeed, Professor Jonathan Israel (someone who is an ardent defender of the first wave modernism), in his book Revolutionary Ideas correctly links the Jacobins to Rousseau and this tradition of moralizing and puritanical criticism of the bourgeois ethos.  The Jacobins were terrified by the prospects of a liberal French republic akin to England (although England was a de-facto constitutional monarchy).

But from Rousseau, to Kant, Hegel, and eventually Marx, this second wave of modernity also promoted an alternative universalist construct to combat the liberalism of Spinoza, Hobbes, and Locke.  To counter a materialist and universalist philosophy, the second wave offered up an equally materialist and universalist philosophy—but one supposedly more moral, concerning itself with group solidarity rather than atomizing conflict among individuals, that also shared a certain re-Christianization of society from a moralist perspective.  (As many scholars have long known/asserted, Rousseau, Hegel, and Marx all have a certain inverted traditional Judeo-Christian worldview in many ways.)

The third wave, however, beginning with the later German Romantics around the Jena School, sharply broke with the second wave.  The seminal figure in this movement would be Johann Fichte, one of the most unrecognized but important philosophers of the last 200 years.  It was Fichte, not Hegel, who first proposed the “Hegelian” dialectic of Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis.  (Although Fichte said that Hegel’s Dialectics contained the same Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis construct.)  Fichte, like many of the German Romantics, were initially celebratory sympathizers with the French Revolution (starting with the Jacobins), because they understood the Jacobin cause as one of anti-bourgeois liberalism which they also subscribed.

But when Napoleon emerged, and sought to expand a universal system onto the Germans, the Germans rebelled.  In Vienna, the old Habsburg Austrian Empire fought to preserve the old order of the Holy Roman Empire.  Throughout the universities of Germany, the German intelligentsia sharply rebuked this pan-nationalism of Napoleonism in favor of a distinctive historicism of unique culture, custom, and history.  The birth of true pluralism emerged from the romantic philosophers who emphasized difference and uniqueness, and sought to preserve such difference and uniqueness against the weight of universalism (which stemmed from the materialistic monism of Spinoza which was, and remains today, the bedrock foundation of liberalism).

Fichte’s “Address to the German Nation” was a seminal moment in the establishment of a pan-German nationalism that embraced Germanic historicism: Germany had a unique language, culture, mythological past, folk heritage, and history that united all the German states and principalities that stood apart from those of the French, Russians, or English.  Fichte is not only the father of German nationalism, some consider him to be the ultimate father of a certain Nazism since the Nazis picked up on many of the same themes Fichte promoted.  Furthermore, Fichte believed it to be the job of German education to educate German students in the traditions, culture, myth, and history of the German people to cement this pan-German nationalism and patriotism to the Fatherland to be the vanguard against foreign parasitic movements and philosophies that would threaten to erode the uniqueness of Germany.

But as Fichte produced this paradigm shift, the conflict between the new third wave and the first wave also led to conflict with the second wave.  In part, because Rousseau and Marx and the “Left” embraced a universalism of their own, steeped in a puritanical moralism that equally threatened to erode the uniqueness of the pluralism being developed among the German Romantics.

Does this not strike any reader familiar with the NRx crowd as being essentially the same as to what the NRx are advocating?

Like the third wave modernists, both identify a rupture with the past.  Both are fearful of the universalism of liberalism.  Both are equally fearful of the materialist and atomizing aspects of liberalism.    And both sought to preserve the uniqueness of the pluralism of difference against all other philosophies and systems that threaten to either erode such difference or produce a vague sameness of all persons, cultures, and customs.

Within the NRx movement, we see this basic foundation go off into different paths.  Among the “Alt-Right” (and by “Alt-Right” I’m referring explicitly to the pan-White racialists and identitarians of North America and Europe), this pluralism of uniqueness is misappropriated (quite deliberately) to mean some form of pan-White nationalism and consciousness:  The “Saxon” race, or “Teuton” race, etc.

Here, I would like to point out that while such people often pay lip service to Fichte, Hegel, Schelling, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Spengler and Schmitt, none of them are actually proper adherents to the German Romantics and Idealists.  They merely borrow some of the concepts and twist them to fit their racialist ideology and philosophy.  The “other” is a threat to the uniqueness of the White race and White values: crusader, builder, conqueror, and entrepreneur.  (But as if this isn’t true of other cultures?)  As such, they’re not that important.

The more important wing of this tradition is the contemporary NRx movement itself, those who are openly sympathetic to Moldbug, and the neoreactionary label.  While they often promote a racial realism that imitates the Alt-Right, the NRx crowd is much more aligned to the heart of German Romanticism and Idealism than the misappropriating Alt-Right.  There seems to be three components to the contemporary NRx movement: one libertarian, one “traditionalist”, and the other accelerationist capitalist.

The acceleration wing surrounds itself around Nick Land, and various science-fiction writers (like Vox Day).  They combine a certain techno-futuristic social traditionalism with a grand hope for a glorious scientific and technological future embracing trans-technological capitalism as the pathway forward for humanity.  (More accurately, a “new humanity” defined by technology and capital.)  This crowd of the NRx movement openly sympathizes with the Anarcho-Libertarian Austrian philosophers and economists previously mentioned.  To this crowd men like Hayek, Mises, and Rothbard are early forerunners of their movement—or at least have many intellectual ideas regarding the economic-heavy elements of this movement.

The problem with this part of the NRx movement is that they are apparently unaware of the inherent antagonism between atomistic capitalism against collective community.  As such, notable Catholic thinkers like Thomas Woods and Lew Rockwell are often criticized by traditionalist Catholics for holding to economic theories that have long been condemned by the Roman Catholic Curia (since proper Catholic theory views economics as part of Moral Theology to which Catholic Social Teaching is meant to embody and the economics of distributism that undergirds Catholic philosophy).

The libertarian wing, some might call it an offshoot of paleolibertarianism, is closely aligned with trans-traditional capitalist wing of the NRx movement that celebrates the combination of technological progress, “accelerationism”, with Austro-libertarian economics and traditional gender roles.  In a way, the paleolibertarian wing of the NRx movement seems to be somewhat Catholic in orientation, in general agreement more with Woods and Rockwell than with Land, Vox Day, and the various NRx blogs that promote this awkward combination of technology, capitalism, and traditional social and gender roles (despite the long history of traditional conservative criticism of capitalism and technology as eroding any form of social and cultural traditionalism).

From this, the more openly neo-traditionalist wing of the NRx movement is the one that is most interesting to study.  This wing of the NRx crowd openly opines democracy, prefers monarchism or a similar strong-man system of government, and tends to be religiously conservative (although not exclusively so).  But insofar that this wing is still historicist in mentality, and not “ancient” as Leo Strauss defines, they embody something akin to conservatism but not quite.

Conservative philosophy has its roots in Socrates and Plato, but reaches a fuller expression in the works of Aristotle and appears in some of the various Roman philosophers too, traces of it mostly found in Cato.  In Catholic conservative circles, the neo-Platonic Aristotelianism of the Greeks reaches in apogee in the pre-nominalist philosophers of the Catholic tradition.  This conservatism regards the telos of humanity to be the pursuit of the “highest good”, to use Platonic language.  In non-Christian circles, this would be the commonwealth of justice and virtue of Cato.  In Christian circles, the highest good is God.

In both schools liberty is not about freedom of the will and freedom of choice but in conforming oneself to the dictates of the highest good and entering into community (Aristotle’s natural community since humans are “political” animals).  The community is established and exists to help all reach the flourishing of being in the pursuit of the highest good.  Traditions and customs—the ancient traditions so steadfastly guarded by conservatives—emerge post-community to reinforce the stability and harmony of the community, and also reinforce the direction of the person to the highest good.

Classical conservatism doesn’t have an “understanding” of History and progress (or regress) because conservatism is of the ancient frame of mind.  It seeks the flourishing of humanity through a true humanism in the pursuit of the highest good (whatever that might be), and by striving for this highest good a true humanism without the conceit of social engineering emerges.  As St. Augustine says in De Doctrina Christiana, one is to love others more than self because to love others is a reflection of one’s love of God (which is the highest good in Augustinian Catholicism).  Likewise, the virtue philosophers of Greece and Rome note that self-virtue extends to others as a reflection of the high virtue attained in the pursuit of being a virtuous person.  (In Catholic circles, there is no rupture between virtue and God, virtue would be a high good meant to push humanity to the highest good—which is God.  Also, the virtue philosophers were often themselves religious—just from within the context of Greco-Roman “mythopoetic religion.”)

The militant core of the NRx movement might deride classical conservatives as weak.  Or more appropriately unwilling to fight.  There is something true in the assertions of scholars that conservatism, in a way, helps give rise to reactionary thought.  But at the same time, it should be clear to any student of philosophy that reactionary thought also sharply breaks with classical conservative disposition and philosophy in many key places.  After all, classical conservatism is completely free from having emerged in the third wave of modernity.  It is ancient in its origins.

The third wave which spawned classical reactionary thought and is just as much the foundation for the NRx movement, is ancient insofar that it recognized a break from the classical mind to the modern mind.  But, even those figures were unable to recover the Greeks, Romans, and early Christians.  In part, because of the implicit (inverted) Hegelianism within the third wave itself.  Beginning with Fichte, a new mythology—a new veil of sacrality—was constructed to combat the bourgeois liberalism that so terrified both the second and third waves of modernity.

Insofar that the NRx movement cannot shake itself off the seedlings of historicism, it will never be a truly conservative philosophical movement—even if they are among the few who openly embrace the term; and are not first wave liberals defending first wave liberalism against the second and third wave critics who call their defense of so-called classical liberalism “conservatism” (i.e. modern/mainstream conservatism in the Anglosphere, which is anything but conservative and fully liberal and bourgeois in its philosophical foundations).  This is also why all students of philosophy know that what is called “conservatism” by the press, media, and most self-described “conservatives” of any prominence are nothing more than universalist, globalist, liberals who are just organic evolutionary liberals of a certain modesty compared to the unrestricted social engineering ethos of modern progressives.

The conflict between “conservatives” and “progressives” is nothing but an intra-liberal battle between the children of Spinoza, Hobbes, Locke, Smith, Ricardo, Mill, and Rawls fighting over the “proper” direction and principles of the universalist and materialist middle-class.  Those who think life and politics is about “middle-class” and “jobs” and “wages” expose themselves for what they are: materialistic liberals, regardless of what label they describe themselves with.  The NRx is not liberal, but it is, in the traditional sense, progressivist; it is historicist to the core with a very particular reading of the unfolding of history.  The NRx believe there is a proper path to the unfolding of History, that something (liberalism) arose to derail this unfolding, and that they are working – like doctors – to cleanse this stain so that History can unfold again to its proper end of history.  The revealing hand of History is also being unveiled in this process.   One can imagine the NRx changing the lyrics to that most infamous scene in Cabaret to: “History, oh History, show us the sign…your children have waited to see.”

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Hesiod, Paul Krause in real life, is the editor-in-chief of VoegelinView. He is writer, classicist, and historian. He has written on the arts, culture, classics, literature, philosophy, religion, and history for numerous journals, magazines, and newspapers. He is the author of Finding Arcadia, The Odyssey of Love and the Politics of Plato, and a contributor to the College Lecture Today and Making Sense of Diseases and Disasters. He holds master’s degrees in philosophy and religious studies (biblical studies & theology) from the University of Buckingham and Yale, and a bachelor’s degree in economics, history, and philosophy from Baldwin Wallace University.

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Hegel is considered the father of History in some circles, or the father of Historicism.  By History, rather than history, scholars and philosophers refer to History as Historicism – the notion that History is unfolding in its particular epoch toward an ultimate goal.  History has a telos, it is moved by dialectical advance to its end, and the purpose of History is to “be on the right side of history,” which is to say to be on the “winning side of history.”  In fact, much of our contemporary language of “being on the right side of history” or “being on the winning side of history” are rooted in a perversion of Hegel’s historicism.  This is called philosophy of history, and it is distinguished from (normal) “history,” which is merely the study and memorization about what happened in the past.  For Hegel, the study of history is inferior to the knowledge of History.  This former is called reflective history, and the latter is called philosophical history.

Originally a combination of lectures, Hegel’s most visible commentary in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History, and they are mandatory reading in philosophy studies or anyone working with Hegel.  Hegel is largely impenetrable, for his use of language is revolutionary which makes it difficult to understand.  He uses different words for the same concept – but Hegel is making no mistake of language or embracing sophistry in doing so, we must remember his dialectic of sublation that guides much of his systematic philosophy.  The old is gone and has been replaced by the new.  The same goes for his use of language.

THE AGE OF HEROES & ORIENT

History, according to Hegel, has three defined epochs: the Age of the Orient, the Age of the Greeks, and the Age of Reason (he calls this the “German world” in his work).  Hegel’s understanding of History unfolds through two primary means: organic succession and violent sublation (or revolution) which lead to greater recognition of humans as humans through consciousness.  History is a struggle of the advancement of the Absolute Idea through time, and the Geist (Spirit) that moves this advancement and calls humans to be in accord with it produces this struggle in concrete life.  Although an idealist, Hegel is a concrete idealist – the Absolute Idea must always be made concrete in the world.  While he has Neoplatonic influences riddled throughout his work, Hegel disagrees with the Platonic and Plotinian conception of the thinking mind being fully alive insofar that the thinking mind is fully alive only when it becomes actualized and active in the world – living and embodying what it knows – this is the famous Hegelian dictum “only the rational is real.”  To think is a reflection of living, but it is not the height of living, rather, only that thinking mind that has come to understand the Absolute Idea is the full living person.  In this way, the Absolute Idea that calls us is made concrete in the world through human action, either that organic succession or through violent sublation of the old idea crumbling and giving way to the new.  Thus, mere thinking is not the highest expression of living.  Understanding as actualization from thinking is.  One must understand in order to be “fully alive.”  (And we all know Hegel thought that he was one who was “fully alive.”)

The most basic way to understand Hegel’s conception of History is that it is the march of liberty through time due to the triumph of reason to spirit; Vernuft to Geist. Of course, this will require us to ultimately know what Hegel means by liberty and reason – since he does not conceptualize either in the manner that liberal theorists understand both terms.  In earlier times, only some were free.  Today, all should be free.  Thus History is the dialectic struggle of liberty which Hegel associates with the rise and triumph of universal consciousness – or rationality and connectedness to one’s inheritance.  (Here, Hegel disagrees with the likes of Locke and Rousseau who assert that man is free in his very beginning in the state of nature; man is not free, but man is becoming free over time.)  This is a natural and organic process that is pushed forward most excitingly during the collapse of the old order into the new order (aufehebung) which unleashes the storm of revolution.  Ultimately Hegel thinks this march of liberty and reason is both restorative, and we’ll get to that at the end of this series on his thoughts concerning the nature of history, and progressive.  It will culminate in the constitutional State but Hegel believes that the consummation of law and State in History is liberty and reason, for the State, and its laws, will embody what his precursor and spiritual father, Johann Gottfried von Herder, called the volksgeist (or “people’s spirit”).  This will consummate itself in what Ferdinand Tönnies later called the Gemeinschaft (“community”), and what fascists later called Volksgemeinschaft (“people’s community”).  To say Hegel was a national populist, although anachronistic, would be accurate enough in some sense.

But if we recall the dialectic of Positive-Negative-Synthetic (Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis), does History follow this threefold path? Yes and no.  Everything follows this dialectic. But the most common mistake people make who have never actually read Hegel, rather having read Hegel as you are doing now, online, is to the think that it merely follows this exhaustion into synthetic and then, in the emergence of the synthetic, the new age or epoch begins.  This is the case with Marx but not the case with Hegel.  This is why this first introduction to his history is just about the Age of the Orient, although it was necessary to briefly explain some things about Hegel himself before we could begin.

The Age of the Orient is characterized not necessarily by tyranny, as much as it is characterized by the World Spirit being embodied only by one person.  Hegel begins his History of the Oriental epoch by explaining the dialectical progression to the State.  The movement from the “World Historical Men” of individual hero, to the rise of empire, kingship, and so forth (Hegel sees four archetypes of men: the hero, the person, the citizen, and the victim – we will visit these four archetypes in a later post).  As Hegel himself writes, “It is the absolute interest of Reason that this moral Whole should exist; and herein lie the justification and merit of heroes who have founded states — however rude these may have been.”  The hero is the father of the State, the founder of a society.  The hero is memorialized by his society and State, for his is actions, and ultimately the hero produces the successor to him which ends the dialectic of the hero and begins the dialectic of emperors.  The emperor, as a descendent of the hero, propagandizes the hero as being an offspring of divinity which set him apart from the rest of his community, and by the emperor claiming lineage through this child of divinity, he also sets himself apart from the community he rules over.  This is the rule of one which characterizes the Age of the Orient, only one is free (the descendent of the hero who had the world-historical spirit embodied in his ideals and actions).

In some sense, the Heroic Age is “Original History.”  In fact, we might actually better understand the primordial Age of the Hero as what Hegel sees History as moving back toward but also away from simultaneously.  This is because, “Such individuals [the heroes] had no consciousness of the general Idea they were unfolding, while prosecuting those aims of theirs; on the contrary, they were practical, political men. But at the same time they were thinking men.”  The hero had no consciousness or understanding of the Absolute Spirit, even though they were also thinking men, which Hegel associates with necessity.  Insofar that the hero was unaware he was in accord with the Dialectic, there was no History in the sense of philosophical history – no understanding or knowledge of History.  This was the historical epoch of the pure Spirit, Spirit moving forces to do its bidding without the World-Historical forces knowing what they were doing in the fullest sense.  By contrast, the emperors and kings of the Age of the Orient are the first to have this awareness and understanding, as do their opponents.

Hegel notes that the age of the hero is characterized by tireless labor.  It is place that was “no happy place.”  They sought fulfillment of their own inner desire to be free but were unable to actually be free because they didn’t understand the nature of freedom even if they were advancing it.

