THE STATE (B) STATE AND HISTORY 1(2)

THE DECLINE OF THE WEST BY OSWALD SPENGLER VOLUME TWO PERSPECTIVES OF WORLD-HISTORY pp 361-398

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.361

Within the world-as-history, in which we are so livingly woven that our perception and our reason constantly obey our feelings, the cosmic flowings appear as that which we call actuality, real life, being-streams in bodily form. Their common badge is Direction. But they can be grasped differently according as it is the movement or the thing moved that is looked at. The former aspect we call history and the latter family or stock or estate or people, but the one is only possible and existent through the other. History exists only as the history of something. If we are referring to the history of the great Cultures, then nation is the thing moved. State, status, means condition, and we obtain our impression of the State when, as a Being in moved Form flows past us, we fix in our eyes the Form as such, as something extended and timelessly standing fast, and entirely ignore direction and Destiny. State is history regarded as at the halt, history the State regarded as on the move. The State of actuality is the physiognomy of a historical unit of being; only the planned State of the theorist is a system. A movement has form, and that which is moved is "in form," or, to use another sporting expression, when it is "going all out" it is in perfect condition.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.361-362

The individual class or family is the smallest, the nation the largest unit in the stream of history. Primitive peoples are subject to a movement that is not historical in the higher sense the movement may be a jog-trot or may be a charge, but it has no organic character and no profound importance. Nevertheless, these primitive peoples are in motion through and through, to such an extent, indeed, as to seem perfectly formless to the hasty observer. Fellaheen, on the contrary, are the rigid objects of a movement that conies from outside and impinges on them unmeaningly and fortuitously. The former includes the "State" of the Mycenaean period; that of the Thinite period; that of the Shang dynasty in China up to, say, the migration to Yin (1400); the Frankish realm of Charlemagne; the Visigothic Kingdom to Eurich; and Petrine Russia state-forms often ample and efficient, but still destitute of symbolism and necessity. To the latter belong the Roman, Chinese, and other Imperia, whose form has ceased to have any expressive content whatever. But between primitive and fellah lies the history of the great Culture. A people in the style of a Culture a historical people, that is is called a Nation. A nation, as a living and battling thing, possesses a State not merely as a condition of movement, but also (above all) as an idea. The State in the simplest sense of the term may be as old as free-moving life itself. Swarms and herds of even very lowly animal genera may have "constitutions" of some sort and those of the ants, of the bees, of many fish, or migrating birds, of beavers, have reached an astounding degree of perfection but the State of the grand style is as old as and no older than its two prime Estates, nobility and priesthood. These emerge with the Culture, they vanish into it, their Destinies are to a high degree identical. Culture is the being of nations in State-form.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.362

A people is as State, a kindred is as family, "in form" that is, as we have seen, the difference between political and cosmic history, public and private life, res publica and res privata. And both, moreover, are symbols of care. The woman is world-history. By conceiving and giving birth she cares for the perpetuation of the blood. The mother with the child at her breast is the grand emblem of cosmic life. Under this aspect, the life of man and woman is "in form" as marriage. The man, however, makes history, which is an unending battle for the preservation of that other life. Maternal care is supplemented and paralleled by paternal. The man with weapon in hand is the other grand emblem of the will-to-duration. A people "in condition" is originally a band warriorhood, a deep and intimately felt community of men fit for arms. State is the affair of man, it is Care for the preservation of the whole (including the spiritual self-preservation called honour and self-respect), the thwarting of attacks, the foreseeing of dangers, and, above all, the positive aggressiveness which is natural and self-evident to every life that has begun to soar.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.363

Plant-life is only plant-life in relation to animal life; nobility and priesthood reciprocally condition one another. A people is only really such in relation to other peoples, and the substance of this actuality comes out in natural and ineradicable oppositions, in attack and defence, hostility and war. War is the creator of all great things. All that is meaningful in the stream of life has emerged through victory and defeat. A people shapes history inasmuch as it is "in condition" for the task of doing so. It livingly experiences an inward history which gets it into this "condition," in which alone it becomes creative and an outward history, which consists in this creation. Peoples as State, then, are the real forces of all human happening. In the world-as-history there is nothing beyond them. They are Destiny.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.364

But in all cases the law of the stronger is the law of the weaker also. To "have the right" is an expression of power. This is a historical fact that every moment confirms, but it is not acknowledged in the realm of truth, which is not of this world. In their conceptions of right, therefore, as in other things, being and wakingbeing, Destiny and Causality, stand implacably opposed. To the priestly and idealistic moral of good and evil belongs the moral distinction of right and wrong, but in the race-moral of good and bad the distinction is between those who give and those who receive the law. An abstract idea of justice pervades the minds and writings of all whose spirit is noble and strong and whose blood is weak, pervades all religions and all philosophies but the fact-world of history knows only the success which turns the law of the stronger into the law of all. Over ideals it marches without pity, and if ever a man or a people renounces its power of the moment in order to remain righteous then, certainly, his or its theoretical fame is assured in the second world of thought and truth, but assured also is the coming of a moment in which it will succumb to another life-power that has better understood realities.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.366

