Facing the Hour of Decision - Spengler’s Faustian Virtues in a Libertarian Order
This essay attempts a synthesis that may at first appear paradoxical: it brings into productive contact Oswald Spengler’s cultural-pessimist diagnosis of Western decline, articulated most sharply in ‘The Hour of Decision’ (1933) and prefigured in ‘The Decline of the West’ (1918/1922) with the radical libertarian, anarcho-capitalist project I have articulated in my ‘Pathways towards a Stateless World Society’ and in ‘Markets and Discourses – Politics after the Libertarian Revolution’. The contrast in philosophical outlook is stark: Spengler proponent of a cyclical conception of history, a fatalist, a critic of both democracy and capitalist money-rule, and the exponent of an aristocratic-Prussian ethic of duty and honour. I argue, however, that once Spengler’s diagnosis is detached from his cyclical metaphysics, and once his conflation of social structure with social stratification is corrected by Luhmann’s theory of functional differentiation, a deep convergence emerges. Spengler’s critique of levelling rationalism, of the worker-cult, of the parliamentary-journalistic class that has dissolved European society since the French Revolution, and his celebration of a Faustian character marked by realism, courage, duty, dignity, and commitment to a shared mission, can all be re-integrated into the libertarian project. What Spengler honoured as the highpoint of Western culture, embodied in true statesmen, great entrepreneurs, inventors, engineers, and leaders of industry, will not return through a Prussian-Caesarist authoritarianism. It can re-emerge, and in our historical moment can only re-emerge, within a libertarian order grounded in markets and discourses.
Every individual is confronted with an inevitable choice. It behoves him to know definitely where he stands, on the Right or the Left; otherwise the course of history, which is stronger than all theory and ideological dreaming, will decide for him.
— Oswald Spengler, The Hour of Decision, 1933
This essay is an attempt to appropriate Oswald Spengler’s erudition, insights, striking historical analogies, his trenchant critique of opportunistic party politics and his hard hitting anti-democratic/anti-socialist polemics, as well as his spirited promotion of embattled but enduring moral virtues for my libertarian project. Just to avoid any misunderstandings that might flow from the phrase “anti-democratic” from the start: As a libertarian with the conviction that the state must be cut back – ultimately to zero – not only is socialism my political enemy but I consider all forms of democracy that project state power to be highly problematic and – especially in the current era of post-Fordist network society - increasingly counterproductive. The more scope democracy is given the less individual scope for initiatives is left. I have no problem with democratic decision making in any voluntary association like a club, mutual aid society, cooperative, or political party. This also includes shareholder democracy in joint stock companies where voting rights are naturally proportionate to holdings. To be sure, given a certain level or scope of state power, I prefer a democratically constituted over an autocratic government. I thus fully appreciate the relative advantages of liberal democracies over autocracies or single party dictatorships. For me the question is – especially given the economic stagnation, fiscal deterioration and the erosion of trust in political institutions we find in most advanced liberal democracies – which political reforms and transformations allows advanced societies to regain their economic dynamism? For me that answer lies certainly not in the expansion of the scope of democracy. Quite the opposite must happen: The expansion of the scope for private, civil society initiatives of all kinds, including economic initiatives. In this sense, the roll back of the state necessarily implies the role back of democracy. In the context of this libertarian agenda, an astute critic of socialism and democracy like Oswald Spengler – a critic with a keen eye towards the pathologies of mass democracy who also understood the tendency of democracy to become increasingly interventionist and socialistic – can be a very useful resource.
With respect to Spengler’s question of knowing where to take once’s stance, on the Right or the Left, my position is clear: I am standing on the Right. However, this statement can be misleading. While I am sharing Spengler’s firm opposition to all left-leaning political projects, I am not sharing or endorsing Spengler’s conservative, traditionalist, nationalist position. To clarify this difference on the Right, we need to enrich the political compass with a second (vertical) axis that cuts across the (horizontal) Left-Right axis: We need to distinguish a libertarian Right, my position, from an authoritarian Right, Spengler’s position. The same axis distinguishes at one pole an authoritarian left, e.g. Stalinism, from a libertarian left, i.e. left-wing or communistic anarchism at the opposite pole. While I am not sure how far out on the authoritarian spectrum I would locate Spengler’s position, I can say with consolidated confidence that my own position – anarcho-capitalism as a long-term goal – is located at the extreme end of the libertarian spectrum. That this position – however rare it is at the current moment – is not a mere utopian dream but a plausible prospect at a time of rapid technological and indeed political transformations has been argued in depth in my ‘Pathways to a Stateless World Society’ (Schumacher, 2024). Despite the fact that my espoused political position is (currently) an outlier, I do not feel politically isolated. There are many political positions, movements and parties in the UK and in Europe – including the Conservative Party (which has moved to the right in opposition), Reform UK, Restore Britain, Advance UK, the UK Libertarian Party (LPUK) in Britain, the Alternative for Deutschland (AfD), the Free Democratic Party (FDP), WerteUnion, and Atlas Initiative in Germany, and many other European right-of-centre parties – that all share the same direction of rightward travel towards economic liberalisation, lower taxes, less regulation, and profess a willingness to return more scope to civil society, up to a point. We are currently still some distance away from this point where this shared rightward direction will fray and bifurcate into a somewhat statist-authoritarian versus a more libertarian direction. Until this point has been reached all political currents moving rightward from the position where our left-liberal democracies are currently stuck, can draw insights, inspirations and incisive polemics from Spengler’s ‘Hour of Decision’.