The Age of the Hero is characterized by the thesis: struggle for life (freedom); which is challenged by the antithesis: death (the end of freedom), and the tug-of-war between this struggle ends two ways, the lesser succumb to death, while those who were imbued and moved by the World Spirit overcome death, and achieve, temporarily, life.  The synthesis is the embodiment of life (freedom) in the person of the hero, who in his death, passes on the embodiment of life to his successor or heir.  The struggle for life which ends in the embodiment of life is the groundwork for the origin of State and society.  Which is to say it marks the earliest embodiment of freedom, because primordial freedom is life – however laborious, tiresome, and ripe with struggle it is.  This dialectic is necessary for Hegel because all advancement and coming to know oneself, and the world, comes in dialectic.  For instance, one would not know beauty without ugly.  One would not know light without darkness.  And so on and so forth.  He who struggles to understand the dialectic is he who gains knowledge.  The hero does not struggle to understand, he is simply a vessel of the world spirit, but those who come later reflect on him and understand the hero’s actions to have been necessary and therefore praiseworthy because without him, we would all be dead (we recognize the need of the hero in order to have life).

The hero is worthy of praise and honor because were almost all failed, the individual hero succeeded.  And this becomes key for understanding Hegel’s restorative yet progressive outlook on History.  The hero fought for his own life for he had no knowledge of the World Spirit that would have directed him to fight for the life of others.  But in securing life for himself, and then embodying life at the end of the struggle between want for life and staving off death, the hero unintentionally – for he “had no consciousness of the general Idea they were unfolding” – succeeded in really fighting for the freedom of his people, and securing the freedom of his people, which is the life of his people.  The irony, for Hegel, is that the people know this before the hero does, this is why the people’s spirit (volksgeist) is such an important topic and theme in Hegel (even if he borrowed it from Herder).  In this paradoxical sense, the Age of the Hero was the age of absolute (unconscious) freedom (the triumph of life over death – the heroic struggle that overcome the conflict and ended, unknowingly, in the security of life and liberty for the masses).  The masses sound the trump of fame and worship to this hero (but this is where they equally went wrong – for it was not the hero but the Absolute Idea that should have been the directed source of their gladness and appreciation).

All of this is the backdrop to the proper Age of the Orient, the rule of one, who claims lineage from the original hero.  In claiming lineage from the hero, the Oriental ruler is participating in reflective history.  The ruler shows signs of awareness about History and understands that the fruits he enjoys today were the result of that struggle long ago.  While the hero never had time for rest and leisure, the god-emperor does because he inherited the new synthesis established by the hero.  From time to time, the hand of Fate reaches out and lifts up “great men” (heroes) to do the bidding of the World Historical Spirit.  The hero is the pure embodiment of Spirit though he does not know he is in alignment with the World Spirit.

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This returns us to what I said before about how the dialectic progress in the Age of the Orient doesn’t have a single shot to the Age of the Greeks, or the Age of Aristocracy.  Hegel understands the dialectic as going through multiple cycles in each age before exhausting into the next.  For instance, the Age of Orient which begins with the god-emperor suffers conflict.  The people argue that the hero whom the god-emperor claims lineage from “fought for them” and was “one of us.”  The hero becomes a man of the people, and in doing so, loses his status of quasi divinity which was placed onto him by his original worshippers, and advanced by the god-emperor successors.  This produces conflict.  The new synthesis has become the thesis, which is challenged by the antithesis which arises from the people.  This exhausts itself in the god-emperor no longer being divine, but an intercessor and protector of the people.  The emperor still has lineage to the hero, which makes him special, but he is no longer seen as a god, and neither is the hero who gave rise to his claim to the establishment.  This is the advancement of rationalization in society.  Which, in another way, is an advancement of “secularization” since the god-emperor is no longer a god and neither is the hero founder.  Now, the emperor still occupies the top spot in society, and the hero is still revered and worshipped, in a sense, but the god-emperor is no longer “in it for himself.”  Instead, the god-emperor’s descent into just emperor, also entails that the emperor is the protector of the people and fights the people – just as the hero unintentionally did back in Original History.

So the Age of the Orient moves from god-emperor to emperor, which reflects growing rationalization.  The people are content, for the time being, until the people once again realize their power.  They achieved gradual change through organic processes to move from divine imperium to secular imperium.  They will do so again, the re-engagement of the dialectic begins.  This time, the people seek intercessors to the emperor rather than the emperor also being intercessor to the people.  This marks the conflict toward the establishment of legal systems, courts, rule of law, and advisors.  The emperor is still supreme, and he is not so much “checked” by these new establishments, instead, law, courts, and advisors, in the Oriental Age, embody the freedom of the emperor.  The emperor, in essence, delegates his power and freedom to law, courts, and advisors.

This is the primordial beginning of something like a constitution and a constitutional monarchy.  Imperium, then, eventually sublates into a monarchy.  The empire is divided into kingdoms to make the management of the establishment, which is the management of freedom, better.  The rule of one is still present, but it has been codified and regionalized.  As Hegel writes, “Kings have a class of ministers through whom they command elemental changes, and every place possesses such magicians, who perform special ceremonies, with all sorts of gesticulations, dances, uproar, and shouting, and in the midst of this confusion commence their incantations.”  The ministers, laws, and advisors all answer to the king, but their position in the new society is also one that reflects a greater movement toward the power of the people – but we should see, the power of the people is not in their hands, it becomes embodied in externality: the hero, the god-emperor, the emperor, the king, the constitution, the courts of law, etc.

Eventually this dialectic of the Absolute Spirit of greater rationalization toward liberty continues and continues, until, at long last, the Age of the Orient characterized by the rule of one, is destroyed and becomes the rule of some (the Age of Aristocracy, which Hegel associated with the Greeks and Romans).  Now, some societies don’t make it to this transition.  They either fall to a new breed of hero to orient, which shows that such a society did not have consciousness of the World Spirit, or they collapse from within because they have misunderstood the nature of freedom as being one of leisure and pleasure, rather than struggle and fortitude.

In any case, Hegel sees the Age of the Orient as the rule of one – freedom embodied in the single ruler.  This slowly moves toward the freedom of some, or the rule of several (the Age of Aristocracy).  But the Age of Orient is not, as most would think, a simple dialectic of thesis-antithesis-synthesis (one ruler, multiple rulers, survivors become the some rulers).  Instead, it embodies multiple dialectical cycles that slowly move toward the rule of some: hero to god-emperor, god-emperor to emperor, emperor to king, king to embodied kingship, embodied kingship to the sublation into the Age of Aristocracy.  The dialectic goes through many cycles in this Age of Orient, and each cycle is a slow advance away from the rule of one toward the rule of some (which finally consummates the Age of Aristocracy).

THE ROLE OF RELIGION & CULTURE IN HISTORY

Continuing with Hegel’s philosophy of history we will move into one of the most important, but often neglected, aspects of Hegel’s philosophy: the role of religion as the source of society and culture.  Throughout his works, Hegel comments on religion, the power of religion, and the role of religion in society and shaping national character and spirit.  Religion, itself, is part of the world-historical process and embodies the Absolute Idea.  But if the Absolute Idea is universal, and Hegel was a cultural particularist, how did Hegel get around this seeming contradiction?  The answer is religion.

Much like how Herder was an important influence on Hegel’s historical people’s spirit, so too was Herder an influence upon Hegel’s understanding of cultural relativism and what are the forces that cause cultural relativism.  By cultural relativism we do not mean epistemological relativism.  A better term is cultural particularism, and so that is what I will use to describe Herder to Hegel’s cultural relativism, which is really a form of particularity.  Every culture will be different from each other due to circumstances that influenced it – each culture, however, will reflect the universal idea in its particularity.

According to Herder, religion is the root of life in all culture.  Religion is the root of life because it promotes an outlook of life and heroic struggle.  Long before philosophy, science, ethics, or any other intellectual disciplines emerged in society, religion was the first systematic intellectual practice that was captured by the World Spirit and implanted itself in society.  Religion, rich in ritual and practice, nevertheless was an interpretive movement – at its heart, and this is critical, religion is an interpretive endeavor.  Religion’s primary importance is intellectual, rather than practical or practiced from Hegel and Herder’s perspective.

All religions, however, are different.  Religions are shaped by geographical realism, societal difference (settled vs. nomadic), a society’s wealth (rich vs. poor), and the historical consciousness of a people’s experience (war-like and conflictual, or leisurely and pleasurable).  Religion also provided the first sense of communal belonging.

Furthermore, as Herder saw religion as embodying the ethos of struggle, so too did Hegel see the religious hero as the archetypal hero.  The oldest heroes always tended to be great religious leaders, prophets, or founders, shamans, and so forth.  While Hegel was writing prior to the discovery of the Epic of Gilgamesh, one sees the residue of Moses as hero in Hegel’s understanding of the hero as religious struggler and father as also being the father of a civilization and the pre-founder of the State.  In Lectures on the Philosophy of History and Elements of the Philosophy of Right, Hegel notes that the hero is the one who founds – somewhat unknowingly though being guided by the World Spirit – the state and civilization.  Thus, we see, ever more clearly, the role of the religious hero as the father of civilization.  Religions are ripe with heroes: prophets, saints, martyrs, warriors, patriarchs, matriarchs, princes, princesses, kings and queens, etc.

Religion is also the root of all culture because, in Latin, cultus, meant care or praise or worship.  Cult simply means “to care” and “to praise.”  Religion, seeing that it not only embraces some notion of heroic struggle, against sin, against death, or to save others (e.g. filial piety as reflected in Aeneas saving his aging father in The Aeneid).  Since cult is the basis of care – like the caretaker who concerns himself with the planted seed of life in the ground – culture springs from cult (or religion).  Think about all the great works of poetry, music, artwork, sculptures, etc. and their religious inheritance, themes, or outlooks.  It gives the people something to praise.  It unites people in love and care and praise of something: beauty, struggle, victory, etc.

Hegel follows Herder in this respect then.  Now, some scholars assert the interest in religion as the source of difference can be explained by history.  Germany was first home to Arian Christianity, adopting Chalcedonian Christianity much later than the Roman Empire, and the Roman Empire’s most important successor kingdom: France (which is often remembered fondly in Roman Catholicism as the first sacred daughter of the Church, and some say the root of Franco-German animosity).  Then Germany was home to the Cult of the Holy Spirit movements of Catholic mysticism of the Middle Ages (think of Meister Eckhart).  Then Germany was the center of the Protestant Reformation after Martin Luther posted his 95 Theses to the door of the Wittenberg Cathedral.  Irrespective of this attempt to historically explain the role of religion as difference in German Romanticism, the fact remains that German Romanticism was adamant in its place of religion as the source of life and culture, identity, and ultimately the volksgeist and eventually nationalism.

For Hegel, religion as the root of culture and life is that religion was first intellectual force to begin to understand the relationship between the ideal and the concrete, and was the first force to begin the dialectical movement toward the Absolute Idea while also preaching that others embrace the absolute and manifest it in their lives as persons and, consequentially, manifested in their society.  This is why religion is a part of Hegel’s unitive composite final spirit at the End of History.  Religion took abstract ideals and made them concrete in their practicing manifestations in life.

The idea of beauty captured in art and architecture and music.  The idea of struggle (the dialectic itself) in overcoming sin (specifically looking at Christianity) and how that is manifested in daily living and practices of confession and charity.  The idea of honoring ancestors being bound in praise of the eternal father, but also the praise and honor of martyrs and saints.  Hence, religion is the nexus of all culture and culture is the life of any people.  (We often forget that many of the great classical compositions of the 1700s and 1800s were explicitly religious in nature.)  As Hegel himself wrote, “The German nations, under the influence of Christianity, were the first to attain the consciousness that man, as man, is free: that it is the freedom of Spirit which constitutes its essence. This consciousness arose first in religion, the inmost region of Spirit; but to introduce the principle into the various relations of the actual world involves a more extensive problem than its simple implantation; a problem whose solution and application require a severe and lengthened process of culture.”

Since the dialectic in Hegel is a creative function, and religion serves as a creative function, there is already a cross pollination then that cannot be eradicated unless one loses everything that has come with the unity of consciousness, culture, and religion.  The creative function of religion establishes the groundworks of all civil society in Hegel, to which he calls this the Sittlichkeit – or “ethical life.”  Ethics, for Hegel, is concerned with life because ethics is about creation and propagation.  From Sittlichkeit emerge the family, community, civil society, constitutions, and the State itself.  Eliminate religion and you will, in time, lose consciousness, freedom, law, art, poetry, culture, and ethical fortitude because all of these things ultimately spring from religion. Sittlichkeit, in another sense, is the life of attached love. It is a radical appraisal of Goethe’s “Verweile doch du bist so schön.” But rather than stay a while, the beauty of love keeps one attached in the garden of love for eternity.

This is where Hegel’s outlook on religion is often difficult to understand.  Hegel believes religion to be the foundation of culture and civilization, the very foundation of civil society and all that civil society embodies.  However, this entire process of dialectical progression is still one of sublation.  “Secularization” in Hegel, and by secularization we mean the preservation and continuation of religious thoughts, habits, and ideas after the atrophy of faith, is, in a way, the logical continuation of religion in society.  Religion becomes fully realized in the world. That is, the success of religion is that it exhausts itself as a practicing force, becoming an interpretative force, and then becoming a cultural force.  We begin with religion, but we end with the State.  Yet, the State is rooted in the religious foundations of that particular society.  People may not be “practicing religion,” but they live, in essence, as religious people as religion has completed its real goal: intellectual actualization of concrete ethical life. (Certain dunces like Sam Harris would be a good example of someone who is ethically religious in the Hegelian disposition even if he is too ignorant to realize it.)

For example, religion gives us the basis of the family structure; therefore, the family structure embodies religious ideals. As the family structure gives way to community, the religious ideals embodied in family structures is inherited into the community.  Thus, civil society embodies an inherited religious ideal.  And all of this is carried forward into a civil society’s constitution, and eventually into the ideals of the State itself.  In Hegel, as most Hegelian scholars note, the State is the consecrated “Temple of Human Freedom.”  The State has embodied all aspects of culture into itself, and in doing so invites no further changes – this is what the “end of History” means.  It is the end to Progress, but events and time continue after it.

In the midst of this too is the transition from Subjective Spirit to Objective Spirit to Absolute Spirit in History.  According to Hegel, religion fundamentally seeks to understand Absolute Spirit and manifest it in life. Thus, for whatever other faults we can throw upon the altar of religion (mostly material faults and disputations), religion was, and is, the interpretative discipline of the Absolute Spirit.  While religion did not fully understand the Absolute, in being the first movement to seek an understanding of the Absolute which gets embodied at the beginning of culture and society in the Sittlichkeit, religion is the first of what will be many legs – so to speak – in propelling society toward the Absolute.

Additionally, we must also understand – perhaps paradoxically at first – that Hegel’s entire schema isn’t predicated on the movement toward the Absolute per se (in a Platonic sense) but in the Absolute being made concrete which includes the movement to the Absolute.  This is the Objective Spirit (objektiver Geist) – the Absolute Spirit having been consummated in the world.

Here, too, religion is the first major force in society that is aware of this truth of History.  In beginning with the attempt to understand the Absolute Idea, religion attempts to then make it concrete – which is to say religion, after a long period of reflection and theological inquiry, attempts to actualize its Absolute Spirit into an Objective Spirit in the world (through practice).  The first signs of this are in the objectiveness of family life.  And this continues to progress through civil life, then embodiment in law, and eventually the State.

All of this is taken up in its most concrete form in culture.  Religion is the embodiment of culture because culture is a creative, life-giving, and constructive endeavor. Culture is the attempt to make concrete the Absolute Idea.  Thus, religion is the basis of particularity in Hegel’s philosophy and outlook on History.  While all are moved by the universal attempt to make concrete the Absolute, all will have done so in unique and different ways that eventually get embodied in national character and will, which is Hegel’s equivalency of the Herderian volksgeist.  Likewise, when a culture, or civilization, loses its religious impulse, it dies.  It grows decadent and old, and, with nothing left to live and die for, expires in total exhaustion.  There is nothing left to praise, and as such, there is no more struggle to bring the abstract ideal and make it manifest in concrete practices.

For Hegel, there is an unmistakable spiritual reality to the work of Geist in History and a spiritual reality to all that humans engage in and create. Indeed, the very movement of History, the very rise of consciousness and moral community, is the movement from hell to the climb up the mountain to find the White Rose at the end of the work of History. The divinization of man, earth, and culture – the sanctification of the world in love – is very much integral to Hegel’s work and outlook. After all, the movement of History is the realization of Geist.

THE AGE OF ARISTOCRACY AND STRUGGLE FOR FREEDOM

Now we move into the heart of Hegel’s Historicism: the movement from the orient to aristocracy.  The movement to aristocratic governance is the next great moment in historical unfolding, but also posed many problems as Hegel makes clear in his commentary over the Greeks and the Romans whom he uses thoroughly in his analysis.

If we recall, the age of oriental despotism was the rule of one – the god-emperor who inherited the now codified tribal community after the actions of the hero to save the tribe and found civilization.  As the oriental age unfolded, and society became more complex, the emperor devolved power to associates to help him run the nation.  Likewise, people within society began to accrue power and responsibilities in daily life.  This shift of needing more people to help with the running of society represented the antithesis to the thesis of singular sovereign rule.  The conflict is inaugurated until the synthesis was derived wherein the emperor, or king, or head, retained his place, but power had been devolved to the “aristocratic” class.

The aristocratic class is the landed gentry – those who had accrued fortunes and wealth through various means and had become highly respected members of the community.  The aristocratic class also included those associates of the emperor or king who helped him in administering the nation and were rewarded with titles and land for their service.  In the aristocratic age these people now take on greater freedom than they had before – thus representing an expansion of freedom from the orient (one) to the age of aristocracy (few, but more than before).

The aristocratic age is characterized by the unstable dialectic of the aristocracy and the plebeian majority edging ever closer to democracy.  This is important to know because Hegel does not see democracy as the end of history or that democracy is representative of the “Age of Freedom” where all are free:

The History of the World is the discipline of the uncontrolled natural will, bringing it into obedience to a Universal principle and conferring subjective freedom. The East knew and to the present day knows only that One is Free; the Greek and Roman world, that some are free; the German World knows that All are free. The first political form therefore which we observe in History, is Despotism, the second Democracy and Aristocracy, the third Monarchy.