It is clear, then, that on the heights of history two such life-forms, Estate and State, contend for supremacy, both being-streams of great inward form and symbolic force, each resolved to make its own destiny the Destiny of the whole. That if we try to understand the matter in its d epths and unreservedly put aside our everyday conceptions of people, economy, society, and politics is the meaning of the opposition between the social and the political conduct of events. Social and political ideas do not begin to be differentiated till a great Culture has dawned, or even till feudalism is declining and the lord-vassal relation represents the social, and the king-people relation the political, side. But the social powers of the early time (nobility and priesthood) not less actively than those of the later (money and mind) and the vocational groups of the craftsmen and officials and workers, too, as they were rising to their power in the growing cities sought, each for itself, to subordinate the State-ideal to its own Estate-ideal, or more usually to its estate interests.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.367

We are thoroughly right therefore in feeling a distinction between State-history and class-history, between political (horizontal) and social (vertical) history, war and revolution. But it is a grave error of modern doctrinaires to regard the spirit of domestic history as that of history in general. World-history is, and always will be, State-history. The inner constitution of a nation aims always at being "in condition" for the outer fight (diplomatic, military, or economic) and anyone who treats a nation's constitution as an aim and ideal in itself is merely ruining the nation's body. But, from the other point of view, it falls to the inner-political pulsesense of a ruling stratum (whether belonging to the First or to the Fourth Estate) so to manage the internal class-oppositions that the focus and ideas of the nation are not tied up in party conflict, nor treason to the country thought of as an ace of trumps. And here it becomes manifest that the State and the first Estate are cognate down to the roots akin, not merely by reason of their symbolism of Time and Care, their common relation to race and the facts of genealogical s uccession, to the family and to the primary impulses of all peasantry

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.368-369

It is, however, a distinction of quite another kind that holds as between the State-idea and the idea of any one of the other Estates. All these are inwardly alien to the State as such, and the State-ideals that they fashion out of their own lives have not grown up out of the spirit and the political forces of actual history hence, indeed, the conscious emphasis with which they are labelled as social. And while in Early times the situation is simply that historical facts oppose the Church-community in its efforts to actualize religious ideals, in Late periods both the business ideal of the free economic life, and the Utopian ideal of the enthusiast who would actualize this or that abstraction, also come into the field. But in the historical world there are no ideals, but only facts no truths, but only facts. There is no reason, no honesty, no equity, no final aim, but only facts, and anyone who does not realize this should write books on politics - let him not try to make politics. In the real world there are no states built according to ideals, but only states that have grown, and these are nothing but living peoples "in form." No doubt it is "the form impressed that living doth itself unfold," but the impress has been that of the blood and beat of a being, wholly instinctive and involuntary; and as to the unfolding, if it is guided by the master of politics, it takes the direction inherent in the blood; if by the idealist, that dictated by his own convictions in other words, the way to nullity. But the destiny question, for States that exist in reality and not merely in intellectual schemes, is not that of their ideal task or structure, but that of their inner authority, which cannot in the long run be maintained by material means, but only by a belief of friend and foe in their effectiveness. The decisive problems lie, not in the working-out of constitutions, but in the organization of a sound working government; not in the distribution of political rights according to "just" principles (which at bottom are simply the idea that a class forms of its own legitimate claims), but in the efficient pulse of the whole (efficient in the sense that the play of muscle and sinew is efficient when an extended racehorse nears the winning-post), in that rhythm which attracts even strong genius into syntony; not, lastly, in any world-alien moral, but in the steadiness, sureness, and superiority of political leadership.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.370

Every State that emerges in history exists as it is but once and for a moment; the next moment it has, unperceived, become different, whatever the rigidity of its legal-constitutional crust. Therefore, words like "republic," "absolutism," "democracy," mean something different in every instance, and what turns them into catchwords is their use as definite concepts by philosophers and ideologues. A history of States is physiognomic and not systematic. Its business is not to show how "humanity" advances to the conquest of its eternal rights, to freedom and equality, to the evolving of a super-wise and super-just State, but to describe the political units that really exist in the fact-world, how they grow and flourish and fade, and how they are really nothing but actual life "in form."