What we can learn from Spengler, as well as from other conservative critics of democracy like Carl Schmitt, is that the original strength of the parliamentary political systems – the utilisation of rational discourse within parliament (as was emphasized by Edmund Burke in 1774), embedded within a public sphere where debates were conducted by an educated, reading public of engaged and accomplished civil society stakeholders – had been increasingly perverted, due to the rapid expansion of voting rights. This together with the simultaneous expansion of state power and intervention implied that the political process became increasingly susceptible to demagogy and corruption. In his 1923 book ‘The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy’ Carl Schmitt lists the deficiencies and pathologies of modern mass democracy at that time as follows: “the dominance of parties, their unprofessional politics of personalities, the government of amateurs, continuing governmental crises, the purposelessness and banality of parliamentary debate, the declining standard of parliamentary customs, the destructive methods of parliamentary obstruction, the misuse of parliamentary immunities and privileges by a radical opposition which is contemptuous of parliamentarism itself, the undignified daily order of business, the poor attendance in the House”(Schmitt, 1923/1988, p.19). Schmitt argued that the principles and rules underlying the classical 19th Century parliamentary systems and which are still preserved in all modern constitutions – the independence of the representatives and the publicity of the proceedings – make sense as safeguarding the parliament’s deliberative function in discursive exchange with an informed public – but make no longer sense in the 20th Century situation of universal suffrage mass democracies. Schmitt further elaborates:
“The impression based on long familiar observations has gradually spread: that proportional representation and the list system destroy the relationship between voters and representatives, make fractions an indispensable means of government in parliament, and make the so-called representative principle (article 21 of the Reich constitution that “the members are representatives of the whole people, they are only responsible to their own consciences and not bound to any instructions”) meaningless; further, that the real business takes place, not in the open sessions of a plenum, but in committees and not even necessarily in parliamentary committees, and that important decisions are taken in secret meetings of faction leaders or even in extra-parliamentary committees so that responsibility is transferred and even abolished, and in this way the whole parliamentary system finally becomes only a poor facade concealing the dominance of parties and economic interests.” (Schmitt, 1923/1988, pp.19-20)
One hundred years on these same pathologies evidently persist. Then and now, a situation persists in which we have both too much democracy in the sense of too much scope for political control of society and too little democracy in the sense of genuine parliamentary debate and public discourse about the areas that are supposedly still meant to be democratically controlled. These too pathologies amplify each other in a vicious spiral.
Both Spengler and Schmitt agree that 20th Century universal suffrage parliamentarism, especially since socialist parties have been soaring politically, are plagued by demagogy. What surprised me in reading Spengler was the discovery that the kind of aggressive, moralising ideological phenomenon we are today plagued by and call woke leftism - with its defamation of all who fail to genuflect in front of its anointed group - did not begin in 2010, nor in the 1990s when it was called political correctness, nor even in 1968 as many surmise but was already rampant 100 years ago and started first over 200 years ago around the French revolution and then in a more generalised form around the revolutions of 1848. We are not talking about the particular ideology of wokeness with its particular anointed group but about a strikingly similar moralising political process, with many equivalent features and dynamics.
What we also learn from Spengler is that this phenomenon is not a purely ideological phenomenon, but connected to power struggles with materialist rather than idealist motivations of the protagonists. We also learn about some of the material mechanisms and political power dynamics that are at play and that very similar, structurally equivalent or at least comparable dynamics were already at play in the final decades of the Roman Republic.
For Spengler, the hour of decision is the hour of the terminal decline of the West brought about by the dissolution of the Western societal order and virtues through what he calls the White Revolution, beginning with the Jacobins radical egalitarianism and reign of terror and – in Spengler’s time - reaching its up to then most extreme phase in Russia’s bolshevism. But he also saw 19th Century and 20th Century Western parliamentarism, increasingly pushed and determined by socialist parties, in particular with respect to the Weimar Republic, as a factor and symptom of Western decline, weakening the West internally and externally. He, in my view rightly, attributed the 1929 global financial crash and the Great Depression that followed to these egalitarian tendencies driving state interventionism. Spengler saw this demagogic-egalitarian interventionism as another – compared to Lenin’s bolshevism perhaps less crude - form of power grab of the demagogic-revolutionary political class. Spengler’s intuitive sense of the ideological, cultural and political dynamics that led to the Great Depression was confirmed in the precise economic analysis and explanation of the Great Depression articulated by Mises, Hayek, and later Rothbard. The broader outlook upon the dangerous tendencies Spengler identified was then more fully formulated in Hayek’s famous 1944 book ‘The Road to Serfdom’. However, Spengler does – amidst this gloomy pessimism – allow for a faint flicker of hope for Western civilisation: He thought that the German nation who as the only of the great European nations had not yet played a world historical role, had not yet exhausted and dissolved all its slumbering potentials for Faustian vigour, missionary zeal, greatness and will to lead.
Our current economic and political situation shows some parallels to the situation Spengler was confronting. Since the 2008 global financial crash and the Great Recession that followed, the economic dynamism unleashed by the Thatcher-Reagan neo-liberal revolution - allowing the momentous, computational technology induced post-fordist socio-economic restructuring to deliver a new, highly innovative high-productivity economy – experienced a major setback, leading to a resurgence of state interventionism and by now nearly two decades of stagnation, with no revitalisation in sight. The 2008 crash – just like the 1929 crash – was itself already a result of increasing state interference (since the early 2000s) blocking the vital self-regulation and self-correction mechanisms of market economies. This period of policy-induced stagnation was further acerbated by a resurgent Western leftism pushing the political class and itself pushing into the political class, as well as into the public sector, education, NGOs and the media, scaring business into the adoption of counter-productive DEI processes, cumulatively leading to the woke take-over of society. That living standards are stagnating or only slowly rather than precipitously sinking is due to the fact that technology-induced productivity gains in many sectors are still happening. These gains - fritted away and consumed in the political alimentation machine – are so far preventing the outright collapse of the advanced economies. At the same time the political alimentation machine is relying on increasing deficit spending and an ominous and inflationary build-up of sovereign debt. Inflation is further eroding the incomes and savings of all who are still self-reliant and prudent rather than falling back on alimentation. The predictable backlash against these paralysing tendencies is now hitting Western Europe via the growth of right-wing populist parties, now in many key nations like the UK, France and Germany at the cusp of taking power. The problem with this right-wing populism is that here the leadership’s common sense libertarian positions are increasingly swamped by the more popular statist, nationalist factions within these new parties.