Oriental Despotism was overcome by the second form of the political: democracy and aristocracy which characterize the aristocratic age, which will, as we shall find out, exhaust itself into monarchy and monarchy will be – for Hegel – the perfected form of civic constitutionalism.

But as the history of the world moved from Oriental Despotism to quasi democratic aristocracy, Hegel informs us why the Greeks and Romans were the ones to achieve this while the rest of the Orient (China, India, and the Middle East remained despotic).  The smallness, or limitedness, of the Greek city states, and the original Roman state, gave people a sense of connectedness with their fellow citizens and rulers.  Thus, they were committed to its preservation which demanded a strong moral ethos to be inculcated in individuals.  At the same time, the Greeks and Romans were the first to truly particularize their religious mythos writ large.

In the second part of this exploration of Hegel’s philosophy of history we commented on the importance of religion to culture and society.  It is the Greeks and Romans who were the first bring that abstract universal and manifest it in concrete particularity for themselves and their progeny:

This is the elementary character of the Spirit of the Greeks, implying the origination of their culture from independent individualities; — a condition in which individuals take their own ground, and are not, from the very beginning, patriarchally united by a bond of Nature, but realize a union through some origin of their moral life the Greeks have preserved, with grateful recollection, in a form of recognition which we may call mythological.  In their mythology we have a definite record of the introduction of agriculture by Triptolemus, who was instructed by Ceres, and of the institution of marriage, etc. Prometheus, whose origin is referred to the distant Caucasus, is celebrated as having first taught men the production and the use of fire.

Here Hegel highlights how religion is an intellectual enterprise, one of teaching, and in being made manifest in daily life, people expand their intellectual awareness and appreciation of the heroes of old who have given them their present lives and seek to preserve it as they see themselves as part of the continuation of this great story.  Culture, in particular, is the embodiment of this creative enterprise and, therefore, culture becomes a major force in the advancement of history and the Absolute being made concrete.  Culture is also a driving force of the democratic spirit.

*

The transition to quasi democratic-aristocracy is embodied in Greek and Roman culture Hegel reminds us.  The great poets capture this in their epics.  Though the kings of ancient Greece and their aristocratic aids are those who hold power, they were acting in a democratic ethos insofar that they were dependent on one another and petitioned each other in order to go to war.  They needed agreement among themselves before acting.  In this manner, though they did not know it, the aristocratic and monarchical states were already showing the democratic spirit in their actions.

The newfound energies of the Greeks and Romans exploded into the realm of culture.  Praise and care.  The Greek and Roman poets wrote works, produced works of art, and attempted to pass them on to their children, which celebrated the heroic, the democratic spirit, and togetherness (connectedness) or recognition (Anerkennung) of the Greek kings and Roman peoples with one another.  Culture was the creative Spirit working in history during this age.  Culture was something that bound past with present, and the creative act of culture bound past and present with the future!

Furthermore, the expansion of this civic participation and expansion toward democracy was because of a dialectical opponent.  United by a common opponent, the Greeks fostered a cult of patriotism, participation, and democratic ingenuity.  Focusing on Homer, Hegel highlights how Troy served as the antithesis to which the Greeks had united and were being transformed and how the dialectic is essential for all progress in history:

But the poet supplied an imperishable portraiture of their youth and of their national spirit, to the imagination of the Greek people; and the picture of this beautiful human heroism hovered as a directing ideal before their whole development and culture. So likewise, in the Middle Ages, we see the whole of Christendom united to attain one object — the conquest of the Holy Sepulchre; but, in spite of all the victories achieved, with just as little permanent result. The Crusades are the Trojan War of newly awakened Christendom, waged against the simple, homogeneous clearness of Mahometanism.

This ultimately produced the “exhilarating sense of personalities,” of individual heroes, and demi-gods for whom the rest of the Greeks should strive to be.  The poets captured the essence of Aristotle before Aristotle.  Aristotle speaks of the imitation of nature to achieve perfection.  Hegel agrees that the natural world, in its goodness, beauty, and perfection, is a better model to imitate write large because all persons can imitate nature whereas not all persons can hope to become the next Achilles or Odysseus or Aeneas.  However, in presenting individual heroes for the people to look up to, to emulate, and to imitate, this caused an explosion in the democratic sensibilities of the Greek and Roman people.  Many were imitating their heroes of old and advancing society and themselves through this burst of energetic spirit.  These heroes were microcosms of the Absolute.  To imitate the heroes who were reflective embodiments of the Absolute meant you also reflected the Absolute.  (Though Hegel informs us that they did not knowingly reflect the Absolute which was the problem.)

The imitation of the person would, in time, be transformed to the imitation of nature as a greater expansion of the democratic ethos.  As Hegel notes, the Greeks mandated that one self-control themselves, become a beautiful and self-disciplined person before attempting to produce the imitation of beauty and the heroic in art form: poetry, marble statues, great buildings, etc.  “This is the subjective beginning of Greek Art — in which the human being elaborates his physical being, in free, beautiful movement and agile vigor, to a work of art. The Greeks first trained their own persons to beautiful configurations before they attempted the expression of such in marble and in paintings.”  The imitation of nature, as perhaps best seen in Aristotle and then the later Greek stoics, was a step closer to the imitation of the Absolute – the embodying of the Absolute in one’s own life.

Culture itself is the great fuel of history, and culture is representative of where are people are at in their movement through history.  In the Oriental Age, all art and culture was dedicated to one (the god-emperor).  In the aristocratic age, art has expanded outward to many and is dedicated to multiple people with the inclusion of the Absolute Idea particularized in concrete form: namely beauty.  In the Oriental Age it didn’t matter if art was beautiful so long as the communicative message of hero-worship of the one was drawn out then all was fine.  However, in the aristocratic age, there is the importance of presenting presentable and beautiful works for others to imitate so they themselves can be made beautiful and disciplined in their own lives because when we’re all doing this we achieve a beautiful and disciplined society writ large.  Likewise, the expansion of art beyond the one to the many reflects the quasi democratic spirit of aristocracy.

The result of this transformation in the aristocratic age was a shift in intellectual knowledge.  People began to know that men were free.  But only some men.  The heroes.  The kings.  The princes.  The princesses.  The aristocrats. Per Hegel:

The consciousness of Freedom first arose among the Greeks, and therefore they were free; but they, and the Romans likewise, knew only that some are free — not man as such. Even Plato and Aristotle did not know this. The Greeks, therefore, had slaves; and their whole life and the maintenance of their splendid liberty, was implicated with the institution of slavery: a fact moreover, which made that liberty on the one hand only an accidental, transient and limited growth; on the other hand, constituted it a rigorous thraldom of our common nature — of the Human.

But this is not to condemn the Greeks and Romans, as Hegel does not do.  He simply highlights how their energies helped expand the consciousness of freedom from the one to some, a great leap of advancement considering how the Orient remained despotic while Greece and Rome advanced closer to constitutional liberty and the freedom of all.  This was a necessary step and advancement, in other words.  We should not condemn the Greeks and Romans but praise them.  Extract from them the good and beautiful and import them into our time and society to make our society even more self-realized and beautiful.

*

The reason why Hegel unites democracy with the aristocratic age is because the end of Greek aristocracy was really the rise of democracy.  Likewise, the rise of the Roman Empire which brought about the end of the Roman Republic was because of democracy and atomization.  For Hegel, the collapse of the Roman Republic was its property-owning atomism in combination of increased primitive mass democracy on the part of the urban plebeians who soaked up the attentions of the Roman political order – the two combining to eliminate the collective and communitarian nature upon which the Roman Republic was originally founded on.  This was inevitable, for Hegel, in the dialectic between aristocratic land owners (becoming self-absorbed) and the wants of the masses becoming greater and greater as they clamored for more political recognition (becoming increasingly militant as a result).  The Roman political order, shepherded by the landowning class, abandoned their responsibilities as they became increasingly atomized and self-absorbed.  The masses, in contrast, were equally self-centered in their wants, but united together and put pressure on the Roman system which became paralyzed to meet the demands of the masses and safeguard the property of the aristocrats.  The freedom of the aristocrats was under threat by the push for greater freedom (in the sense of autonomy) by the masses.

Following the works of Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero, Hegel came to realize that democracy – as simple rule of the majority – exhausted itself in resentment and tyranny.  The end of constitutional government in Greece and Rome was not the tyranny that overthrew the democracies, it was the democracies themselves which burdened and collapsed the constitutional orders (which, admittedly, did primarily serve the interest of the aristocrats) which, when the people wanted a return to order, gave themselves over to the tyrants.  The realization of freedom that became evident in Greece and Rome met the dialectical antithesis through the masses but this was a messy and bloody affair.  Overwhelmed, the entire system collapsed.  The pendulum swung too far in one direction when the Greeks and Romans were not ready for it.  They were not ready for absolute freedom because the Greeks and Romans did not yet truly understand freedom in its most concrete form.

This is why the aristocratic age had its form of governance as both aristocratic and democratic.  It fostered civic participation among the many (democracy) while only maintaining freedom for the few (aristocracy).  As the energies of this democratic outburst moved beyond art and culture, and as various other changes in life were resulting, the masses – having been inculcated with a spirit of participation – sought to make manifest the freedom of their idols whom they imitated but the result was the struggle between the aristocrats and their backers who jealously guarded their freedom against the plebeian masses who sought the freedom of the aristocrats not knowing how to achieve it or protect it if they ever attained it.  The result of this dialectic struggle was a pendulum swing into chaos where old heroes had to arise again (like the heroes of old) and reset the system.  The end of this dialectic was the birth of empire.  The Greek empires and the Roman Empire.

The aristocratic age may have ended in fire, civil war, and the re-imposition of single rule, but its spirit endured.  The spirit of cultural actualization, civic participation (patriotism), and increased responsibilities for self-cultivation (on my own accord) is what the aristocratic age embodied and bequeathed to posterity.  These ideals which failed to be actualized in the aristocratic age would eventually be the project of the age of freedom – or more appropriately for Hegel, the age of civic constitutionalism.

Moreover, the importance of art and culture to Hegel’s philosophy should be becoming more evident.  The cultural works of the Greeks and Romans: religion, poetry, art, philosophy, etc., was instrumental in actualizing consciousness.  Such enterprises helped give sustenance and understanding to the absolute ideas which were attempted to be made manifest through religious stories and practices, the construction of the epics, dramas, and sculptures both small and large, and the rise of philosophy attempting to understand the phenomenon before them and render the chaotic action of individuals and society intelligible.

Nevertheless, the aristocratic age was brought to end by its own democratic energies when it was not ready for “democracy.”  The dialectic between the aristocrats and the plebeians resulted in losses for both, which is to say all except for those who strode across the Tiber and invaded Athens and Corinth and consummated empire to bring order back to chaos, thus stunting the energies and the world spirit.  Thus, the Greco-Roman would have to wait for Christianity before its own desires could be realized, “It was less the miracles of the Apostles that gave to Christianity its outward extension and inward strength, than the substance, the truth of the doctrine itself.”  The truth of Christianity, that all persons are images of God (imago Dei) possessing intrinsic rationality to know the truth, that liberty is self-control and fulfillment of desires through unity of reason and desire to achieve the consummation of the absolute in concrete life, and that all of this is only possible within the bounds of transcendent law (hence the importance of political constitutionalism as the secular embodiment of transcendent law) is what would rekindle the world spirit and bring about the final consummation of concrete reality and civic participation and fulfillment in the world.

According to Hegel, the reason why the Greek and Roman experiment with freedom failed is because they had not known, as demonstrated by Hegel’s quote concerning even Plato and Aristotle, that all men were free.  For all men were created by God and made in God’s image.  Thus, the spirit of freedom and the energies of culture which all strove for the Absolute Idea were to wait until Christianity emerged to bring about their full realization through Christian doctrine (and not so much Christian practices).  For it is the doctrines of Christianity that understood freedom in its concrete form, thus giving to the Greeks and Romans what was needed to complete the synthesis.

The reason for this is because in Christianity, God (the Absolute) became man (the god-man Christ) so that man could, in turn, self-actualize in union with God, and become god (a free and moral agent).  This follows standard traditional Christian doctrine, as perhaps best summed up by St. Athanasius, “God became man so that man might become God.”  That is, union with God makes man fully self-aware of who he is and what is nature is, and therefore, what his freedom is.  The Absolute is made concrete in the incarnate image.

However, the second age – of aristocracy – is characterized by the explosion of creative activity in arts and culture.  This Hegel concentrated on. Through the rise of the creative arts there is, within the aristocratic age, a quasi-expansion of democracy as a result.  The Absolute is attempted to be concretized through culture, rather than the human person, but the spirit of freedom moves the masses into a dialectical confrontation with those who are free and consider only themselves free (the aristocrats).  Because there was no understanding that all are, in their essence, free, the dialectic fails as the pendulum of democracy swings too far and the result is tyranny to restore order.  The final age, which is more aptly to be described as the age of constitutional love, is what will arise when this dialectic of aristocracy vs. democracy (the masses) plays itself out again.

THE AGE OF FREEDOM AND MORAL LOVE

The Aristocratic Age, that age of great movement, creativity, and the arts, and the dialectic between the aristocrats and plebeians, failed because there was no notion that all men were equal.  Now we move into the Age of Freedom (and moral love) in the wake of the failure of the Aristocratic Age to produce freedom. This final cornerstone to the advancement of the age of freedom needed the insights of the Christian religion before it could be consummated.  Furthermore, the failure of the Aristocratic Age was because of the self-centered atomism of the patrician landowner and the resentful politics of the Plebeian.  Now, however, with the advent of Christianity’s declaration that all men were equal, the march to freedom from the Aristocratic Age to the Age of Liberty and moral love could begin, where moral love – the great import from Christianity into the consciousness of humans – allows for freedom to emerge in society writ large based on moral love of one another instead of the domination of others into submission.

*

Hegel’s “Age of Freedom” is generally referred to as the “Constitutional Age” (but we shall see that it is far more than just that).  It is the achievement of a peoples to produce an enduring Constitution that not only enshrines the principles of liberty and equality under the law, it is also the consummation of a peoples history and culture—for history and culture are the ingredients that produce constitutions: A peoples law, institutions, and legal traditions and outlooks.  For Hegel freedom is not possible without Law; freedom without law leads to nothing but conflict.  This is why absolute freedom is the end result of a long dialectic of unfolding conflict between those who have freedom (the Oriental Emperor, to his advisors, to the land owning patricians and poets, and finally to the multitude of the masses—all are subject to the Law and not above the Law).

The importance of Christianity to Hegel’s unfolding historicism was that “The German nations, under the influence of Christianity, were the first to attain the consciousness that man, as man, is free: that it is the freedom of Spirit which constitutes its essence. This consciousness arose first in religion, the inmost region of Spirit.”  For Hegel it was the egalitarian spiritual (innermost) aspect of man within Christian anthropology that ensured the movement to the understanding of a free and equal society.  It is not that Hegel thought that the advent of Christianity in Late Antiquity produced a free and equal society.  In fact, Hegel’s Germanic-Protestant exceptionalism is also on full display in his statement about Christianity and Germany.  It is the Protestant understanding of man within the Christian tradition, which laid its seed most prominently in Germany, that was the first to attain that consciousness of freedom.

All dialectical movement is slow unfolding conflict that produces a new result which raises consciousness and self-understanding.  In the early centuries of Christianity, it had to contend with the mystery religions of the east and the pagan religions of the West.  In this contest Christianity offers development of higher consciousness and subjectivity in offering a relational aspect within religion rather than the subjected fatalism or esotericism of pagan religions.  The fatalism of the various Greco-Roman cults consigns man as the puppet of the gods.  The esotericism of the mystery salvific religions (like the Cult of Mithras) ensures inequality between men where only the knowledgeable few are free and the rest of mankind languishes in ruination and ignorance.  Christianity, being a religion of the heart and mind, subjectivity and objectivity, is the total religion that transforms man’s consciousness and brings the subjective and objective together—the transcendent made concrete.  And this is a very long process.

This long movement leads us to modernity.  “We have now arrived at the third period of the German World, and thus enter upon the period of Spirit conscious that it is free, inasmuch as it wills the True, the Eternal — that which is in and for itself Universal,” as Hegel writes.  The importance of the Reformation, the union of Lutheran subjectivity with Germanic federalism, was that:

Truth with Lutherans is not a finished and completed thing; the subject himself must be imbued with Truth, surrendering his particular being in exchange for the substantial Truth, and making that Truth his own. Thus subjective Spirit gains emancipation in the Truth, abnegates its particularity and comes to itself in realizing the truth of its being. Thus Christian Freedom is actualized.

The importance of something being unfinished is key to Hegel’s historicism.  If freedom had been completed and Truth complete in the dogmas of the Roman Church, then the Reformation would had never happened.  Corruption, as Hegel writes, is one thing.  But the Reformation was more than about church corruption—it was the catalyst for a further development of Christian truth wherein the subjectivity of interpretation and movement offered in Lutheranism offered further development to the truth being actualized in the world.  Christianity had the seed of freedom and equality within it; it just took a long time for it to finally sprout and become actualized in the world.  Had it done so earlier we would have had the end of History with the Christianization of the Roman Empire.  Per Hegel, “This is the essence of the Reformation: Man is in his very nature destined to be free.” In this sense, for Hegel, Roman Catholicism served as the necessary antithesis to the original thesis of the spirit of Christianity which was realized in the thesis of the Reformation. Many Protestants who may not share Hegel’s otherwise heterodox theology (which borders on pantheistic monism with a Christian cover) nevertheless share, unknowingly, his quintessentially Reformation outlook which influenced the next hundred years of Protestant self-understanding especially in the age of biblical criticism and textual studies that emanated from Germany and spread to the United Kingdom and United States and other Anglosphone Protestant outposts.