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.371

History in the high style begins in every Culture with the feudal State, which is not a State in the coming sense of the word, but an ordering of the common life with reference to an Estate. The noblest fruit of the soil, its race in the proudest sense, here builds itself up in a rank-order from the simple knighthood to the primus inter pares, the feudal Overlord amongst his Peers. This sets in simultaneously with the architecture of the great cathedrals and the P yramids the stone and the blood elevated into symbols, the one meaning, the other being. The idea of feudalism, which has dominated all Springtimes, is the transition from the primitive, purely practical and factual, relationship of potentate to those who obey him (whether they have chosen him or have been subdued by him) into the private-law (and, therefore, deeply symbolical) relation of the lord to the vassal.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.373

The mightiest expression that the feudal idea found for itself not merely in the West, but in any Culture came out in the struggle between Empire and Papacy, both of which dreamed of a consummation in which the entire world was to become an immense feudal system, and so intimately enwove themselves into the dream that, with the decay of feudalism, both together fell from their heights in lamentable ruin.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.376

What this fall of Papacy and Empire meant was the victory of State over Estate. At the root of the feudal system there had been the feeling that the purpose of existence was that a "life" should be led in the light of what it meant. History was exhaustively comprised in the destinies of noble blood. But now the feeling sprang up that there was something else besides, something to which even nobility was subordinate, and which it shared with all other classes (whether of status or of vocation), something intangible, an idea.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.378

The combination of both elements produces the idea of Dynasty. This is so deeply rooted in the Cosmic and so closely interwoven into the factual web of historical life that the State-ideas of each and all the Cultures are modifications of this one principle, from the passionate affirmative of the Faustian to the resolute negative of the Classical Soul. The rip ening of the State-idea of a Culture is associated with the city and even the adolescence of the city. Nations, historical peoples, are town-building peoples. The capital takes the place of the castle and the palace as the centre of high history, and in it the feeling of the exercise of power, Themis, transforms itself into that of government, Dike. Here feudal unity is inwardly overcome by national, even in the consciousness of the First Estate itself, and here the bare fact of rulership elevates itself into the symbol of Sovereignty.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.385

With the beginning of the Late period there is a decisive turn, where city and country are in equilibrium and the powers proper to the city, money and brains, have become so strong that they feel themselves, as non-estate, an equal match for the old Estates. It is the moment when the State-idea finally rises superior to the Estates and begins to set up in their place the concept of the Nation. The State has fought and won to its rights along a line of advance from feudal union to the aristocratic State. In the latter the Estates exist only with reference to the State, instead of vice versa, but, on the other hand, the disposition of things is such that the Government only meets the governed nation when and in so far as the nation is class-ordered. Everyone belongs to the nation, but only an elite to the classes, and these alone count politically.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.386

In the West this struggle of the old Estates against the State-power took the form of the Fronde. In the Classical world, where there was no dynasty to represent the future and the aristocracy alone had political existence, we find that a dynastic or quasi-dynastic embodiment of the State-idea actually formed itself, and, supported by the non-privileged part of the nation, raised this latter for the first time to power. That was th e mission of the Tyrannis.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.387

The sixth-century Tyrannis brought the Polis-idea to its conclusions and created the constitutional concept of the Citizen, the Polites, the Civis, the sum of these, irrespective of their classprovenance, forming the soma of the city-state. When, therefore, the oligarchy contrived to win after all thanks once more to the Classical craving for the present, and the consequent fear and hatred evoked by the quasi-will-to-duration of the dynasts the concept of the citizen was there, firmly established, and the non-patrician had learned to regard himself as an estate vis-b-vis a "rest." He had become a political party the word "democracy" (in its specifically Classical sense) now acquired a really serious content and what he set himself to do was, no longer to come to the aid of the State, but to be himself the State as the nobility had been before. He began to count money and heads, for the money-census and the general franchise are alike bourgeois weapons whereas an aristocracy does not count, but values, and votes not by heads, but by classes.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.397-398

But Rome was unique in all Classical history in this equilibrium of Senate and Tribunate. Everywhere else it was a matter not of swaying balance, but of sheer alternatives, namely Oligarchy or Ochlocracy. The absolute Polis and the Nation which was identical with it were accepted as given premisses, but of the inward forms none possessed stability. The victory of one party meant the abolition of all the institutions of the other, and people became accustomed to regard nothing as either venerable enough or useful enough to be exempt from the chances of the day's battle. [...] With this, the future was set for Rome. It was the one state in which political passions had persons only, and no longer institutions, as their target; the only one w hich was firmly in "form." Senatus Populusque Romanus that is, Senate and Tribunate was the form of forged bronze that no party would henceforward batter, whereas all the rest, with the narrowness of their individual power-horizons in the world of Classical states, were only able to prove once more the fact that domestic politics exist simply in order that foreign politics may be possible.