The situation in Germany is particularly dramatic. The exclusion from power of the right-of-centre Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) – now by far the highest polling party across the whole of Germany – implies that the woke left can continue to dominate government, with the result of rapid de-industrialisation and the simultaneous expansion of the welfare state, also due to uncontrolled immigration into the welfare system. As I have argued in my 2024 substack article “Thesis on German Rightwing Populism”, the German economic powerhouse is seriously at risk, and that, as matters stand politically in Germany, the AfD might be the only force that can save this highly evolved but endangered prosperity engine, one of very few specimens of this distinctive, high-trust, high-performance species. As I formulated then: “Even today, there is only a handful of these engines in full flourish. Germany has been, and probably still is or can be, one of them, and it would not be in the long-term interest of world society to let Germany, or any of these precious engines be fractured, slowed or compromised in its further development potential” (Schumacher, 2024).
My thesis is that the decisive political battle in our current ‘hour of decision’ is not only a battle over fundamental institutional reform, but simultaneously and inseparably a battle over the cultural conditions that determine whether a libertarian civilisational renewal is possible. The right-wing populist backlash against the woke-administrative apparatus, however necessary as a signal of civilisational resistance, will not by itself deliver the required transformation: without a clear libertarian direction, it risks substituting a nationalist-statist governance for the progressive-statist governance it opposes, leaving the productive substrate of advanced civilisation no more liberated than before. What is required alongside the economic and institutional argument is the cultural recovery of a certain type of human being — the founder, the entrepreneur in the original sense as risk-bearer, the institution-builder, the discourse-leader, as well as, more generally, the self-reliant worker who accepts full existential responsibility for him/herself and his/her family. This is the specific perhaps hitherto insufficiently considered aspect I would like to draw into our libertarian discourse via my reading of Spengler: the importance of not only the economic but also of the cultural, moral and characterological implications of the contested political directions we are confronted with in this new hour of decision. Here lies Spengler’s strength, in his analysis of the forces that undermine virtue and character, and in his insistence that character matters.
However, my key thesis – contra Spengler – is that only a libertarian revolution that rolls back the state and the emergence of a truly libertarian order can, under current technological and historical conditions, prepare the soil upon which men and women imbued with Spengler’s Faustian virtues can grow and flourish. To break through this vicious cycle of corrupting institutions and corrupt characters we need both determined entrepreneurs who persist with their innovative ventures even in the face of our current political conditions, as well as true political leaders – not career politicians – who against the odds keep working towards the libertarian revolution, inspiring and building an organised libertarian movement packed with committed entrepreneurial characters. In this matter of character building, the polemic force and indeed pathos we find in Spengler is not a liability but can be an asset, an asset that libertarianism can appropriate, learn from and build upon. Big projects like the libertarian revolution or the founding of a network of free cities require not only a sharp, hard-nosed intellect, but a generous character with big aspirations, and an indefatigable energy that can only be mobilised by a big and deep inspiration.
The odds can change fast. We are living in revolutionary times. The hour of decision is approaching. It will pay to be prepared.
The book I am bringing to bear here is the relatively short but impressively intense, spirited and often polemic book entitled “The Hour of Decision – Germany and World-historical Evolution”, in German: Jahre der Entscheidung – Deutschland und die Weltgeschichtliche Entwicklung. The book is an expansion of a lecture Spengler gave in 1929 under the title “Deutschland in Gefahr” (Germany in danger). This was also the originally planned title for the book. It had been fully written before Hitler took power in early 1933, and therefore does not take account of this most momentous event. In fact, the bulk of the book was already printed, so Spengler decided to publish it without revisions. However, he changed the title to avoid an otherwise inevitable misunderstanding. The book was then released with the new title in August of 1933. The English translation was published in 1934.
Spengler was not a supporter of the National Socialists and they in turn did not like this book. While Spengler did not shed tears over the demise of the Weimar Republik which he detested, and while he thought a new Caesar - then and now called upon to end the chaos of the late republic - was required to take over the reins, he did not believe that a mass movement and party like the NSDAP could play the required role, nor did he think Hitler can be the new Caesar. Here is what Spengler wrote in the new introduction to ‘The Hour of Decision’ he crafted after the Hitler take over:
“I shall neither scold nor flatter. I refrain from forming any estimate of those things which are only just coming into being. … The seizure of power took place in a confused whirl of strength and weakness. I see with misgiving that it continues to be noisily celebrated from day to day. … In any movement with such a beginning there are many possible developments of which the participants are not often fully aware. The movement may become rigid from excess of principles and theories; it may go under in political, social, or economic anarchy, or it may return to where it started without results. … The intoxication of the moment, which often ruins coming possibilities at the outset, is usually followed by disillusionment and uncertainty as to the next step. Elements come into power which regard the enjoyment of that power as an event in itself and would fain perpetuate a state of things which is tenable for moments only. Sound ideas are exaggerated into self-glorification by fanatics, and that which held promise of greatness in the beginning ends in tragedy or comedy.” (Spengler, 1934, pp.19-20)
One more note of introduction with respect to my reading of Spengler’s ‘The Hour of Decision’: Spengler’s book places a lot of emphasis on geo-politics. His thesis here is that this is not only the age of revolutions but the age of world wars, which will go on until a world dominating power has been able to establish itself, an Imperium Mundi as planetary equivalent of what the Imperium Romanum was for the Mediterranean world. (The key contenders for him were Germany, USA, Russia, Japan). He was also very prescient in stating in 1933 that the second world war was imminent. However, while I do not dismiss the continuing importance of geo-politics – how could I at a time when the contest for world dominance is, once more, on with tense global confrontations and wars – this geo-political theme is not the topic of my engagement with Spengler here. While Spengler sees geo-politics – understood as the struggle of political units for dominance and domination – as primary and political priority that motivates internal political and economic organisation as organisation of externally projected strength, this emphasis is decidedly not taken up here in my reading. My focus here, as libertarian, is on forms of societal order with a view towards prosperity. For me prosperity, not power, is what ultimately drives (and should drive) politics and history. (While I believe that anarcho-capitalist islands and networks of such islands can emerge, persist and expand within a world of states and power blocks, even with wars flaring up around the world as we witness today, a long phase of basic geopolitical stability would be a requirement for the gradual emergence of a stateless world society as envisioned in my ‘Pathsways’.)