*

The spirit of Reformation Christianity is what leads to the formation of the Christian constitution of freedom and equality that was enshrined in the Germanic constitutions and political bodies.  It is in the body politic, the legal constitution, and the political state that the temporalization—the concretization—of Christian principles becomes actualized.  The child of Christianity, for Hegel, is “secularization”—that is, the temporalization and humanization of Christian ideas and principles without ecclesiastical order and institutionalism.  This is the real achievement of the Protestant Reformation.

Hegel’s thesis on secularization is already well known and well-document to those in sociology, political philosophy, and philosophy, so I’m not going to go over it here.  Many people today who have a familiarity with this scholarship will openly note how the ideas of the dignity of man, human rights, freedom and equality, are uniquely found in the Christian, or post-Christian West.  How people who are otherwise “irreligious” nevertheless by Christian metaphysical and ethical standards and not as the pagans of the old West did or as the Oriental civilizations live with their rigid caste systems (such as in India and China), or with the still divinized Oriental Emperor (like Japan).

Because religion is the first cornerstone of culture, and culture is the outward expression of a peoples creativity and culture informs a constitution, it is that spirit of Christianity that becomes incarnate in Constitutions and, therefore, in constitutional states according to Hegel. The movement of World History is the establishment of the State that best embodies the reality of freedom and equality through its Laws, which also means through its culture, arts, and literature.  This is the creation of the “rational constitution” that marks the final unfolding of the Spirit for Hegel.

Hegel’s historicism is the unfolding dialectic to achieve the harmonious constitution with its people; all strata of society, the secular state and the dogmatic and sacred religion of a people, brought together not in a subjected composite of hierarchal power and inegalitarianism, but the harmonious democratic service of all branches of a nation.  In a free constitutional nation the leaders of the nation serve the people whom are their equals.  In a free constitutional nation all men are ability to pursue their interests in harmony with the rest of society—no other person, guild, or corporate organization will obliterate its competitive other into oblivion.

*

The end of History, in Hegel, is not a utopian kingdom of earth as it is in Marx or in progressive liberalism.  In Hegel’s outlook, events and even conflict between states still occur.  The end of History is the end of the movement of the universal to become particularized.  So Hegel’s historical development is not the establishment of a Universal State but the establishment of particular states with their particular concretizations of the universal.

Hegel, here, highlights several different examples.  There are the English with the English constitution and its parliamentarism rooted in the Magna Carta and Common Law traditions unique to the English people.  Then there are the French, who are superior to the English insofar that the French constitution and Revolution—unlike the English way—asserted that all men should be free and equal and took it upon themselves to make that a reality.  The difference between the English and French was that the English did not believe all men should be free: Only the English should be free.  The French believed that all men irrespective of their ethnicity or religion should be free.  However, the danger of the French position is that it is too universalistic.

For Hegel, the ideal intermediary between the two is Germany.  German retains its roots (like England) while embracing the universal truth (like France and unlike England).  Speaking of this dynamic, “The English nation may be said to have approved of the emancipation of France; but it was proudly reliant on its own constitution and freedom, and instead of imitating the example of the foreigner, it displayed its ancient hostility to its rival, and was soon involved in a popular war with France.”  The English celebrated France’s movement to freedom and equality but still felt themselves and their constitution superior, meaning their freedom and equality was superior than that of the French.  And the English would never follow the foreigner’s conception against their own due to English exceptionalism.  The French forgot their roots and therefore the roots of the other nations they eventually traversed over.  Germany, on the other hand, is the perfect combination of both.

The end of History, then, is not universal for all peoples and nations.  Some nations reach their “end of history” before others.  What the end of History means in the universal and abstract sense is that human consciousness over freedom and equality will no longer progress further.  People know what the meaning of life and political life in general, entails and means.  People will know embark on their own journeys to manifest this universal truth in particular terms.  There will be no forced impositions from foreigners (as the French upon the Germans during the Napoleonic Era), or no exception to the rule (as the English believing only themselves to be free and equal in comparison to others).  Hegel’s German “Exceptionalism” is only because, in his mind, Germany was the first to truly realize the spirit of freedom in its own land and not seek to impose it on others or believing themselves to be the only people who would achieve this freedom.  “[T]he Idea of Freedom, whose reality is the consciousness of Freedom and nothing short of it.”  The Age of Freedom could not become real without first coming to realize that all men are free and equal creatures under the Law and in the shared human condition.

There is no freedom without constitutions.  There is no realization of freedom without constitutional states.  The end of History, for Hegel, is the world of constitutional pluralism of states with each state (nation) embodying its uniqueness and particularity but having also realized the universal truth of the Absolute Spirit that moves men and history.  Man is not born free, as Rousseau said.  Man becomes free through heightened consciousness.  In other words, man realizes his freedom.  Hegel’s “Age of Freedom” is better understood as the Age of Constitutional Liberty in union with the Christian theology of moral love in community. Or, more properly, Hegel’s paradise is constitutional liberty and moral community bound together through the love of agape.

Here we see the movement of History from Oriental Despotism (only one is free) to all being free.  And with all free all are equal in their freedom.  Equality does not mean material equality in Hegel’s outlook. Equality means that all men have equal freedom: equal freedom under law and love (recognition of personhood subjectivity and embodied affectivity). There is not the Oriental Emperor above the masses; the aristocratic landowning minority over the majority plebeians; but all are free and therefore equal with each other. The movement of History, the very Spirit of the love of God, was directing mankind to this realization in a free and moral community. In this free and moral community the responsibility to love, to feast, and to laugh is left in our hands.

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Paul Krause is the editor-in-chief of VoegelinView. He is writer, classicist, and historian. He has written on the arts, culture, classics, literature, philosophy, religion, and history for numerous journals, magazines, and newspapers. He is the author of Muses of a Fire, Finding Arcadia, The Odyssey of Love and the Politics of Plato, and a contributor to the College Lecture Today and Making Sense of Diseases and Disasters. He holds master’s degrees in philosophy and religious studies (biblical studies & theology) from the University of Buckingham and Yale, and a bachelor’s degree in economics, history, and philosophy from Baldwin Wallace University.

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• February 25, 2022
• Paul Krause
• Culture Essays, Essays

Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine shouldn’t cause us to lose sight of another battle: the gifts of Russia are not exclusive to that country and a dark tyrant doesn’t control our hearts to the Russian people and their artistic gifts to us. Politics, in this earthly city, as Augustine wrote 1600 years ago, is dominated by relations of power and the lust to dominate. But art, beauty, he also wrote, is the universal path to God (who is Beauty and Love). And the art of the Russian people has inspired many and ought to continue to inspire many more because though the artists were Russian the soul that moved their spirits was the universal soul of beauty and love which is invites all to dwell in beauty and love.

A couple days ago, I was chatting with a friend of mine from England. I’ve known him for many years. We talk on a wide range of subjects—I have, for years, been encouraging him into the idea of “aesthetic living” and the importance of art, music, literature, philosophy, and theology as part of a wholistic embodied existence. During that conversation he asked me what my favorite genre of music was. I told him Romantic. And then told him that among my favorite composers is a Russian, Sergei Rachmaninoff—one of the last great representatives of the Russian romantic tradition in music. His music captures that brilliant synthesis of beauty, passion, serenity. (I had the fortune, when studying in England, to also hear a performance of “Vocalise” inside Buckingham Palace among other classical and romantic pieces.)

Concerning literature, I have a fondness for Russian literature. The title of my book, The Odyssey of Love, is taken from the article of that name published here at VoegelinView assessing the brilliant splendor of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. On most days, Tolstoy’s grand masterpiece is my favorite book. I say most days. Occasionally I wake up and probably love Doctor Zhivago more if I am in a bit more of a tragic mood.

Boris Pasternak’s great novel, situated in maelstrom, hope, revolution, and despair, is a tale of star-crossed lovers. It is also a work that preaches that timeless poetic truth that was divinized by Christian theology (Pasternak was Orthodox): love is stronger than death. The grand epic that began in death and loneliness ended in life and companionship despite the death and destruction and dislocation that engulfed the work from start to finish:

To the two old friends, as they sat by the window, it seemed that this freedom of the soul was already there, as if that very evening the future had tangibly moved into the streets below them, that they themselves had entered it and were now part of it. Thinking of this holy city and of the entire earth, of the still-living protagonists of this story, and their children, they were filled with tenderness and peace, and they were enveloped by the unheard music of happiness that flowed all about them and into the distance. And the book they held seemed to confirm and encourage their feeling.

I also love Dostoevsky. And Solzhenitsyn. And Pushkin. Their gifts being instantiations of beauty and love give them their endurance—their universal value and appeal. After all, love attracts, and love is the magnet of the beautiful. We cannot help, as Augustine said, but to love the beautiful: “How can we love anything but the beautiful?” As he also said in Confessions, after his eureka moment, “Late have I loved you, beauty so ancient and so new, late have I loved you.” (Sero te amavi, pulchritudo tam antiqua et tam nova, Sero te amavi.)

What the genius of “Russian” art and literature captured is the totality of the human condition, the love and beauty that we seek, seldom find, but when we do, are transfigured and transformed by it. Away, up from the crass nihilism that infected the likes of Pierre Bezukhov and Raskolnikov or the vengeful death-drive of Prince Andrei and toward the loving incarnation of husband and wife (Pierre and Natasha), regeneration through suffering and love (Raskolnikov and Sonya), and the healing power of forgiveness (Prince Andrei). That love which unites and binds is what gave life in a world of turmoil and revolution and though parents die (Yuri and Lara) that love still begat life and brings the possibility of continued joy and love in the world (as is the implied conclusion of Pasternak’s great novel and wonderful film adaptation).

I remember reading Dostoevsky in high school for my AP English Literature course. I only remember a couple things about it. I thought it was a long book. I also recall the grisly image of Raskolnikov’s murderous crime. I’m not sure if I really liked it then. I wrote my capstone paper on Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Today, however, I adore Dostoevsky and his novels and find a great, profound, depth to them. Perhaps my graduate education in theology and philosophy opened me up to that world he speaks of. Or, perhaps, it is the elevated cultivated love of art and literature that has sprung up in me as I’ve matured. Maybe both. Dostoevsky’s considerations on the human condition, heart, psychology, love, death, suffering, and redemption can touch any reader. They have touched mine.

When I look at the collection of my library, among my most prized possessions are Russian works. Bespeaking of Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, I own a first edition. As mentioned, Tolstoy’s War and Peace is my favorite book (on most days). C.S. Lewis described it as “the greatest war book ever written.” I think he really meant to say that it was the greatest book ever written.

The beauty, the love, and the majesty of the Russian artistic and cultural tradition exists for the nourishment of all people, all souls, across all space and time. The true destiny of the soul is not bound to nations, a “Third Rome,” or fanciful geopolitical dreams. We must contend with these often-pernicious spirits, heresies, and idolatries, but we shouldn’t let these battles cause us to sour on those cultural and soulful creations that are meant for the world because they were written in the spirit of love and beauty to magnify and transfigure our lives.

In the drama unfolding in Ukraine, let us not take the easy path and become “anti-Russian.” The creative spirit of Russians and their tongue may be foreign to many but what it preached is universal and accessible to all. Evidently, Putin doesn’t have the eyes to see or the ears to hear what the artists of Russia have prophesied. It is up to us to save the treasures of Russia from Vladimir Putin and his ilk and stand in solidarity with the innocent people of Ukraine.

This essay was first published at VoegelinView, 25 February 2022, where the author – Paul Krause (Hesiod, on this site) – is editor-in-chief.

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Hesiod, Paul Krause in real life, is the editor-in-chief of VoegelinView. He is writer, classicist, and historian. He has written on the arts, culture, classics, literature, philosophy, religion, and history for numerous journals, magazines, and newspapers. He is the author of The Odyssey of Love and the Politics of Plato, and a contributor to the College Lecture Today and the forthcoming book Diseases, Disasters, and Political Theory. He holds master’s degrees in philosophy and religious studies (biblical studies & theology) from the University of Buckingham and Yale, and a bachelor’s degree in economics, history, and philosophy from Baldwin Wallace University.

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As we continue to read through Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, an actual reading of the text again causes much confusion to readers who have swallowed the false pill of the myth of the “Enlightenment” and the “Age of Reason.”  In this post we will examine two crucial chapters, 6 and 7, and what the implications are for man and knowledge (e.g. epistemology).  When someone says science is taken on an act of faith, such a person has actually read Leviathan, as well as Francis Bacon, and what the foundation of “modern science” is premised on.

Man has no Rational Soul (Chapter 6)

Classical anthropology, especially as developed in Christianity – though taking inheritance from Greek philosophies of the soul – concludes that while man is an animal, he has a tripartite layered soul.  (On this aside, the Threeness of the soul is one of the reasons why so much Greek and Roman philosophy was simply subsumed by Christianity; the Threeness being a primitive sign of the Trinity which Greek and Roman rationalism had somewhat uncovered – the Greek and Roman philosophies of the soul being signs pointing to the fullness of Christianity.)  If you recall back to Aristotle, Aristotle noted that the human soul’s layering was broken up into three states: Vegetative (and vitalistic), animal, and rational.  Hobbes, by contrast, suggests that man only has two “souls.”

Hobbes denies the soul in the classical understanding: Soul as rational mind and that rational mind being the “image of God” (in Christianity) that bridges the phenomenological with the Transcendent.  Instead, since man is purely material, therefore purely phenomenological, he only has two souls, so to speak – Hobbes calls this “two motions”: Vital and Animal motions.  The vital motions are akin to the vegetative soul.  They concern themselves with the movement of the vital organs and blood necessary to have motion (e.g. life).  Animal motion is what Hobbes defines as voluntary motion: To speak (or communicate), to move, and to have awareness (from the senses).

The greatest propaganda term which ever came out in Western history is how the 17^th century is the birth of the “Age of Reason.”  That depends on what one means by reason.  For, as Hobbes defined, reason is but reckoning through all the (mathematical) consequences to which the sum total.  As the reader of Chapter 7 already knows, there is no definitive knowledge in Enlightenment epistemology.  We can never know anything for certain.  This is because there is no Transcendent Truth because there is no Transcendent God in accord with classical theology, both in its “Pagan” form and Christian form.  This is highlighted already in Hobbes when he asserts that man only has vital motion and animal (or voluntary) motion.

Endeavor is the greatest desire according to Hobbes.  For it is endeavor which propels the voluntary, or animal, motion in man to aim at a destination.  For motion without a destination is not an endeavor at all.  Again, this is the result of Hobbes’s reductionist metaphysics that everything comes from matter.  What motivates man to his freedom (motion)?  His desire.

Man thirsts.  Man hungers.  Man wonders.  All of these things, which stem from the vital motions, pushes man into his full being: Animal motion.  The layered motions (or soul if you stick to classical language) works as thus: Since man is matter, he is vitalistic, the vital is the only “real” motions man has – the vital motions give rise to animal motion.  For it is vital that man thirsts, that man hungers, or that man wonders.  Without his vital appetites man would sit still and die.  In sitting still, he is not in motion.  Since he is not in motion, he is not free.  Since he is not free, he is dead.

Hobbes, here, does something very unique with the concept of freedom, or liberty, which he will fully define for us in Part II during his considerations on the commonwealth.  Liberty, in Latin, is rooted in the word Liber, who is the Roman god of fertility.  Liberty is about life and not death.  If man is motionless, he is dead.  If man is static, he is dead.  Therefore, man’s appetite is what fuels his motions.  When man’s appetite dissipates and evaporates, he is dead.  Readers of Plato will see how Hobbes destroys Plato’s idea of life and the human soul.  For it is the rational, or thinking, soul who is alive and the soul that that slumbers that is dead.  Because man has no rational soul his rationality is not the indicator of his life (e.g. flourishing), but his appetites and ability to feed his appetites.

Hobbes now moves to explain what is good and what is bad (or as Hobbes calls it, evil).  For Hobbes, good and bad are words we craft to communicate experiences of the senses in motion.  For Good denotes pleasurable physical sensation while Evil denotes unpleasant physical sensation.  Nothing is intrinsically good or evil since these are merely communicative terms one uses to communicate physical sensation that was either pleasurable or unpleasant.  (This is something important to remember when reading the famous chapter about the state of nature (Chapter 13) to prevent the gross misreading that Hobbes’s picture is of an evil and immoral man in an evil and immoral state of nature.)

It is after this that Hobbes launches into a massive account on how all “moral language” is really a map of motions.  Ambition requires motion to climb to the top.  Hope is the appetite anticipating fulfillment.  Fear is the appetite anticipating failure, or being hurt.

Most importantly, and most radically, Hobbes breaks with the Pagan and Christian understandings of joy and glory.  “Joy, arising from imagination of man’s own power and ability is that exultation of the mind which is called glorying.”  Only those who a comprehensive knowledge of philosophy and theology will understand the radicalness of Hobbes’s statement, especially when paired at the end of Chapter 6 where he assails felicity, or happiness, “For there is no such thing as perpetual tranquility of mind, while we live here; because Life it self is but motion, and can never be without desire, nor without fear, no more than without sense.”

Praising the heroic is vain.  Praising the successful is vain.  Praising God is vain.  Praising yourself is vain.  All one is really doing, in praise, is commending someone having temporarily satisfied their appetitive desires.  This is vain because appetites are enduring (until death).  The bid to win praise is futile.  You will always have to be praised until you die.  And after you die, you will not be praised anymore because people forget you.  (Which is why we build statues and monuments of our accomplishments because we know of our mortality and still want to be praised for what we have accomplished so monuments will remind people of those accomplishments so we can be praised.  But this is truly irrational because what satisfaction do you get from praise of others when you’re dead?)

Hobbes’s anthropology has deep consequences for social and ethical life.  Hobbes is assailing the classical tradition, in his other famous work De Cive he attacks the classical tradition even more explicitly.  (It is because humans don’t have ties and obligations to each other than the only way to prevent animalistic conflict is by rise of the Leviathan, which Hobbes will cover in Part II.)  In classical tradition, the social animus means man has duties and obligations.  In the liberal tradition, begun by Hobbes, man’s animalistic nature and a-social animus means he is only ever out to satisfy his own desires.

In sticking with the idea of man as an artificial machine with life (e.g. motion), the vital motions, or desires, is like the fuel of the machine.  The animal motions is the machine operating, in motion.  Without the vital fuel which gets the machine started it would come to a halt, which represents death.  “Reason” has no place in the machine.  For, as Hobbes defined, reason is simply what the machine aims at.  In other words, reason is but rationalization of actions taken to have achieved one’s aim.

How does he reconcile man being a machine and an animal?  Because animals were viewed as machines during the 17th century.  Descartes famously said that all animal bodies are like machines.  The physiology of the Enlightenment was mechanistic and mechanical, in line with the prevailing mechanistic and mechanical science of its time.  Animal bodies were governed by the laws of matter alone.  Hence their machine-like characteristic.  Julien Offray de La Mettrie, for instance, openly declared that “man is a machine” in the early 1700s.  This is why it’s important to know the context of philosophy too.  Biological and vitalistic science had yet to emerge.  What had emerged was the mechanical notion of science, which informed 17th and 18th century philosophy, of which Hobbes was a leading figure in the synthesis movement which bequeathed liberalism.  Man was free because he was a machine made to be free, e.g. made to be in motion.

All Knowledge is Conditional and Dependent on Faith (Chapter 7)

One thing that drives philosophers mad in epistemology, or the philosophy field dealing with knowledge, is the idea that science is unique somehow.  Scientia simply means knowledge.  Knowledge, if it exists, has to have a first principle.  This is basic epistemology 101.  Furthermore, modern science is a faith-based epistemology.  Faith acts the first principle, in the form of our axiom, by which we trust that the reckoned conclusion is total so as to avoid epistemological skepticism and its exhaustive outgrowth, epistemological nihilism.

As Hobbes says, “No discourse whatsoever, can end in absolute knowledge of fact, past, or to come.  For, as for the knowledge of fact, it is originally, sense; and ever after, memory.  And for the knowledge of consequence, which I have said before is called Science, it is not absolute, but conditional.”  All knowledge is conditional because there is no Transcendent Reason or Truth because all things are material.

Conditional knowledge is only conditional on the grounds that that mathematical reckoning had all the right inputs in it.  Discourse which “breaks off the chain of man’s discourse” leads to opinion.  Opinion is the result of lack of complete reckoning which Hobbes previously defined as what reason and reasoning is about.  Thus, opinion arises when we have an incomplete equation.  We can presume what the sum total will be, but without the total sum we cannot really have an answer (the complete reckoning of all consequences) whereby this presumption of what the total sum “will be,” or “will not be,” is what we call opinion.  Therefore, opinion is like guessing what a mathematical equation will be without the complete equation.  Yes, you can make an “informed” opinion but that doesn’t mean you’ve reckoned through everything and thereby arrived at the total sum that serves as our conditional knowledge.

As it relates to communicative discourse, conditional knowledge is premised on the first principles of definitions followed out to the consequential total sum conclusion.  This is called syllogistic reasoning.  Hobbes is a father of Analytic Philosophy in this sense and Analytic Philosophy became the dominant form of philosophy after Hobbes in the English-speaking world (in contrast to “Continental Philosophy” in Catholic and “secular” European circles where philosophy remained dealing with questions of metaphysics, ontology, epistemology, phenomenology, human nature, etc.).  When all the definitions are agreed upon and we follow the logical consequences of them being rightly joined together we reach “the conclusion.”  But the conclusion is conditional on having used agreed upon definitions that were properly connected together.  When we lack agreed upon definitions, or when we fail to observe a connection (thereby breaking the connections of deductive reasoning to which the total sum conclusion), this again is called “opinion.”  In this way Hobbes is similar to Aristotle insofar that to speak falsely of something is to speak falsely of it (ergo opinion); definitions matter otherwise we’ll never have a meaningful discourse.  Definitions are the “regulations” whereby rational speech is made possible otherwise you’re uttering noise without an aim.  (This stretches back to Chapter 4.)

“Well, that’s just like, your opinion man.”  (The idea that everything is opinion is itself a logical consequence of claiming that all knowledge is merely conditional and that we can never be sure of anything.)

This is where Hobbes turns to discuss what faith is and how faith relates to science.  Faith is an act of trust.  For science to produce its conditional knowledge we take our total sum conclusions on an act of faith being complete and never needing new revision (though we remain aware that this is always an open possibility).  This is how we arrive at our conditional knowledge.  But, again, as Hobbes said at the beginning of the chapter, “No discourse whatsoever, can end in absolute knowledge of fact, past, or to come.  For, as for the knowledge of fact, it is originally, sense; and ever after, memory.  And for the knowledge of consequence, which I have said before is called Science, it is not absolute, but conditional.”  We trust science to be true on conditions that we have “solved” the equation, but, as Hobbes notes, we are also uncertain because we know we may have missed something.  The open possibility of change means the knowledge is only ever conditional.  This is why science is a faith.

In sum, proper discourse or reasoning only ends in conditional knowledge which we hold to be true on an act of faith.  Faith is our axiom to hold onto for certainty.  Failure to fully reckon through discourse, mental or spoken, is like not having the entire mathematical equation whereby we are left with presuming the total sum which is called opinion.  This is also dealt with by Spinoza.  The problem of finite minds trying to understand the infinite.

One can only appreciate the revolutionary nature of Hobbes’s anthropology and epistemology if they have a substantial knowledge of the preceding epochs of philosophy.  Unlike many people today, Hobbes was extensively trained in the classical tradition and in his attack against the classical and Christian tradition he doesn’t create strawmen like ignorant critics of the vestiges of classical philosophy like Sam Harris or Richard Dawkins.  Hobbes knows what it would mean to grant humans a rational soul and the tranquility of the mind.  Likewise, this is why he goes to great lengths to reduce everything to motionary matter (which he had good reasons to believe on the conditional knowledge offered by 1650s and 1660s science at the time), in showing how everything is an extension of matter in motion and sensations he eliminated the need to have Transcendent Reason (in the realm of Forms or God, etc.).  The “Enlightenment” may be the greatest propaganda term ever propagated by the English Whigs, but there was nothing short of a revolution in philosophy occurring in the 17^th century of which Hobbes is one of the chief architects of.

Chapter 9 (Science Revisited)

As Hobbes also says in Chapter 9, returning to this topic of science and knowledge, he states that only “matters of fact” are absolute.  Knowledge that comes from science is always conditional.  (Note, I have included this brief comment in this post looking at Chapters 6 and 7 because Chapter 9 is but a few paragraphs and a drawn table.  It fits the themes of Chapter 6 and 7 better than 8 and the chapters after Chapter 9.)

This post is adapted from a post from Hesiod’s Corner.

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• February 7, 2022
• Paul Krause

Alessandro Barbero. Dante: A Life. Translated by Allan Cameron. New York: Pegasus Books, 2022.

Dante Alighieri is the most famous Italian of all time. He is the author of the Divine Comedy, the grandest Christian epic poem ever written. He is also a poet of love, having written many sonnets, but most famous for his love poem to Beatrice—La Vita Nuova. We know Dante the poet. But do we know Dante the man?

Alessandro Barbero writes that T.S. Eliot’s declaration that ‘Dante is at least as great as Shakespeare’” is “self-evident for an Italian” but not necessarily self-evident to everyone else. Barbero’s new biography of Dante, translated by Allan Cameron, is yet another book introducing to English-speaking audiences the poet that we probably know from a video game or from literary and religious studies. When at Yale, for instance, our medieval theology professor had us read The Inferno. Given my background in philosophy and Saint Augustine from undergraduate work, I ended up tutoring half a dozen students so that they could “understand” Dante’s poetic masterpiece (one-third of it, at least). But few of us know Dante the human being, the man born in Florence, exiled from his home, dying in Ravenna…

My review of Alessandro Barbero’s new biography can be read at VoegelinView: From Florence and Back Again, Alessandro Barbero’s Dante: A Life.

Carl Schmitt is one of the most controversial and influential political philosophers and political jurists of the 20^th century.  His works have influenced everyone from the New Left, including the likes of Derrida and Foucault, and those on the Right, most notably Leo Strauss.  Schmitt, among other things, is generally credited with establishing the sub-discipline of political theology within political philosophy.  In this post we will examine what Schmitt means, and doesn’t mean, by “political theology.”

Schmitt’s four essays on sovereignty, combined in the compendium called Political Theology, is a short but insightful and important work – and is a companion to his larger essay The Concept of the Political.  The main content of the four essays revolve around the themes of sovereignty, political power, decision theory (decisionism), the “state of exception” (or emergency), and how all of these concepts common in political theory have their roots in ancient theology – even more modern forms of political theory, like “Enlightenment constitutional theory,” he argues, is itself a derivation of theological thought (in this specific case, he links it to Deism).

I

While I will examine his first essay on sovereignty in a later post, we will principally examine his third essay in this post which deals, explicitly and specifically, with what Schmitt means by “political theology.”  First, I want to note that while Schmitt is credited with the formation of the discipline, he is not the first “political theologian” so to speak.  Schmitt found political theology, in the manner in which he describes, as first found in Hobbes, then carried forth through Locke and the 19^th century political theory from Mill to Marx.  As he says:

All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development—in which they were transferred from theology to the theory of the state, whereby, for example, the omnipotent God became the omnipotent lawgiver—but also because of their systematic structure, the recognition of which is necessary for sociological consideration of these concepts. The exception in jurisprudence is analogous to the miracle in theology.  Only by being aware of this analogy can we appreciate the manner in which the philosophical ideas of the state developed in the last centuries.

Political theology is not “faith-informed politics” as an uninitiated person might think when the term is used, especially as used by academics.  Political theology, according to Schmitt, is the view that theology served as the original basis for law, structure, organization.  For instance, the idea that the “law is sovereign” is a secularization of how the ultimate lawgiver (God) is sovereign.  The idea that the state is all-powerful, as Schmitt highlights in his opening paragraph, is rooted in the concept that God is all-powerful.  (This idea is also something developed further in Hegel, whom Schmitt also draws on.)  The idea of the state as a force for order against chaos, especially as it appears in the writings of Thomas Hobbes, is an even older notion (pre-dating Christianity) that there is a struggle between the land god (the god of order) vs. the sea god (the god of chaos).  The idea of History and Utopia are secularized concepts of Salvation History, and so forth.

Schmitt also claims, in this, as was also developed by the likes of Johann Herder and Hegel, among others in German philosophy in the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries, is the view that theology was the first systematic intellectual enterprise of humans.  Thus, being both intellectual and systematic, as Schmitt said in his opening paragraph, early political theories inherited the spirit of inquiry and systematic (theological) thought of theology in systematizing their own theorems about the state, politics, and political order.  Because theology was the first systematic form of human thought, which laid the foundations for civilization, in the end, all civilizational structures and systems therefore have roots in theology.

The problem with a systematic (historical) thinker like Schmitt is that he assumes his readers are knowledgeable in all of these areas.  Thus, I’m here to try and parse out the most important concepts that he makes reference to that many readers don’t realize he’s making reference to.  But the basic academic enterprise known as political theology is the study of theological concepts and how they have come to influence political ideas, structures, and ideology.

II

Part of the argument of the third essay is contemporary concepts of the political are rooted in competing theologies; namely ancient (conservative) vs. modern (progressive/liberal).  This is an important realization the reader of Schmitt needs to recognize, for it is not the most readily visible.  After defining political theology, Schmitt discusses Deism and modern constitutional theory.  He argues that the idea of a Deistic God (detached, who sets the laws of the universe in motion but never breaks the laws he has established – hence the “watchmaker” analogy) is what modern constitutional theory portends itself to be.  Namely, that the Law is established and subject to its own establishment.  This is the same argument to be found in Deism: God establishes the laws of the universe, but in establishing those laws, cannot break those laws.  (Hume famously describes natural theology in this manner.)

This view contrasts with the view of a God of miracles, who can, as crude people argue today, “suspend the laws of nature” (“violate the laws of nature”) for some miraculous end.   Schmitt, a Catholic become Atheist, is not making theological apologetics throughout this work.  He does, however, for reasons I am about to discuss, think that the ancient view (derided as “superstitious”) is, in fact, more rational than the “rationalist” modern view which – as he later claims, dissolves into irrational views about history (specifically looking at liberalism and Marxism).

Schmitt isn’t concerned with whether miracles can or cannot happen.  What he is saying is that since ancient theology believed in miracles, and ancient theology is ultimately the root of the state and the political when all said and done, it is the ancient model that needs to be known to understand the political in its historical and natural form.  For instance, the Deist view of politics means that there cannot be any “state of emergencies” or “state of exceptions” where the State takes on its God-like power and suspends the civil law for the good of the people.  This is what modern constitutional theory claims for itself.  But Schmitt claims that this is a farce.  The State, of course, has that power because it is not really rooted in the Deist view of God, it is rooted in the miraculous view of God.  The greatest miracle being creation itself: creatio ex nihilo (creation from nothing).  The state of exception, or emergency, is the State acting like God at the beginning of creation – stepping into the void and establishing order.

In essence, Schmitt is claiming that “progressives” are not being honest about themselves, or the view of the political they portend to advocate.  They claim to be offering a benign, “rule of law” system of politics, where everyone – including the State – is subject to civil law.  In reality, the State is wholly other.  The State exists apart from “everyone else.”  The State is God on earth, in other words.  That means the State really is all-powerful.

Moreover, Schmitt understands the traditional view of the God of the Hebrew Bible.  Stern and warlike, yes, but stern and warlike because he loves his people (Israel).  Thus, the State exists for its people and no one else’s.  The problem with the “Enlightenment” view, as he claims, is that the State becomes detached from its people in its hyper-rationalism and claimed commitment to law.  When disaster strikes the liberal State claims it cannot violate the laws already established – thus leaving its people to languish.  But Schmitt, again, thinks this view is demonstrably false.  The liberal State acts in disaster mode, suspending laws, and acting like the all-powerful Leviathan that it really is.  But this occurs only at the crisis point.  Schmitt argues in favor of a benign paternalism, in essence, whereby the authentic state is – basically – always in the state of exception mode on behalf of the will of the people.

Schmitt also argues that the hyper-rationalism of modern theology (read: modern politics) exhausts itself in irrationality.  It takes on a vitalistic and progressive view of history claiming that all things have to go according to a specific way.  (Read into how determinist theology also influences this idea, which, incidentally, received a major revival with the emergence of deterministic science in Newton.)  But we know this to not be the case from history and experience.  “Accidents” happen.  Things “don’t go according to plan.”  It is in these moments of exception where liberalism and Marxism fail.  People become shocked at the inevitable triumph they expected (a form of hard eschatological soteriology) not coming true.  Meanwhile it is those who hold to the ancient view, knowing that – pardon my language – shit hits the fan all the time, and are thereby better suited to respond in these moments of exception.

This is the issue of immanence from Hegel’s philosophy which liberals and leftists (the “Left-Hegelians”) took but, in politicizing it (which Hegel was already doing in some way), they became blind to the fact that immanence is a theological and eschatological concept.  Human “will”, in other words, can never achieve that utopia of the post-apocalypse.  There is no “heaven coming to earth” in other words.  But the Left-Hegelians trumpeted the inevitable triumph of their cause.  This was definitely theological in its origins.  However, when it failed to materialize, they were left depressed, saddened, and angered.

(There is also embedded anthropological issues here which I don’t want to get into for the sake of brevity – Schmitt more visibly addresses these issues in the Concept of the Political.  In short: is man violent and “corrupt,” or is man benign and “pure”?  Which one is said, today, to be “irrational” and the other “rational” – but what does the testimony of history seem to indicate?  So who is really being “irrational”?)

The issue of rational vs. irrational is a Hegelian concept.  Hegel famously said that the “rational alone is real.”  Thus, the rational is that which corresponds with nature (or reality).  Reasonableness is not the same as rational.  Anything can be reasonable based on its founding premises.  However, founding premises can be wrong.  Schmitt is basically saying that modern “rationalism” of the Enlightenment is very reasonable indeed – if its starting assumptions are true.  But Schmitt thinks those starting assumptions are not true.  Hence why the hyper rationalism of liberalism and Marxism (e.g. materialism) fail.  They fail, in time, because they are, in fact, not based in reality – hence, the rationalism they claim to embody becomes irrational in these moments of exception.

III

Throughout the text, Schmitt argues that irrationalist views of history tend to emerge from those who claimed the banner of rationalism, science, and progress.  This is because their claimed rationalism (which was never true to begin with) forced them to make “rationalist” arguments about history which always turned out to be false.  They turned out to be false because they were premised on false beliefs from the beginning.  Hence, despite their outward “reasonableness” they prove themselves false in the long run when true reality rears its ugly head.

Schmitt is assuming his readers have a deep knowledge of theology, is arguing that the ancients were the more rational.  They knew, based from their dogmas, that “the end of history” was truly theological.  Hence conservatives never bandy about “the end of history” or “universal utopia” because they know that man is, essentially, corrupt, has the capacity for despotism and evil, and that the real end of history is entirely up to God.  Thus, the claims and grand metanarratives of “historical progress” are the irrationalized secularized forms of salvific history.  But as the Biblical writers say, “we know not the time of the [Second] Coming” whereas, with hyper rationalism and science, people started getting very specific with the “end of history.”  (What is more irrational than claiming specific “revelation” as to the end of history and how it will look?)

History, then, according to Schmitt, are secularized theologies (of salvation) made political.  History is the pursuit of the millennial kingdom of God to be made manifest on earth.  The “pursuit of progress” or the Whig View of History are, then, but secularized variations of Salvation History devoid of any visible theological orientation.  As Schmitt says, the nineteenth century progress ideologies and their utopian end-goals were predicated on the inheritance (albeit “secularized”) of the theology of immanence, “Everything in the nineteenth century was increasingly governed by conceptions of immanence.”