Spengler and the anarcho-capitalist libertarian would, on a first encounter, seem to belong to different intellectual universes. Spengler regarded Western civilisation as entering its winter phase, its springtime of Faustian striving long behind it; he saw the rule of finance and parliamentary liberalism as themselves symptoms of decline, to be overcome by a final Caesarist age. The libertarian project, by contrast, is constitutively progress-oriented. As I have put it in my ‘Pathways towards a Stateless World Society’: The system of increasingly interventionist states has become a historical fetter on the further development of the productive forces. World society’s mode of material reproduction has dramatically shifted in recent decades due to the advance of computation and telecommunication which in turn transformed forms of economic organisation and work. These relatively recent historical conditions invite and indeed necessitate a radical liberalisation as a pre-condition for the full exploitation of the technological and economic potentials of world civilisation. (Schumacher,2024, p.259)
Spengler is a pessimist and fatalist; the libertarian, on the materialist register I have argued for, is a guarded optimist. And yet the closer one reads Spengler’s political diagnoses, especially in ‘The Hour of Decision’, the more familiar much of it sounds to anyone who has been making the libertarian case against our all-controlling state. As we shall see below, Spengler is vehemently opposed to wrest economic decisions from owner-entrepreneurs to bring the economy and its key parameters under the control of party politics and programmes. Consider Spengler’s portrait of the utopian rationalist or revolutionary intellectual who has become the dominant cultural type of late modernity:
“This doctrinaire clinging to theory for lack of experience, or rather this lack of ability to make experience, finds literary expression in a flood of schemes for political, social, and economic systems and Utopias, and practical expression in that craze for organization which, becoming an aim in itself, produces bureaucracies that either collapse through their own hollowness or destroy the living order.” (Spengler, 1934, p.29)
One could lift this passage almost unchanged into a contemporary libertarian polemic against the current left-utopian schemes like Universal Basic Income, The Green New Deal, against the ESG and DEI industries, against NGO complex as well as against the proliferating compliance bureaucracies that demand the production of mountains of documentation. The “craze for organization” that produces bureaucracies which destroy the living order is exactly the contemporary state’s war on the productive economy. Spengler’s targets and the libertarian’s targets are very often the same targets, observed from different angles. What differs is the proposed remedy.
Spengler’s trenchant anti-rationalist polemic and his respect for the historically evolved societal order anticipated Friedrich von Hayek’s critique of what he termed “constructivist rationalism”. Hayek’s target is the Cartesian/Hobbesian/Rousseauian tendency to treat society as if it were an artefact: a machine, a building, or an organisation that can be made according to a blueprint. Against this, Hayek insists that many of the most important institutions—language, law, morals, money, markets, property, common-law rules—are results of human action but not of human design. In ‘Law, Legislation and Liberty’(1973-79), Hayek defines the error very directly: constructivist rationalism assumes that social institutions are, and ought to be, products of deliberate design. He says this is false both factually and normatively: factually, because institutions such as law, money, language, and markets often evolved; normatively, because making the whole social order dependent on design would suppress the dispersed knowledge that only decentralised interaction can use. Rules of conduct may embody experience that no one can fully articulate. Hayek repeatedly argues that we often follow rules before we can explain them. In ‘The Fatal Conceit’(1988), he says reason itself is not the originator of civilisation but one of its products: human beings became rational through traditions, habits, and moral rules that made extended cooperation possible. However, as Hayek notes, constructivist rationalism is attractive because it flatters intellectuals: it promises visible purpose, moral control, and direct responsibility for outcomes. The market order, by contrast, is abstract, impersonal, and often opaque. Reading Spengler I was impressed to note that Hayek’s insights and critique of constructivist rationalism (that I had long since made my own) can be interpreted as an elaboration of insights which Spengler had already articulated earlier.
Spengler, writing in 1933 in the shadow of the Weimar collapse, perceived a continuous historical curve of European decay running from the French Revolution forward. He read it through Roman parallels: the Gracchan revolution, Catiline’s demagogy, the urban plebs fed by “panem et circenses”, the eventual transition from the Republic to the Caesarist Imperium. He understood the European nineteenth and twentieth centuries as the analogue of the late Republic’s death-throes:
“For we live in a mighty age. … It corresponds to the Classical Age from Cannae to Actium, to the age illumined by the names of Hannibal, Scipio, and Gracchus, Marius, Sulla, and Caesar. The World War was but the first flash and crash from the fateful thundercloud which is passing over this century. … The coward’s security of 1900 is at an end. Life in danger, the real life of history, comes once more into its own. Everything has begun to slide, and now only that man counts who can take risks, who has the courage to see and accept things as they are.” (Spengler, 1934, p.36)
Spengler’s most devastating passage in this register comes when he draws up the balance sheet of what he calls the White Revolution — the long, low, continuous victory of the parasitic political-bureaucratic class over the productive substance of European civilisation:
“But who, then, really won the World War? … The labour leader won the War. That which in every country is called the Labour party and the trade union, but is in reality the trade union of party officials, the bureaucracy of the Revolution, gained the mastery and is now ruling over Western Civilization. … The sack of society has been accomplished. It was the reward of the mercenaries in the class war. The natural centre of gravity of the economic body, the economic judgment of the real experts, was replaced by an artificial, non-expert, party-political one. The equilibrium was destroyed and the structure collapsed.” (Spengler, 1934, p.138)
Strip away the cyclical metaphysics and consider what Spengler is actually describing. He describes a political class that has detached itself from any productive function and lives off the manipulation of mass opinion; a parasitic bureaucracy of party officials and revolutionary functionaries who have captured the state apparatus; the replacement of “the economic judgment of the real experts” who take real personal responsibility, staking both their reputation and their property by the decisions through “artificial, non-expert, party-political” experts who are always shielded from the material consequences of their decisions; the deliberate ideological war waged against rank, property, achievement, and competence by an alliance of urban intellectuals and welfare-dependent masses.