For instance, the Marxist reading of History as unfolding toward a particular end with a certain group triumphing over another (the proletariat triumphing over the capitalists) is basically a secularized inversion of the Judeo-Christian account of eschatology and soteriology.  The same is true for liberalism’s vision of progress unfolding to greater “freedom” and ending in utopia.  Schmitt anticipates, very keenly, more modern incarnations of what he is describing.  The idea of a “Right Side of History” and that “History will judge us” is nothing more than a secularization of God as Judge and bringing judgment upon man.  The idea of a “Wrong Side to History” is akin to being the unbelievers, the “sinners” (e.g. the “racists” or “xenophobes” or whatever-phobe), who are judged harshly by God but in our more “enlightened” society are judged by “History.”  And so on and so forth.  Indeed, the entire idea of “History” for Schmitt is an irrational theology.  (History takes over for God but everything else plays out the same.)

Historical Immenance replaced the transcendent God of ancient and orthodox Catholic (and Lutheran) theology.  God’s Final Judgement was replaced by the Judgement of History, the coming utopia that was just over the horizon.  The most hyper rationalistic people, ironically for Schmitt, became the most irrational people as they were chasing after the millennium to make a literal kingdom of heaven on earth.

IV

Schmitt, like Weber before him, argues that secularization is the elimination of the transcendent (disenchantment); therefore, secularization for Schmitt (and for most philosophers) is the temporalization of initially transcendent concepts.  Because the transcendent, historically speaking in theology and philosophy, is what classical rationalism is, then secularization is irrational because it kills off true rationality (the universal transcendent) and relativizes everything.  Thus, all the ancient theologies about God become the basis for the State.   That is what is real.  Thus, the ancient theologies are more “real” than modern theologies who deny their foundations but cannot escape from it.  Additionally, secularization is the “immanence” of the transcendent whereby the transcendent becomes the purely worldly.

Schmitt’s commentary on Rousseau and the anti-Jacobin “Counter Revolutionaries” in France is deeply interesting and engaging.  For Schmitt, Rousseau’s “general will” conferred to the masses the creative revolutionary myth of creation.  We all know that God creates from nothing (creatio ex nihilo in Christian theology).  For Rousseau, according to Schmitt, this principle of creation from nothing is transferred to the instinctive wisdom of the people.  Just as Wisdom created from nothing in Christianity, wisdom (now in the form of the masses) creates from nothing.  The masses can create that “good world” from the book of Genesis; they can create that perfect Garden of Eden.

Paradoxically for Schmitt, the opponents of the French Revolution (despite their outward pretensions to be defending traditional Catholicism) were actually defenders of panentheism or Deism.  Those who were defending the monarchy as the “sole sovereign” were actually defending a panentheistic political theology: That God (in the form of the sovereign king or prince) was both inside and outside the juridical order much like how God in panentheism is understood.  Creation is not yet complete but a continuous and ongoing act of creation like the kingdom.  The sovereign, through his laws and decrees, continuously builds the world just as is found in panentheistic creation theology.

Conversely there is also the post-Cartesian deist political theology that was also being defended by those who were promoting the “rule of law.”  As Schmitt writes, “The sovereign, who in the deistic view of the world, even if conceived as residing outside the world, had remained the engineer of the great machine, has been radically pushed aside.  The machine now runs itself.  The metaphysical proposition that God enunciates only general and not particular decisions of will governed the metaphysics of Leibniz and Nicholas Melabranche.”  Despite the overthrow of the king, the “push[ing] aside” of God in Deism, the counter revolutionaries were defending the machine that God (the king) had created (the ancien régime).  The counter revolutionaries were not so much, in Schmitt’s view, motivated by a defense of the now dead (pushed aside) king but were defending that machine (the ancien régime).

Thus we see the revolutionary impetus as transferring basic theological ideas like creation from nothing, the wisdom of God in creation, and the “good world” of God’s creation, as residing in the heart of revolutionary politics.  The people are the wisdom, the people in their wisdom can create from nothing, and the people in their wisdom and creating from nothing can create a (new) good world (e.g. the utopia).

The Counter Revolutionaries, for Schmitt – somewhat ironically – were not that “conservative” in the sense of being defenders of traditional theology.  Instead they were fairly modernist themselves, defending the “divine right of the king” as a panentheistic political theology of continuous creation but one in which the sovereign king (or prince) remains at the helm and is a state of continuous creation but one that builds from what has already been established (ergo there is no “miracle” of breaking the established laws, it is like the energy moving in the path already prescribed from the first principles).  The other side that emerged after the execution of King Louis XVI was a Deistic counter-revolutionary movement in which the king (God) despite having been cast aside had created that machine (the ancien régime) and these counter revolutionaries are better understood to be defending the clock that God (the now deceased king) had created (the ancien régime and estates) moreover than actually being interested in restoring God (e.g. restoring the king or prince).

This is why, to take an aside, most political philosophers and political theologians (in the Schmittian tradition) see revolutionary politics as deeply theological and religious in nature.  It is heretical to be sure, but virtually all of its ideas are captured first in theological concepts and principles.  As Bertrand Russell wrote of Marxism in his book History of Western Philosophy:

To understand Marx psychologically, one should use the following dictionary:

Yahweh = Dialectial Materialism; The Messiah = Marx; The Elect = The Proletariat; The Church = The Communist Party; The Second Coming = The Revolution; Hell = Punishment of the Capitalists; The Millennium = The Communist Commonwealth.

Thus Schmitt applied creation theology to the politics of revolutionaries: God creates from nothing (the people create from nothing); God creates in Wisdom (the people create because they are wise); God created a good world from nothing (the people can create a good world in their wisdom).  The revolutionary impetus is seeing man as God, displacing and overthrowing God in the process in order to become God.  It is not only a replay of the War in Heaven in Catholic theology (Lucifer’s rebellion), it is the manifestation of secular theology even if people regard themselves as atheists they are deeply theological without realizing it.

In this midst of this crisis of secularization, which is the death of traditional legitimacy as Schmitt claims towards to the end of the third essay, a new concept of the political must emerge.   We cannot go back as Schmitt claims (or as “reactionaries” romanticize about).  Thus, we can only embrace the form of the political that is most like ancient theology: An all-powerful God, a God who creates from nothing, a God who acts only in the interest of his people, a God that is miraculous (steps over the “laws” he himself established), a God that is warlike and wrestles with the gods of chaos.  In the end, Schmitt concludes, with much controversy and debate, that that form of the political is dictatorship.  Because we live in an irrational age.  Because we live in a chaotic age.  Because we live in an age where people don’t care to be political anymore.  We need a State that will make the decisions for us.  We need a State that will confront chaos.  And we need a State that is honest about itself – that it is, in fact, all-powerful and can do whatever it wants.

Lastly, Schmitt is saying that all political philosophy is really political theology once you dig deep enough.  As you begin to understand political theory you begin to recognize all the theology that undergirds it.  That is what is meant by “political theology.”  Because of the deepness of religion and theology upon humanity and human institutions, you can’t really “get rid” of theology or religion despite what ignorant otherwise say.  Our understanding of politics, political concepts themselves, institutions and their importance to us, and our ability to transform the world (or not), are all derivations of originally theological concepts.  Therefore, if one is not knowledgeable on theological matters, one will never be truly knowledgeable on political matters.

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Hesiod, Paul Krause in real life, is the editor of VoegelinView and a writer on art, culture, literature, politics, and religion for numerous journals, magazines, and newspapers. He is the author of The Odyssey of Love and the Politics of Plato, and a contributor to the College Lecture Today and the forthcoming book Diseases, Disasters, and Political Theory. He holds master’s degrees in philosophy and theology (biblical & religious studies) from the University of Buckingham and Yale, and a bachelor’s degree in economics, history, and philosophy from Baldwin Wallace University.

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Thucydides is generally not considered a philosopher in the sense that Socrates, Plato, or Aristotle are. David Bolotin, for instance, said, “[Thucydides] is not generally thought of as a political philosopher.”[1] Yet his only work, The War of the Peloponnesians and the Athenians,[2] is the densest and most profound work that deals with philosophy from antiquity. If political philosophy concerns itself with the nature of the human city, as Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Politics do, then Thucydides’ work stands alongside those canonical classics as a volume concerned with the question of the human city and is therefore a work of political philosophy.

Classical political philosophy presupposes nature. This is what demarcates it from modern political philosophy, or science, which ultimately rejects the notion of an established nature which necessarily erodes political philosophy into malleable political ideology.[3] Insofar that classical political philosophy presupposes nature, classical political philosophy also dichotomizes itself between the holy city and the naturalistic city;[4] that is, to borrow a division given to posterity by St. Augustine, the city of God and the city of man. What role do the gods play in the origins and development of the city, and what role does human will, geography, and cunning play in the origins and development of the city?

In the confines of classical political philosophy Thucydides seems modern because he rejects the holy city and concentrates solely on the naturalistic city. Insofar that Thucydides’ city is premised on a naturalistic sine qua non he is perceived as objective and scientific by modern readers who share his metaphysical axiom which presupposes naturalism. Insofar that Thucydides’ city is premised on a foundational nature which explains things, a nature that is established and knowable, he is thoroughly ancient rather than modern. For Thucydides, human nature is real,[5] and the things that make up the natural world have knowable natures—thus permitting Thucydides to examine the question of the law of nature and our relationship to it. In doing so, Thucydides rightly states that his work “was done to last forever,” or, more precisely, will be heard forever.[6]

To understand Thucydides’ law of nature one must carefully examine the many speeches contained in his work; for it is through the speeches that Thucydides examines the question of nature and the human city. What moderns interpret as the objective wie es eigentlich gewesen is, in actuality, the particular project of a particular man: Thucydides. As Leo Strauss said, “[E]very political speech serves a political purpose.”[7] Some historians have recently acknowledged Thucydides as a partisan revisionist of sorts. Donald Kagan, for instance, has written about Thucydides as a revisionist historian responding to popular criticism and opinion on the issue of the Peloponnesian War.[8]

But Thucydides is doing more than responding to the critiques and concerns of his fellow Athenians. He is engaged in a systematic attempt at understanding the working of politics and war through the acceptance of the axiom sine qua non which compelled the war between Athens and Sparta and why the various powers acted the way they did, thereby carving out a space for human agency, cunning, and intelligence in the outcome of events and not presenting mankind as mere puppets of the gods. It is now well-documented that Thucydides’ work is unified by the theme of  justice and compulsion, of right and necessity,[9] but it is also the case – to my mind – that the question of nature, more specifically the law of nature, is the more immediate unifying theme of the work to which the themes of justice and compulsion are contingent.

De Rerum Natura

I have proposed that Thucydides is a political thinker centrally concerned with the question of the working of politics through a law of nature which compels cities to act in a manner befitting of their nature. This presupposes that all cities are not the same and that different cities will have different “constitutions,” so to speak, to follow. More than any written code of law the more natural code of law inscribed into the city rests on its geographic situatedness determining its geopolitical nature. This is revealed in the first major speech written by Thucydides, the speech debate between the Corcyraeans and Corinthians before the Athenians.

The speeches by the Corcyraean and Corinthian representatives before the Athenians is the first dialogue contained in the work. The speech follows the Corinthian defeat at Epidamnus. Epidamnus, as Thucydides informs us, “is right of the approach to the Ionic Gulf.”[10] Epidamnus is a maritime city and the colony of a colony—Corcyra. The incident that supposedly sparked the war was the democratic overthrow of the oligarchic ruling class which fled in exile to the mother colony, Corcyra, and petitioned for redress and restoration. Corcyra complied. The new democratic regime of Epidamnus appealed to Corinth, itself the mother city of Corcyra which was originally established a Corinthian colony, for help and Corinth complied. Here we see that political constitutions bared no marker on Epidamnus—Athens was the most radical democratic polity at the time but they did not ask Athens for any help.

What began as a minor political incident soon boiled over to give way to the deadliest war in ancient Greek history. Corcyra achieved a major victory which granted Corcyra “complete control of the seas in her own area.”[11] This is no little fact to overlook since the question of maritime prowess and situatedness will become a major issue raised by the Corcyraean representatives when petitioning for an alliance with Athens. While not yet disclosed to the reader by Thucydides when the Corcyraean representatives ask for Athenian help, Corcyra’s location as a port city with open access to Sicily undoubtedly played a factor in the Athenian decision to ally with Corcyra. For Thucydides does later reveal that the imperialist ambition of Athens dreamt of a maritime imperium from the coasts of Ionia, down to Libya, and west to Sicily and beyond; Pericles himself states, “The whole world before our eyes can be divided into two parts, the land and the sea, each of which is valuable and useful to man. Of the whole of one of these parts you are in control – not only of the area at present in your power, but elsewhere too, if you want to go further. With your navy as it is today there is no power on earth . . . which can stop you from sailing where you wish.”[12]

Athens was the predominant maritime polis among the Greek city-states prior to the war. Sparta, by geographic contrast, was the predominant continent (or land) polis among the Greek city-states and remained the most powerful military force in Greece when the war erupted. In fact, Athens’ early success against Sparta shocked much of Greece which expected the Spartan-led alliance to easily defeat the more energetic but militarily weaker city. What is also noticeable about the contrasting alliances led by Athens and Sparta is that the Athenian-led Delian League was comprised of most of the seafaring cities of Hellas while the Spartan-led Peloponnesian League, with a few exceptions, was comprised mostly of the land-based cities of Hellas.

This maritime-continental division recapitulates itself through the speeches of the various actors, named and unnamed, throughout the work. In conjunction with the speeches, there is often talk of physis, of nature, the law of nature or “enemies by nature.” Athens’ control of the sea was something the city used for its economic and political advantages. Through her navy Athens controlled the corn and grain routes out of the Black Sea. Through her navy, which was the primary arm of her power, Athens enforced the supremacy of Athenian coinage throughout her empire—forcing even her allies to adopt her monetary system. Her allies were also required to participate in Athenian festivals.

Sparta may have been the most powerful military force in ancient Greece, and although the Athenians were undeniably engaged in an imperial project, this does not mean Sparta was not without her share of questionable actions. All male citizens were rigorously trained in martial arts without exception. Athens, by contrast, relied on a citizen-army to be called up in times of crisis; the Athenian military was not premised on forced militarization. Sparta maintained an oligarchic rule on agrarian slavery, something largely foreign to the commercial-oriented city-state of Athens and her allies. The Spartan army necessarily served as the police force to keep the large population of slaves (which surpassed the native Spartan population) servile and subservient. During the course of the war the slave population swelled as Spartan took slaves from the captured enemy. The structures of the Spartan regime were premised on the maintenance of the oligarchic ruling class and its subordinate military institutions premised on Sparta’s land-based agrarian constitutional nature.

The Speech of the Corcyraeans and Corinthians

The speech of the Corcyraean representatives focuses on the futility of their earlier isolationism and their status as a sea power. This is interesting because the manner by which the Corcyraeans try to persuade the Athenians for help is by striking at what was the heart of Athenian exceptionalism—her cunning, intelligence, and ingenuity. When the Athenian representatives debate the Spartans over the declaration of war, and when Pericles eulogizes the Athenian dead in his magnanimous Funeral Oration, it is Athenian cunning and intelligence that is extolled, subtly and overtly, in both speeches. The Corcyraeans, aware of the exceptionalist psychology of Athens, present themselves as being imitators of the Athenian psyche insofar that they recognize and openly admit of the futility of their earlier isolationism. Only an intelligence people could realize their wrongheadedness and adopt innovative and new policies to counteract it, “We used to think that our neutrality was a wise thing, since it prevented us being dragged into danger by other people’s policies; now we see it clearly as a lack of foresight and as a source of weakness.”[13]

That the Corcyraeans begin by acknowledging their lack of foresight, they thereby paradoxically inform the Athenians that they are, in fact, a cunning and ingenious people who are ready to embrace adventure and innovation. After appealing to Athens that they would also be acting justly, because the Corcyraeans are the “victims of aggression,”[14] they subsequently pivot to the geopolitical reality which has moved them to seek their alliance with Athens. “[W]e are, after you,” the representatives state, “the greatest naval power in Hellas. You would have paid a lot of money and still have been very grateful to have us on your side. Is it not, then, an extraordinary stroke of good luck for you to have us coming over voluntarily into your camp, giving ourselves up to you without involving you in any dangers or any expenses?”[15] Near the end of their appeal, the Corcyraeans bluntly state the most significant geopolitical reason why the Athenians should help them, “Apart from all other advantages, Corcyra lies in an excellent position on the coastal route to Italy and Sicily, and is thus able to prevent naval reinforcements coming to the Peloponnese from there, or going from the Peloponnese to those countries.”[16]

The speech of the Corcyraeans follows a process of development reaching geopolitical revelation. It begins by acknowledging the futility of isolationism as a maritime power. Maritime powers are naturally internationalist; thus Corcyra is finally embracing its geographic constitutional nature by aligning with Athens. This alliance with Athens is beneficial to the Athenians precisely because Athens is the predominant maritime civilization in Hellas. In acknowledging the futility of their previous isolationism the Corcyraeans present themselves as imitators of Athenian intelligence and cunning. They are able to recognize their faults and change accordingly. Their ambition also makes them natural allies for the Athenians who value cunning and intelligence above all other things in men.

After acknowledging the wrongheadedness of their earlier policies, which esoterically presents themselves as being humans akin to the Athenians, the Corcyraeans then shift to explaining why the maritime reality of their city has led them to embrace internationalism and seek an alliance with the Athenians. It is only natural, once one discovers their nature, to embrace and embody it. Therefore, it is only natural that the Corcyraeans align themselves with the master maritime imperium having discovered their physis.

Physis, in Greek, is not something static. Physis entails growth and maturation. Nature is something one grows into and must eventually embody. Failure to grow and embody one’s nature has disastrous consequences. In the conflict with the Corinthians the Corcyraeans have discovered their nature and discovered who is the god of this particular geographic nature: Athens. Thus they invoke Athens’ maritime nature in their appeal for aid like a devotee would his god. It is noteworthy that the practical and pragmatic reasons for an alliance is what the Corcyraeans also drive home with. While stating that they are victims of aggression and that Athens would be acting justly in aiding a victimized power, along with advancing the cause of liberty by liberating Corcyra from the tyranny of Corinth, the bulk of the speech rests on the maritime advantages that Athens would gain if coming to Corcyra’s aid.

When the Corinthians rebut the Corcyraean argument, the Corinthians rest their argument not on any geopolitical nature but on justice and wisdom. The Corinthians also assail the character of the Corcyraeans as deceitful and untrustworthy, “Though they are colonists are ours, they have never been loyal to us and are now at war with us.”[17] This, the Corinthians argue, is the main manner by which they mask their wrongdoings and selfish pursuits. The Corinthians end their speech by simply appealing to common justice, honor, and nobility—the Athenians can be on the side of justice, honor, and nobility by not aligning with the devious, deceitful, and rebellious Corcyraeans. The Corinthians even say, “Do not be influenced by the fact that they are offering you a great naval alliance.”[18]

In between the lines there is a commentary over the distinction between nature and convention. The Corcyraeans make their appeal to nature. Nature is, as Thucydides reveals in his discussion on the civil war in Corcyra and the Melian dialogue, that which is in one’s self-interest. This self-interested nature is, of course, rooted in a geographic reality. The Corinthians appeal to the conventions of justice, honor, and nobility and end by arguing against geopolitical realism. “The right course, surely, is either for you to preserve a strict neutrality or else to join us against them.”[19] According to the Corinthians, the legal course of action is that the mother nation has ruleship over their colonies and that colonies ought to be loyal to their mother nations. This is the precedent of legal right. If the Athenians ally with the Corcyraeans they would be putting themselves against the side of legal right. Furthermore, in such an action the naked self-interest of Athens would be revealed for the whole of the Greek world to see. To help the Corcyraeans, the Corinthians state, would be to “aid and abet them in their crimes.”[20]

But what determines criminality? Legal right and precedent determine criminality. The Corinthian argument is premised on the concept of legal right determined by conventional law and common precedent. Law maintains that a colony is the possession of the mother nation and that the colony should be subservient to the laws and customs of the mother nation. Insofar that Corcyra has always been disloyal and promulgating its own judicial system to serve their interest and subvert Corinthian oversight,[21] the Corcyraeans have long been engaged in criminal activity by the legal precedent of custom and using their “geographical situation” to their own self-advantage.[22] For the Athenians to help the Corcyraeans would mean that the Athenians have no concern for legal right and precedent and be swayed entirely by the law of nature which is self-interest dictated by geographic reality. That is precisely the argument made by the Corcyraeans while veiled with the beautiful but deceitful language of liberty and victimization which the Corinthians show great insight in recognizing and rebutting in their speech.

The law of nature, not the law of legal convention, triumphed in Athens’ decision to ally with Corcyra. As the war between Corcyra and Corinth raged, the Athenians sent a small detachment of ships led by Lacedaimonius to aid the Corcyraeans. The ships participated in the Battle of Sybota where both sides claimed victory. Yet it was the Athenian arrival that prevented the destruction of the Corcyraean navy and thus allowing Corcyra to recover from what would have otherwise been a disastrous defeat. This intervention by Athens which saved Corcyra from destruction thus giving Corinth the legal right to declare war on Athens which would eventually drag Sparta into the war and give birth to the war of “great movement.”

Maritime Realities and Athenian Exceptionalism

The speeches between the Athenian and Spartan representatives over the declaration of war between the two great Hellenic powers in the middle of the first book is the most nakedly exceptional of the Athenians speeches. The speech borders on excessive pride and hubris but also contains some of the most remarkable language in the text. It is during the speech that the psychology of Athenian exceptionalism is fully manifested. Yet a closer inspection of the exceptionalism contained in the speech reveals an undeniable maritime basis for it.

We have already established the geopolitical and geographic realities of nature in Thucydides as a leading factor for the imperial thesis of Athens. The world, according to Pericles, can be divided into land and sea, both of which have their usefulness to man. But it is the sea which Athens dominates which permits her navy unrestricted access to the seas. The Athenians can go wherever they want to go because of this mastery of the sea. The speech by the Athenians at Sparta, giving an apologia for the Athenian Empire, rests on the maritime reality of Athens and, it seems, the superiority of sea to land and what the sea brings to the usefulness and progressive development of man.

When the Athenian representatives give a defense of their empire before the Spartans, they openly acknowledge the reality of the sea as essential to her greatness:

“This is our record. At Marathon we stood out against the Persians and faced them single-handed. In the later invasion, when we were unable to meet the enemy on land, we and all our people took to our ships, and joined in the battle at Salamis. It was this battle that prevented the Persians from sailing against the Peloponnese and destroying the cities one by one; for no system of mutual defense could have been organized in face of the Persian superiority. The best proof of this is in the conduct of the Persians themselves. Once they had lost the battle at sea they realized that their force was crippled and they immediately withdrew most of their army. That, then was the result, and it proved that the fate of Hellas depended on her navy. Now, we contributed to this result in three important ways: we produced most of the ships, we provided the most intelligent of the generals, and we displayed the most unflinching courage. Out of the 400 ships, nearly two-thirds were ours: the commander was Themistocles, who was mainly responsible for the battle being fought in the straights, and this, obviously, was what saved us. You yourselves in fact, because of this, treated him with more distinction than you have treated any visitor from abroad.”[23]

In this remarkable passage in which the Athenians defend themselves and their empire against the Spartans, the speech is not only filled with praise of Athens but also an implicit belittlement of Sparta and, by contingency, the usefulness of land. While it is true that all historians agree that the Battle of Salamis was far more important than the Battle of Thermopylae the Athenians lose no chance in making sure that this reality is a sticking point—a sort of dagger into the side of Sparta—during the opening debate. We also see from this passage the superiority of the sea to the land (at least in the psychology of the Athenians). It was the Battle of Salamis, not any of the land battles, which proved to be the decisive engagement against the Persians. As the Athenians say, Greek liberty “depended on her navy.” Moreover, the Athenians do not hesitate in promoting the fact that they contributed the most to the most important battle. As the representatives say, “[W]e produced most of the ships, we provided the most intelligent of generals, and we displayed the most unflinching courage.” It was, above all, the cunning and intelligence of Themistocles, which won the battle and saved Greece from eastern despotism. As such, Themistocles, as the representatives remind the Spartans, was treated as a greater hero than any Spartan for his role in the defeat of the Persians and the salvation of the Greek people.

The Athenian Empire, thus, was born from a defensive war won at sea. “We did not gain this empire by force. It came to us at a time when you were unwilling to fight on to the end against the Persians. At this time our allies came to us of their own accord and begged us to lead them.” In this striking passage, immediately following the hubristic opening of the Athenian apologia, the representatives from Athens highlight the exceptionalism of their empire. Their empire is, literally, the exception of all history. “We did not gain this empire by force.” Instead, the Athenian Empire was consummated through a defensive act. The other Greek city-states threatened by Persian tyranny “begged” Athens to lead the fight for liberty. Athens was, in this way, compelled by her nature as a maritime polis to contribute the greatest amount to the war against Persia and thus contributed the most to the salvation of Greece from the hands of the conquering and warmongering Persians. The Persian Empire, as the speech entails and as Greek memory would have testified, was won by force of conquest. This is not the case with the Athenian Empire. The Athenian Empire was won by the defense of her fellow brethren who also requested that Athens lead them in the fight against Persia. The Athenian Empire, then, was not the product of naked aggression but benevolence defense.

The benevolence of the Athenian Empire is the subsequent pivot of the speech. It is easy to condemn the hubris of the Athenians and their psychology of imperialism, but in a dark world governed by barbarism and despotism, the imperial democracy of Athens was truly unique in the world.[24] The Athenians say, “No one bothers to inquire why this reproach is made against other imperial Powers, who treat their subjects much more harshly than we do: the fact being, of course, that where force can be used there is no need to bring law. Our subjects, on the other hand, are used to being treated as equals.”[25] Here the Athenians maintain that their empire is just. It was product of a just outcome in a war against aggressive tyranny and the voluntary appeal of the many Greek city-states for Athens to lead them in the struggle against Persia. Furthermore, after the consummation of this empire by defense, the Athenians treat their subject cities with equality. They do not engage in forced submission and impose, by violence, order over the people. Instead, the legal customs of the many cities now under the Athenian imperium remain, and Athens acts as a sort of benevolent guarantor of defense and of long-established customs threatened by foreign forces which lurk just over the horizon of many of her allies. Paradoxically, by embracing nature Athens has become the guardian of cherished customs and conventions throughout the Greek world. Athens, then, understood itself as the guardian of a new quasi-Panhellenic order and of the traditions of the Greek people.

Not only was the Athenian Empire acquired justly, and acts justly, the Athenian Empire is freer than the prospects of a Spartan imperium over Hellas. The Athenians close their speech by saying, “Your own regulated ways of life do not mix well with the ways of others. Also it is a fact that when one of you goes abroad he follows neither his own rules nor those of the rest of Hellas.”[26] Pericles’ Funeral Oration testifies to the public-private distinction critical to the flourishing of liberty. What people do in their private lives is of little importance to the Athenian state assuming they abide by the public orthodoxy which protects the city and fosters the open way of life offered in Athens. This is contrasted with the militaristic and regulatory life of the Spartans. The Athenians end their apologia by implying that not only is their empire just, it is also freer than the Spartan oligarchy with its insistence on militarism and regulative modes of living. This is further revealed as a point of contrast and contention when Pericles declares, “The Spartans, from their earliest boyhood, are submitted to the most laborious training in courage; we pass our lives without all these restrictions, and yet are just as ready to face the same dangers as they are.”[27] There is no benefit for the regulative way of life imposed over all in Sparta.

The exceptionalism of Athens, which is the content of this apologia as Athens and Sparta move closer to war, is premised on the maritime reality of the city and the superiority of sea to land—which is more fully revealed in Pericles’ Funeral Oration and his policy advocacy recounted in the second book. Therefore, there is an undeniable geopolitical dimension to the speech that cannot be missed or overlooked.

As hitherto stated, the Athenians state that it was the Battle of Salamis which proved essential in the salvation of Greece from Persian tyranny. This implicitly establishes the geographic hierarchy of superiority in which the sea is more useful to man than the land. This is borne out by the fact that Athens is not sustained by an elaborate totalitarian agrarian economy built on slavery but is otherwise sustained by having her ports “open to the world”[28] which leads to “all the good things from all over the world [to] flow in to us.”[29] Athenian democracy is also a byproduct of this commercial openness to the world. In fact, the economics of Athenian democracy is built on the fact that power is diffused and contested between the multiple factions that have arisen from this imperium.

Karl August Wittfogel has shown how irrigated agrarian societies develop the most totalitarian of political systems.[30] Because a society is built on a single economic mode of production, this single economic mode of production stratifies itself and leads to the creation of an extensive managerial bureaucratic system which forces mass labor for the sustenance of society. This was the case with Sparta. As an agrarian-based society with little commerce and trade, the Spartan mode of production and society could only be sustained by mass labor and a regulative system of life. This resulted in the extensive Helot slave system which, according to Herodotus, constituted over eighty percent of the nominal Spartan population.[31] The regulative tyranny of Sparta was the product of the geographic law of the land.[32]

Thus, the maritime reality of Athens fostered competition between the ascendant commercial and trading class with the agrarian class and the established oligarchic ruling class. This triangular competition fostered greater openness, compromise, and democratization (i.e. expanding political participation to what the Romans would have called the homines novi) to the Athenian population. The freedom enjoyed by Athens and her allies, almost all of whom were maritime polities, was the product of their geographic nature. The freer polis of Athens, in contrast to the more respective polis of Sparta, did not mean that Athens did not have a stratified society; it simply meant that Athens had more diversity to it than Sparta and less rigidity in those stratas than the singular dominant and rigid oligarchic strata foundational to Sparta. As such, Athenian democracy was the product of economic diversity and class competition which was spurred by open maritime and commercial policies. In Athens, people were not locked into a specified social condition as in Sparta. Rather, there existed the possibility of social mobility and changes in which class held political power in Athens. Such possibility ensured its democracy.

The City Open to the World

Of all the speeches in The War of the Peloponnesians and the Athenians, Pericles’ Funeral Oration may be the most memorable. What makes Pericles’ speech so remarkable and stirring is its praise of the conventions and customs of Athens. The nobility of Athens is not, at least as first appearing from Pericles’ speech, a product of her nature. Instead, Periclean Athens is beautiful because of the customs, laws, and way of life described by Athens is beautiful. (And perhaps strikingly similar to our own.)

Pericles’ speech is stirring because, as mentioned, the reader or listener finds the conventions praised in the speech beautiful and noble. The commitment to law and justice, even unto the foreigner who is not expelled out of whim, strikes us as humane and humanistic. Pericles’ statement of Athens not copying the constitutions and institutions of others, and not relaying on a conscripted military to protect itself, is equally uplifting and exceptional. Pericles’ statement that the shame of poverty is not poverty itself but in not taking the political action to combat it is exceedingly accommodatable to modern welfare thinking. The distinction between public and private lives is also something modern Westerns find attractive in Pericles’ speech.

I am not here to discuss the merits of the exceptionalism contained in Pericles’ speech. But deep within his speech is a geopolitical element that is often missed behind the beauty and grandeur of Pericles’ rhetoric. The beauty and grandeur of Periclean Athens is, in large part, the product of Athens being the “city…open to the world” from which “good things from all over the world flow in to us.” These are not realities that have arisen through the dictates of conventions but from the necessity of geographic demands. When Pericles praises Athenian courage he acknowledges the imperial thesis of Athens when he says that “we launch attack[s] abroad.”[33] Pericles also praises the Athenian navy as the backbone of her strength – even when defeated in battle, often on land, the Athenians have yet revealed their total power because she still retains her navy.[34] That there are memorials to Athenians all over the world, commemorating both good and bad deeds and outcomes, one must ask how these memorials have been erected so far from Athens? The answer, of course, is in the fact that Athens possesses an empire maintained by her navy and control over international trade; thus, “good things from all over the world flow in to us.”

Athens is the city open to the world because Athens is geographically situated to be a city open to the world. Unlike the continental constitution of Sparta, which restricts Sparta to be a land-based entity, the maritime constitution of Athens permits her the possibility to “sail where [we] wish.”[35]

Upon closer inspection of Pericles’ Funeral Oration, there are two cities being spoken of by Pericles. The first, and most memorable and stirring, is the Athens of nomos. The second, and always forgotten, is the Athens of physis. As Pericles’ policies are later revealed by Thucydides, this dialectical tension between the Athens of law and the Athens of her geographic nature comes to the fore.

The Athens of grandeur, of daring intelligence and cunning, and of exceptional bravery – all things Pericles eulogizes and the Athenian representatives at Sparta also praised – is brought to fruition not by the customs of Athens but by the demands imposed on her by her imperial reality. The Athenians must be brave and cunning, like Themistocles, in order to rule the sea and sail wherever they wish. The Athenians must be good with others, and maintain positive relations with other cities, in order to engage in international trade which brings the best goods from around the world back to the Athenian market. This city “open to the world” necessarily comes into conflict with other sea powers that stand athwart its rule. Thus the geographic demands of Athens as a sea power leads us to the most famous dialogue contained in Thucydides’ grand investigation into the nature of politics.

The Melian Dialogue as Geopolitical Determinism

If Pericles’ Funeral Oration is the most eloquent speech in the work, and the most famous political speech in Western history, then the Melian Dialogue is the most notorious speech uttered from the mouth of Athenians and remains the most notorious dialogue in the work and among the most notorious in Western history. The Melian Dialogue is notorious for all the reasons most people already know: The Athenians demand the subjugation of Melos and premise their argument as the rule of the strong over the weak. The Melians, naïve or idealistic, refuse; their refusal prompting Athens to lay siege to their city which results in its extirpation. The Athens of our imagination, the Athens of Pericles, is shown here to be a naked brute which is why it is so shocking and notorious. The Athens we romanticize is far beneath the glorious and enlightened civilization of our imagination.

The Melian Dialogue recapitulates themes that we already discussed in the first book (especially as contained in the debate between the Corinthians and Corcyraeans). Thucydides informs us that “[t]he Melians are a colony from Sparta.”[36] Like the Corcyraeans, the Melians are a colony polity of a superior power. Like the Corcyraeans, the Melians are also a naval power which is something that separates them from their land-based masters. The Melians have, thus far through the war, showed great disloyalty to their mother city by remaining neutral—as a maritime polity, their neutrality is tantamount to isolationism which the Melian representatives stubbornly cling to (unlike the Corcyraeans).

Since Thucydides’ work is a work of instruction, the debate of the Corcyraeans and Corinthians with the debate between the Athenian and Melian representatives is an instructive study in contrasts. The Corcyraeans, as we know, opted to submit to Athenian power and become part of the Athenian Empire and alliance. The Melians, as we know, opted to resist Athenian power and were subsequently destroyed as a result. The Corcyraeans and Melians are both maritime polities who are colonies to larger political forces. The Corycraeans and Melians both engaged in a foreign policy of isolationism and neutrality. Why, then, do the Corcyraeans take a different path than the Melians? Melos is an identical city to Corcyra but the two cities traverse two different paths that results in two different outcomes.

The recapitulation of earlier themes is also seen through the beginning of the dialogue when the Athenians restate their defensive imperial exceptionalism. The Athenians begin their dialogue with the Melians by briefly mentioning their actions against Persia. However, they speak more strongly in their defense by employing false premises.

The Athenian representatives claim they will not claim a noble justification for their empire by recoursing to their actions against Persia. Thucydides uses the word kalon,[37] which Rex Warner translated as “fine.” Kalon, of course, is a word that Aristotle frequently uses for noble beauty. By claiming they will not recourse to the beautiful nobility of their prior actions, yet doing so in the same sentence, the hypocrisies of power are instantly revealed at the beginning of the dialogue. There is something sinister about the Athenian representatives which was absent in their otherwise hubristic but magnificent speech in defense of their empire before the Spartans. By claiming that they will not recourse to their beautifully noble action in defense of Greece against Persia, though implicitly having just done so, the Athenians begin with an aura of superiority.