Now consider the libertarian diagnosis of late post-Fordist stagnation. I have argued both in ‘Pathways’ and in ‘Markets and Discourses’ that we live through a historically unprecedented technological transformation — the convergence of computation and tele-communication, robotic and additive fabrication, software-as-a-service, and most recently the AI revolution, all implying the capacity of absorbing unlimited innovations — whose productive potential is being systematically choked off by an inherited administrative apparatus that has become a fetter. The point of referring here to the accelerating technological dynamics of our times is that these new productivity propelling dynamics make all attempts at political overlording even more counterproductive as at any earlier time. Productivity could soar much faster, and prosperity could grow accordingly. Today, however, the productivity gains made by some are now fritted away and swamped by the simultaneous expansion of counterproductive and costly political control and redistribution efforts, resulting in the extraordinary schism of prosperity stagnation at the very time when technology builds up unheard of prosperity potentials. This massive pent-up potential could be released by the libertarian revolution I have been calling for.
In advanced economies the state controls often up to 50% of GDP and moreover burdens 100% of GDP production with questionable regulations that stifle the free flow of entrepreneurship and market exchanges, lowering productivity and slowing down innovation. … Government and parliaments are certainly massively overburdened by the task of optimally allocating 40% or 50% of GDP, even more so by the task of regulation. In either case incentives through direct existential feedback are missing and ideological rhetoric, if not outright demagogy, guide the parliamentary work more than the kind of direct feedback market participants are continuously exposed to.
The two diagnoses pick out the same patient. Where Spengler sees civilisational winter, the libertarian sees institutional sclerosis. Where Spengler sees the labour-leader caste having “won the World War” and now ruling Western civilisation, the libertarian sees the left-liberal activist class capturing the modern, increasingly intrusive state and turning it against the productive economy it depends on. Where Spengler sees a culture sick in its instincts that “offers no defence,” the libertarian sees an NGO complex and a media-academic establishment that has lost the capacity to respect, or even understand the conditions of its own material reproduction, and is therefore busy undermining these conditions. The crucial difference lies in the prognosis. Spengler reads the dynamic as the unalterable working-out of a cultural destiny. The libertarian reads it as a contingent political-institutional crisis with available solutions.
What a reading of Spengler can add to the libertarian discourse, beyond the awareness of striking historical precedents and parallels, is the reflection on the ethical and characterological dimension of political life. My claim is that a substantial part of Spengler’s positive ethical vision — the part that concerns strength of character, virtue, dedication, and the dignity of overcoming difficulties in accomplishing important tasks — can be detached from his Caesarist-fatalist prescription and integrated into the libertarian project. Indeed, I will argue something stronger: that the libertarian project, properly understood, is not merely compatible with the Faustian-Spenglerian character ideal, but is in our historical moment the only social order in which that character can flourish at scale. The contemporary administrative-managerial state — with its proceduralised compliance regimes, its inflated external responsibilities and collapsing internal authorities, its therapeutic-safeguarding paradigms and journalistic moral panics — is the actual destroyer of Faustian character. The libertarian revolution would be its restitution.
“People” no longer meant the community of the whole nation, but that section of the city masses which set up in opposition to this community. The proletarian appeared as the hero on the stage of the progressive bourgeoisie.
— Spengler, The Hour of Decision
One of Spengler’s sharpest pieces of cultural analysis concerns the construction of “the worker” as a moral-political fiction in nineteenth-century Liberal-Romantic thought. It is worth quoting at length, because the structural form of the diagnosis applies directly to our own moment:
“The concept of the proletariat, created with deliberate intention by Socialist theoreticians, has been accepted by the middle classes. Actually, it has nothing to do with the thousand branches of strict and skilled labour — from fishing to book-printing, from tree-felling to engine-driving — and is scorned and felt as a disgrace by industrious, trained workers. It was intended solely to secure the amalgamation of these workers with the city mob for the purpose of overthrowing the social order. … A fatal notion of things, half false and half stupid, began to pervade educated and semi-educated minds: “the worker” becomes the real person, the real nation, the meaning and aim of history, politics, public care. The fact that all men work, and moreover that others — the inventor, the engineer, the organizer — do more, and more important, work is forgotten. No one any longer dares to bring forward the class or quality of his achievement as a gauge of its value. Only work measured in hours now counts as labour. … The whole middle class swings the censer before this phantom. No matter what one’s own achievements in life may be, one must fall on one’s knees before him. His being stands above all criticism.” (Spengler, 1934, p.117)
Spengler’s point is not only the sociological one that the leaders of left-wing movements are typically bourgeois — though, as he caustically observes, they typically are academics like Marx and Lasalle, or lawyers like Danton and Robespierre and “the rest were literary men and journalists. There was not a single working man among them” (Spengler, 1934, p.111). His point is conceptual. “The worker” is a fabricated political abstraction that abstracts away from the actual differentiation of productive achievement. The “inventor, the engineer, the organizer,” whose contribution is “more, and more important, work,” are erased. What remains is a sacralised, lump-abstract category before which respect must be performed, and around which an entire political economy of entitlement, victim-status, and moral immunity from criticism is constructed.