It is during the dialogue between the two sides that the discussion over the “law of nature” finally materializes. The Athenians open by saying “our knowledge of men lead us to conclude that it is a general and necessary law of nature to rule whatever one can. This is not a law that we made ourselves, nor were we the first to act upon it when it was made . . . We are merely acting in accordance with it, and we know that you or anybody else with the same power as ours would be acting in precisely the same way.”[38] In this telling revelation the Athenians articulate the view that Thrasymachus (re)states in Plato’s Republic. Nature is the rule of the strong over the weak. The Athenians subsequently prevent any further discussion over this point by claiming that if the Melians were powerful they would be acting in the same manner that the Athenians are currently acting in.

This causes the Melians to retort by claiming that the law of nature, which is the law of self-interest, will lead Sparta not to betray the fact that the Melians are their colonists and brethren. The Melians put their trust in others rather than themselves for their salvation. The Athenians counter that the law of nature, of self-interest, is “to be safe.” They then assail the Spartans as not being adventurous and that because they lack an adventurous spirit they will not come to the aid of Melos. The Athenians implicitly argue that if the Melians were to follow their self-interest, the law of nature, then they would join Athens rather than remain an enemy.

Returning to an earlier portion of the dialogue, it is clear that the Athenians are not as nakedly brutal as it initially appears.[39] The Athenians give the Melians an opportunity to “save [themselves]”[40] by joining them. The Athenians also state that Melian acceptance of the Athenian alliance would be mutually beneficial. It is the lack of intelligence, or obstinance, exuded by the Melians which quickly becomes a problem. The Melians think that the policy of neutrality allows them to be friends of both sides. The Athenians, however, remind the Melians “[w]e rule the sea and you are islanders, and weaker islanders too than the others; it is therefore particularly important that you should not escape.”

The Melians are islanders. The Melians are a maritime polity. The Melians are a sea-power just like how the Athenians are a sea power whose navy can travel anywhere they please. By being a sea-power the Melians are naturally, that is, geopolitically, under the orbit of Athens rather than Sparta. This is what the Corcyraeans recognized but the Melians did not. The Athenians inform the Melians that precisely because they are a maritime polity they cannot permit the Melians to remain outside of their imperial orbit. To do so would be make Athens look weak. And appearing weak is something Athens cannot afford in this war against Sparta. “As a matter of fact,” the Athenians say, “we are not so much frightened of states on the continent. They have their liberty, and this means that it will be a long time before they begin to take precautions against us. We are more concerned about islanders like yourselves, who are still unsubdued, or subjects who have already become embittered by the constraint which our empire imposes on them.”[41]

Before the Athenians state the obvious about the law of nature being the rule of the powerful over the weak, they offer an opportunity to the Melians to grow into their nature by recognizing themselves as “islanders” who are naturally under the orbit of Athens. To do so would permit their retention of customs and conventions while supporting Athens in the war. Moreover, Athens will remain strong and in control of the seas and Melos will benefit, politically, militarily, and economically, from their alliance with Athens. The Athenians even implore them, “Do not let this happen to you, you who are weak and whose fate depends on a single movement of the scale. And do not be like those people who, as so commonly happens, miss the chance of saving themselves in a human and practical way.”[42] The Athenians constantly give the Melians every opportunity to recognize the reality of the situation that they find themselves and to truly embrace the law of nature and their self-interest which ought to necessitate the Melians to accept Athenian overrule.

Contained in the Melian Dialogue is an elaborate discussion on geopolitical determinism. First, the Athenians “rule the sea.” Second, the Melians are “islanders.” Third, the law of nature, which manifests itself in strength, is founded on self-interest. Fourth, it is in the self-interest of Melos—as a maritime polity—to accept Athenian rule which will save them from destruction and bring many benefits to their populace hitherto unexperienced from their prior policy of isolation because the law of nature necessitates the self-interest of Athens to make sure all island polities are under their geopolitical rule. Fifth, by accepting Athenian subjugation the Melians would be growing into their nature as an island city and abandoning the “wrong choice”[43] of isolation and embrace the policy of internationalism which will mutually benefit Athens and Melos in a win-win scenario (thereby implying that all politics is not a zero-sum game as the Melians seem to think).

If the Melians were intelligent as the Athenians are intelligent, whose intelligence is shown in their statement of having discovered the law of nature which they are now acting in accord with, then the Melians would have recognized the law of nature which determined them to be under Athenian rule. However, the Melians, as the Athenians end their dialogue by saying, have deluded themselves through the principle of hope and have brought ruination unto themselves. The Athenians are mere instruments of judgement against a people so obstinate and unintelligent as to recognize the law of nature so they must invariably be trampled over by those who exude the law of nature and are moved by it.

Thucydides is complicit in the Athenian destruction of the Melos. His reticence, coupled with his earlier statement that human nature being what it is and that his work is intended to teach generations forever to come, reveals that Thucydides agrees with the Athenian disposition and understanding of nature and self-interest. The Melian Dialogue and the fate of the Melians is a tale of instruction, not of restraint, but on the importance of knowing the law of nature which ought to necessitate decision-making accordingly. By not acting in accord with the law of nature the destruction of Melos was self-induced. And, as Thucydides repeatedly shows over the course of the dialogue, the Athenians constantly offered a path of survival and prosperity for the Melians until the Melians forced their hand in refusing to submit to the Athenian Empire. Failure to embody nature has dire consequences as the Melians find out the hard way. But we, as readers and learners from Thucydides, do not have to follow the same path as the Melians even though, as the Athenians imply, there will be other Athens’ in the future.

Nature had necessitated the Athenians to enforce their control over the “islanders” because failure to do so would prove fatal to the Athenians. As we’ve already covered, the geopolitical constitution of Athens is that of the sea. By this matter of geographic fact, Athens must ensure her dominance of the sea by controlling all the maritime polities. This is where her strength lies, as the Corcyraeans know and as Pericles openly states. Nature has determined that Melos is a sea power, an island power, a maritime polity that necessarily moves it under Athenian orbit.

The conflict of self-interest is not in Athens against Melos, per se, but is in Melos not embodying her geopolitical nature—which is to say, not following her self-interest. Athens is simply embodying her geopolitical nature which is necessitated by its geographic constitution. Melos had the opportunity to embrace her geopolitical nature which would have saved the city, her customs and traditions, and brought new prosperity and political security. Rather than recognize her geopolitical nature, Melos retreated into the abstractions of freedom and hope and subsequently lost both. The geopolitical reality of Melos meant that her self-interest was to ally with Athens. She opted not to do so and suffered the consequences of not embodying her nature.

Enemies by Nature: Hermocrates’ Speech Against Athens

The final speech I wish to examine is Hermocrates’ speech to his “fellow Sicilians.” Hermocrates’ speech is unique insofar that he appeals directly to nature, rather than customs, conventions, or the gods. But what does Hermocrates mean when he speaks of nature in his speech? He doesn’t refer to race as the natural unifying bond; in fact, he recognizes the racial differences that constitute the populations on the island.[44] Instead, he appeals to “Sicily as a whole.”[45] Hermocrates’ appeal to nature is an appeal to Sicily and all her cities and diverse peoples. They must, then, have something in common despite being separated by racial, linguistic, and political differences.

According to Hermocrates, “Sicily” is united by a common enemy: Athens. As he says so eloquently and with deep perception, “[W]e have also to consider whether we can still preserve the existence of Sicily as a whole. It is now, as I see it, being threatened by Athens, and we ought to regard the Athenians as much more forcible arguments for peace than any words that can be spoken by me. They are the greatest power in Hellas.”[46] The Athenians in Sicily are few but Hermocrates sees the future invasion of Sicily as the logical outcome of Athenian power and her control of the sea. In fact, Hermocrates recourses to the geographic dialectic formerly espoused by Pericles about the world being divided by land and sea. When speaking of Sicily as a whole, Hermocrates says that the Sicilians, though they live on land in a nominal sense, are surrounded by the sea, “[W]e are all of us neighbors, living together in the same country, in the midst of the sea.”[47]

Hermocrates, then, has ascertained the law of nature and the geopolitical constitution of Sicily. Though he is from the most powerful city in Sicily, Syracuse, Sicily is divided by race, custom, and language. Yet the world refers to all, as Hermocrates says, as “Sicilians.” What makes the diverse island united is not just a common enemy in Athens but the geopolitical reality of Sicily. Sicily is an island jewel “in the midst of the sea.” Divided, Sicily is weak and prone to Athenian intervention and subjugation. United, however, Sicily could be strong and the natural counterweight to Athenian maritime dominance.

Sicily has long been envisioned as the crowning achievement of the Athenian Empire. Sicily is a rich island. Sicily is situated in the center of the known world. From Sicily one could have a base of operations to control the entire Mediterranean. From Sicily one could have a floating city in which ships, merchants, and colonists could spread to Italy, the Iberian Peninsula, and North Africa. Since Athens already controlled the eastern Mediterranean, the Aegean and Ionian seas and coastlines, Sicily is the great temptation for Athenian grandeur and daring.

Hermocrates realizes the perilous position that Sicily is in. When he speaks to his fellow Sicilians, who are Dorians and Chalcidians and Phoenicians, his appeal to nature is premised on a geopolitical cornerstone which finds a common enemy in Athens and maintains Sicily as a potential maritime polity in-of-itself. The petty divisions which have caused war in Sicily can all be overcome in the unity against Athens and the amalgamation of the many Sicilian city-states under a united political entity (undoubtedly to be led by Syracuse). “By acting in this way,” Hermocrates ends his speech, “we shall be conferring immediately two benefits on Sicily – release from the Athenians and the cessation of civil war; and for the future we shall have a country that is free in itself and not so much in danger from abroad.”[48]

Since, however, Sicily is a (rising) sea power, why didn’t Hermocrates align with Athens as Melos should have done?

Hermocrates’ speech is, therefore, an instructive contrast with the Melians. Hermocrates doesn’t appeal to convention or hope like the Melians do. Instead, Hermocrates appeals to nature. Sicily is also on the periphery of Athenian power in a way that Melos never was. Moreover, Sicily is strong where Melos is weak. Syracuse is a very strong city-state in its own right; thus it isn’t surprising that it is the Syracusan Hermocrates that spurs the advocacy of Sicilian unity (out of self-interest).

Because Sicily is strong and is potentially even stronger if united, Sicily is the enemy of Athens and the natural counterweight to Athenian maritime power. Sicily has the potential, as Hermocrates implies, to become the greatest power in the world and the dominant maritime polity superseding even Athens.[49] (Sicily could be that other Athens the Athenians warn the Melians of.) In being free from invasion from abroad Sicily would have the power to engage in her own foreign adventures. Moreover, just as Sicily is the springboard for Athenian dominance over the world, Sicily is already situated to be the great empire to control the world. Alas, Hermocrates’ vision of united Sicily and Sicilian Empire didn’t come to pass though he did achieve secondary goals of bringing civil war and internal division to an end. More importantly, he achieved these goals before the Athenian invasion he prophetically foresaw.

Hermocrates’ speech is instructive because it also shows, unlike with the future dialogue between the Athenians and Melians, how the embrace of nature can lead to the survival and growth of conventions and traditions. “[L]et us realize,” Hermocrates says at the acme of his speech, “that by following my advice we shall each keep the freedom of our own cities, and in these will be able to act in the true spirit of independent men, returning good for good and evil for evil; whereas if we take the opposite course we shall be under the power of others, and then there will no longer be any question of our being able to do harm to an opponent.”[50] Sicilian independence and power, power most importantly, rests on the “Sicilians” putting aside their differences and embracing their geopolitical nature. The mark of nature is power and the ability to “harm an opponent.” Thus we see, as implied by Hermocrates’ acknowledgement of the reality of nature and power, that Sicily does not need to yield to Athenian subjugation precisely because Sicily has the strength to subjugate others—“to do harm to an opponent” is a component of one’s freedom.

The Athenians are the “enemies by nature” of the Sicilians because the Athenians threaten Sicilian unity and power. The Athenians are the “enemies by nature” of the Sicilians because they are both rival maritime civilizations with the potential to rule the world. The Athenians are the “enemies by nature” of the Sicilians because the Athenians plan on conquering Sicily, colonizing it, and taking “the good things of Sicily”[51] for themselves. Hermocrates’ speech, his appeal for peace and unity, is founded primarily on a geopolitical dimension. The law of nature has been discovered by Hermocrates, and Hermocrates intends to have his fellow Sicilians follow it for their salvation.

The Eternality of Thucydides’ Work

It seems evidently clear that the law of nature which Thucydides examines is a geopolitical one. This returns us to the naturalistic sine qua non that Thucydides takes as his axiomatic foundation to understanding human nature, human action, and the course of events. Insofar that Thucydides doesn’t appeal to a moral law established by God or the gods, insofar that Thucydides doesn’t appeal to supernatural events and omens as reasons for human actions and their outcomes, and insofar that Thucydides only looks to naturalistic causes for the war, he seems rather modern.

However, it is also clear from any reading of Thucydides that he does accept human nature—and that human nature tends toward evil. Convention, by contrast, civilizes men and makes him a noble animal. When law dissipates, as it does through war, nature (re)asserts itself. When nature (re)asserts itself the nature that rises to the fore is a geopolitical one—since man is a political animal and, more importantly, is found to living in a land or sea constitution as Pericles stated. As such, men either embrace their geopolitical nature or forsake it.

But Thucydides’ geopolitical law of nature is not a Jared Diamond-esque geographic determinism where human choice, intelligence, and will have no factor to play in the inevitable success or decline of a people and their civilization. Geography may dictate the path that people should take, but Thucydides leaves open the reality of human free will in making decisions—often with disastrous consequences for the wrong decisions. We see disastrous consequences repeatedly and we see many blunders made by fallible human agents. In carving out space for human cunning, intelligence, and free choice, Thucydides’ work is a triumph not only of political philosophy but of philosophy more generally. His work is a triumph in examining the seminal philosophical question: Quid sit homo.

Thucydides’ War of the Peloponnesians and the Athenians equally shows the paradoxical dichotomy and dynamism of human nature. Man is at once a slave to his geopolitical constitution yet has the power, through his free choice, intelligence, and reason, to thrive or die in the nature imposed onto him by geography. Thucydides doesn’t give us answers to the seminal questions of life but teaches us to think, and think deeply, about the seminal questions of life. Thucydides doesn’t answer the question of justice. Thucydides doesn’t answer the question of the good life. Yet Thucydides allows us to think about justice and the good life. Precisely because Thucydides’ work teaches us to think about the important questions of political life and human events it truly is a work that “will last forever.” And “last forever” it has.

This article was originally published at VoegelinView, 6 January 2020, under the title “The Geopolitical Law of Nature in Thucydides.”

Notes

[1] David Bolotin, “Thucydides,” in History of Political Philosophy, eds. Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 6.

[2] I have opted for the traditional naming of the work of Thucydides now commonly known as the History of the Peloponnesian War. Unless noted otherwise, all citations come from Rex Warner’s translation, The History of the Peloponnesian War (New York: Penguin Books, 1972). I have opted to follow Warner’s notations of chapter and section (by paragraph) for easier reader access and referencing than following the traditional Renaissance notations.

[3] Leo Strauss, The City and Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 7-8.

[4] Ibid., 240-241.

[5] Cf. Thucydides, I.22.2; III.82.1.

[6] Ibid., I.22.2.

[7] Strauss, 166.

[8] See Donald Kagan, Thucydides: The Reinvention of History (New York: Viking Press, 2009).

[9] See David Bolotin, “Thucydides,” in History of Political Philosophy, 6-32.

[10] Thucydides, I.24.1.

[11] Ibid., I.30.2.

[12] Ibid., II.62.1.

[13] Ibid., I.32.2.

[14] Ibid., I.33.1.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Ibid., I.36.1.

[17] Ibid., I.38.1.

[18] Ibid., I.43.1.

[19] Ibid., I.41.1.

[20] Ibid., I.43.1.

[21] Ibid., I.37.2.

[22] Ibid.

[23] Ibid., I.73.3-74.1.

[24] Strauss, 169.

[25] Thucydides, I.77.1.

[26] Ibid.

[27] Ibid., II.39.1.

[28] Ibid., II.39.1.

[29] Ibid., II.38.1.

[30] See Karl August Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957).

[31] Herodotus, Histories, 8.28-29.

[32] It seems to me, however, that Wittfogel’s study misses one key element though it is nevertheless entailed in the general thesis of his work—population is also a factor in societies of “total power” because extensive irrigated agrarian societies need large populations to force the labor necessary for such a society’s construction and sustenance. Therefore, when a society lacks the population needed in having an extensive irrigated agrarian mode of production, it either does not develop toward total despotism and veers toward the path of agrarian republicanism (as in ancient, pre-imperial, Italy) or requires slavery to necessitate its development down the path of totalizing tyranny.

[33] Thucydides, II.39.

[34] Ibid.

[35] Ibid., II.62.

[36] Ibid., V.84.3.

[37] Ibid., V.89.1

[38] Ibid., V.105.1.

[39] Ibid., V.95.1-99.1

[40] Ibid., V.93.1

[41] Ibid., V.99.1

[42] Ibid., V.103.1.

[43] Ibid., V.111.1.

[44] Ibid., IV.61.1.

[45] Ibid., IV.59.1.

[46] Ibid., IV.60.1.

[47] Ibid., IV.64.1.

[48] Ibid.

[49] Ibid., IV.62.2; IV.63.1.

[50] Ibid., IV.63.1.

[51] Ibid., IV.61.1.

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Hesiod, Paul Krause in real life, is the editor-in-chief of VoegelinView. He is writer, classicist, and historian. He has written on the arts, culture, classics, literature, philosophy, religion, and history for numerous journals, magazines, and newspapers. He is the author of The Odyssey of Love and the Politics of Plato, and a contributor to the College Lecture Today and the forthcoming book Diseases, Disasters, and Political Theory. He holds master’s degrees in philosophy and religious studies (biblical studies & theology) from the University of Buckingham and Yale, and a bachelor’s degree in economics, history, and philosophy from Baldwin Wallace University.

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