This Spenglerian dissection has, I want to argue, an exact contemporary structural analogue, and the analogue is the ideology of multi-culturalism, where the “worker” of the early 20th Century as object of care and concern has been replaced by the noble, innocent and vulnerable immigrant. In my ‘Multi-culturalism and Ethnic Pride as Barriers to Prosperity’ I have argued: The general, mainstream, publicly promoted attitude towards these distinct immigrant cultures is deliberately and decidedly non-judgemental. Judgement is taboo. The dominant approach is indeed … to uncritically celebrate this cultural diversity. … The persistent minority underperformance, however, is never attributed to the persistent, maladapted cultural patterns but is rather attributed to a lack of opportunities due to (supposedly groundless) persistent prejudices within the host nation, or more recently, due to myriad imperceptible forms of structural or institutional racism, “detected” and “verified” by the measured inequity of outcomes. This short-circuit conclusion is obviously scientifically indefensible but trumps the discourse unchallenged because it has become the demand of a new pervasive “morality.” Morality, as Luhmann teaches us, is all about the conditioning of respect. The simple withdrawal of respectability beats or rather silences here all rational arguments. (Schumacher, 2023)
Like Spengler’s “worker,” the multi-culturalist’s “marginalised community” is a fabricated political abstraction. It pools together radically different groups under a homogenising moral category; it abstracts away from the comparative analysis of which behavioural patterns, work ethics, attitudes to education, family structures, and trust networks actually produce flourishing and which do not; and it treats its protected category as immune from the very criticism by which any culture, including the dominant productive cultures of the modern West, has historically improved itself. In both cases the mechanism is the one Spengler intuited and Luhmann theorised: morality functions as the conditioning of respect and disrespect, and the simple withdrawal of respectability is sufficient to silence rational argument before it gets started. The contemporary academic, journalist, or corporate HR officer does not dare apply the same comparative judgement to non-Western cultural patterns that he routinely applies to Western ones, exactly as Spengler’s nineteenth-century bourgeoisie did not dare to “pour the same scorn on the working man” as it freely poured on “judges, officers, and heads of businesses.”
Spengler’s analysis goes further, and the further step is essential for understanding the contemporary scene. He traces the historical genealogy of the worker-cult itself, showing that the demagogic class did not begin by appealing to the industrial proletariat. It began by attempting to mobilise the peasantry and craftsmen, found these populations resistant to mobilisation, and only then — with explicit deliberation — turned to the uprooted urban mass that proved more susceptible to its methods. The passage is one of the most important in The Hour of Decision and deserves to stand in full:
“This active Liberalism progresses from Jacobinism to Bolshevism logically. These are not in opposition of thought and will, but are the Early and the Late form, the beginning and the end, of one single movement. It began about 1770 with sentimental social-political tendencies: the structure of society according to class and rank was to be destroyed; and there was to be a “Return to Nature,” to the uniformity of the herd. The place of class was to be taken by that which has no class: money and intelligence, counting-house and lecturer’s chair, arithmeticians and clerks; in place of form-ordered existence, life without form, manners, obligations, respect. It was only about 1840 that this “social-political” tendency passed into an “economic-political” one. The scapegoats are now no longer the aristocrats, but the possessors, from peasant to entrepreneur. The disciples of the movement are promised, not equal rights, but the privilege of the unpropertied; not freedom for all, but the dictatorship of the city proletariat, the “workers.” But this represents no change of a world outlook — which was, and still is, materialistic and utilitarian — but solely a change in revolutionary methods. The professional demagogues now mobilize a different section of the nation for class war.” (Spengler, 1934, p.109)
And the further detail — why the peasantry and craftsmen proved unsuitable as a revolutionary base — is given with characteristic precision:
“At first, about 1770, peasants and craftsmen were approached with some hesitation, both in England and in France. The cahiers of small-town and country deputies in 1789, which were supposed to represent the “Cry of the Nation,” were composed by professional ranters and were not understood at all by the greater part of the electorate. These classes were too deeply rooted in tradition to be unconditionally available as means and weapons. Without the mob from the eastern suburbs — the fists of the capital, always handy — the Reign of Terror in Paris would have been impossible. … Hence the failure of the Convention: peasantry and craftsmen were no reliable following for professional demagogues. They possessed a native sense of respect and self-respect. They had too much instinct and too little town-intelligence. They were industrious and had learnt something; besides, they wished to leave the farm or the workshop to their sons. No permanent effect could be made upon them by programs and catchwords. (The agitation towards this stratum was promptly abandoned when it was found not to have had the desired result.) Only about 1840 did the pamphlet-and-platform demagogy of Western Europe, whose development had proceeded on uniform lines, discover a better medium for their ends in the uprooted mass of men who had gathered round the North-European coal area — the type of the industrial worker.” (Spengler, 1934, p.110)
Two observations of fundamental analytical importance follow from these passages. First, the demagogic class is logically prior to the constituency it claims to represent. The professional agitators who composed the cahiers of 1789, the “pamphlet-and-platform demagogy” of the 1840s, are not the spokesmen of a pre-existing political subject called “the people” or “the worker.” They are an autonomous formation — the literary-journalistic-activist class — in search of a mass through which to operate. The mass is selected on technical grounds: its rootlessness, its detachment from inherited responsibilities and traditions, its lack of “instinct,” its susceptibility to “programs and catchwords.” Peasants and craftsmen are unsuitable because they have “too much instinct and too little town-intelligence” — because they are formed by the productive work they do and the inherited culture they inhabit, and are therefore inhospitable hosts for abstract revolutionary catechisms. The industrial worker of the 1840s is suitable because, in Spengler’s decisive phrase, he is “uprooted” — detached from the cultural and economic substrate that would have given him a sense of “respect and self-respect” independent of what the agitators offer.
Second, and equally decisively, the choice of constituency is opportunistic, not principled. The demagogic class does not begin with a commitment to the industrial proletariat and discover its political vocation as the proletariat’s representative. It begins with a commitment to the dissolution of the inherited social structure and searches for whatever mass population can be successfully mobilised against that structure. When peasants and craftsmen prove unsuitable, “the agitation towards this stratum was promptly abandoned.” The discovery of the industrial proletariat as the mobilizable mass is a tactical-historical contingency, not a revelation of the underlying meaning of history. This is why Spengler can call Jacobinism and Bolshevism “the Early and the Late form, the beginning and the end, of one single movement” — the underlying movement is the demagogic dissolution and usurpation project, and its various political vehicles (the urban Parisian mob of 1793, the industrial proletariat of 1840-1917, and, as we shall see, the contemporary client-categories of the welfare-administrative state) are successive instrumental selections. While this interpretation of the deepest motivations of revolutionary fervour is probably too dark and cynical, I know from my own experience as participant in Marxist revolutionary activism that that fantasy of becoming politically powerful, and indeed of eventually taking over state power, was indeed a thrilling and energizing motivation that animated me and my comrades. In any event, we are talking here not primarily about psychological motivations but self-reinforcing social feedback logics in situations that are fluid, invite experimentation of multiple political projects in front of multiple audiences.
The contemporary parallel is exact and analytically crucial. The class that today operates as the demagogic administrative-academic-journalistic apparatus of the West is the lineal successor of Spengler’s “professional ranters” and “pamphlet-and-platform demagogy.” Its commitments are continuous with theirs: the dissolution of inherited social structure, the elevation of abstract universal categories over substantive differentiated communities, the moral disqualification of “the possessors,” and the redistribution of social respect and material reward through disincentivising political rather than incentivising economic channels. What has changed is the mass through which the class operates. The industrial proletariat has shrunk in the post-Fordist economies and has, in any case, partly disappointed its sponsors by becoming culturally conservative and economically integrated. The demagogic class has therefore made the same tactical pivot that Spengler diagnoses in the 1840 transition: it has identified a new “uprooted mass” suitable to its purposes, and has reorganised its mobilising vocabulary accordingly.
The new uprooted mass is the welfare-dependent client population, supplemented by recently arrived populations of migration whose cultural distance from the host society leaves them similarly detached from its inherited norms of “respect and self-respect.” This population shares the technical characteristics that Spengler identified as the demagogues’ selection criteria. It is rootless — detached from the productive cultures that would have given it independent dignity. It is economically inactive or only marginally active, leaving it without the substantive sense of contribution that peasants and craftsmen possessed. It is unanchored in inherited tradition, especially in the second and third generations. It has, in many of its segments, exactly that combination of “too little instinct” and excess of consumed media that the contemporary equivalent of “town-intelligence” has produced. And, decisively, it is dependent on the political-administrative apparatus for its livelihood, which gives the apparatus the structural leverage to organise it politically. As I argued in Multi-culturalism and Ethnic Pride as Barriers to Prosperity, the contemporary minority population that does succeed economically and acquires the substantive dignity of productive integration — East Asian, South-East Asian, Eastern European, and many of the older European migrations — promptly becomes politically unreliable from the perspective of the demagogic class, and is increasingly excluded from the protected moral categories accordingly. The principle of selection Spengler identified continues to operate.
The Roman parallel here is noteworthy, and Spengler invokes it explicitly elsewhere. The transition from peasant-citizen-soldier of the early and middle Republic to the urban plebs of the late Republic is the original instance of the phenomenon Spengler analyses. The Gracchan reformers attempted to mobilise the Italian peasantry on a programme of land redistribution — and ran into precisely the resistance the revolutionaries of the French Revolution encountered when they tried to build a mass following. The peasantry was too deeply rooted in its work, too encumbered by its productive responsibilities, to constitute a reliable political base; “the peasants, who had moved into Rome in masses to vote, had to go home again for the harvest.” After Gaius Gracchus, the demagogic tradition therefore pivoted, just as in nineteenth-century Europe, to a more politically usable population: the urban populace of Rome, fed by the corn dole, increasingly detached from productive employment, swelled by displaced rural migrants and freedmen, and available year-round for political mobilisation. The Catilinarian, Clodian, and post-Caesarian populations of the Roman streets were the late-Republican equivalent of Spengler’s “uprooted mass.” The transition from one to the other, in both cases, is the transition from a society in which political life is grounded in productive substance to one in which it is grounded in administered dependency — the transition, in Spengler’s terms, from Culture to Civilisation, and, in our libertarian terms, from a productively self-supporting society to a politically-administered redistribution machine.
This historical pattern of the demagogic recruitment of the urban masses was indeed a phenomenon already observed in ancient Rome and astutely described by the Greek historian Polybius. Polybius, quoted by Spengler, describes how ambitious Romans, exploiting and bypassing the constitution, used their wealth to capture power via the mobilisation of the up-rooted urban masses.
“So, when they begin to lust for power and cannot attain it through themselves or their own good qualities, they ruin their estates, tempting and corrupting the people in every possible way. And hence when by their foolish thirst for reputation they have created among the masses an appetite for gifts and the habit of receiving them, democracy in its turn is abolished and changes into a rule of force and violence. For the people, having grown accustomed to feed at the expense of others, and to depend for their livelihood on the property of others, as soon as they find a leader who is enterprising but is excluded from the honours of office by his penury, institute the rule of violence; and now uniting their forces massacre, banish, and plunder, until they degenerate again into perfect savages … when on the one hand they think they have a grievance against certain people who have shown themselves grasping, and when, on the other hand, they are puffed up by the flattery of others who aspire to office. For now, stirred to fury and swayed by passion in all their counsels, they will no longer consent to obey or even to be the equals of the ruling caste, but will demand the lion’s share for themselves. When this happens the state will change its name to the finest sounding of all, freedom and democracy, but will change its nature to the worst thing of all, mob-rule.” (Polybius: The Histories, VI, 9 & VI, 57, Loeb Classical Library, 1922, quoted in Spengler 1934, p.89)
History is replete with examples of this political strategy of using the rabble - what Marx termed the Lumpenproletariat - as vehicle of a power grab.
The strategic pattern Spengler identifies is not the invention of one era or one political tradition. It is a recurring structural feature of political history wherever a demagogic intellectual class exists alongside a sufficiently uprooted, demoralised, and economically marginal mass susceptible to its activations. Marx himself identified and named the phenomenon from the inside: what he called the Lumpenproletariat — the “ragged proletariat” of criminal elements, vagabonds, discharged soldiers, ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie, beggars, and the chronically unemployed — was for Marx a politically dangerous formation precisely because it lacked the productive embeddedness that he attributed (somewhat optimistically) to the industrial working class. The Lumpenproletariat was available for sale to any political entrepreneur who could pay or promise enough; it had no stake in any particular social order and was therefore perfectly mobile as a weapon. Marx was right about the structural diagnosis and wrong only in assuming that the industrial proletariat was immune to the same availability. History has since shown that populations of any class can be reduced to the Lumpenproletariat condition by the systematic removal of productive purpose, cultural rootedness, and existential responsibility — exactly the removal the political wage and the welfare-administrative state perform.
Three axes of analytical variation organise the historical instances of this strategy. The first is the character of the mass selected: veterans, unemployed urban youth, rural migrants recently urbanised, welfare-dependent populations, ethnically marginalised communities, or the deliberately impoverished. The second is the instrument of activation: the press, the party cell, the mosque or religious institution, the radio broadcast, the NGO and social media ecology. The third is the goal of the demagogic class: seizure of state power, destruction of an internal party rival, ethnic cleansing, cultural revolution against inherited institutions, or the more diffuse but equally consequential goal of institutional capture in universities, corporations, and media. What is near-universal across all instances is what may be called the discard pattern: the mass is instrumentalised, deployed, and then discarded or suppressed once the goal has been achieved. The uprooted mass is never the political subject of the enterprise; it is always the weapon. The confirmation of this is observable in the consistent fate of the deployed mass once its usefulness is exhausted.
Fascist Italy provides the first and in some ways the most instructive case, because Mussolini is perhaps the purest instance in modern history of Spengler’s demagogic intellectual class pivoting from one failed mass to another. Mussolini began as a revolutionary socialist journalist — the archetype of the “pamphlet-and-platform demagogue” — and spent his first political career attempting to mobilise the industrial proletariat. When the Socialist Party’s neutralism over the First World War made that constituency unavailable to him – he had publicly argued Italy should join the war which led to his expulsion - he performed exactly the tactical pivot Spengler diagnoses in the 1840 transition: he identified a new uprooted mass, the discharged veterans of the Italian military, and reorganised his political vehicle and vocabulary accordingly. The fasci di combattimento of 1919-1922 were organised squads of war veterans and unemployed young men, deliberately maintained in a state of violent activation, deployed to break up socialist trade union offices, cooperative movements, and municipal administrations across the Po Valley. The squadristi were Spengler’s “fists of the capital, always handy” — available precisely because they lacked the productive embeddedness that would have given them an alternative stake in social stability. After the March on Rome and Mussolini’s consolidation of power, the squadristi were progressively demobilised, absorbed into the state apparatus, or marginalised: the classic discard pattern.
National Socialist Germany follows the same logic with added ferocity. Hitler is the completed form of the demagogic type: the failed artist, the rootless urban drifter of Vienna and Munich, whose entire political method was the incitement of resentment in a mass of similarly uprooted and demoralised men, instrumentalised through the party cell, the mass rally, and the Stormtrooper (SA) organisation. The SA, which at its peak in 1933 numbered nearly three million men, was composed overwhelmingly of unemployed working-class and lower-middle-class young men — precisely the population most damaged by the Great Depression, most thoroughly stripped of the productive rootedness and self-respect that would have made them resistant to demagogic mobilisation. The SA was deployed to destroy the organised left, break up opposition political activity, and terrorise the Jewish and liberal professional classes. Once this deployment had served its purpose, Hitler had the SA leadership murdered in the Night of the Long Knives (June 1934) and transferred political-military authority to the SS — a more disciplined, ideologically-reliable instrument replacing the now-inconveniently autonomous rabble. Discard pattern: exemplary. It is worth noting that Spengler — writing at this historical moment — despised the National Socialists as the demagogic-journalistic type rather than the statesmanly-Caesarist type he had hoped for. He refused their overtures, declined the offered presidency of the German Academy, and spent his remaining years in internal exile. The man who had diagnosed the phenomenon most precisely was also among the first to recognise its latest instance for what it was.
Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution (1966–76) represents a special case, because Mao deployed the uprooted mass not against an external class enemy but against his own party apparatus — using it as a weapon in a factional struggle for internal party supremacy. By 1966 Mao had been substantially marginalised within the Communist Party leadership by Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping following the catastrophic Great Leap Forward. Unable to dislodge his rivals through internal party mechanisms, he reached outside the party structure and activated a mass that no one else had yet mobilised: the student population of Chinese universities and secondary schools. The Red Guards were students and young workers, deliberately unleashed from all conventional social and institutional constraints, empowered to “bombard the headquarters,” to attack teachers, professors, local party officials, “capitalist roaders,” and anyone carrying the stigma of education, professional expertise, or traditional cultural knowledge. In Spenglerian terms: the demagogue identified a mass that was exactly the inverse of Spengler’s peasants and craftsmen. Where the peasants were rooted in tradition, skilled in their work, and unwilling to be unconditionally available as weapons, the Red Guards were defined by the specific combination of ideological saturation, absence of productive skill or responsibility, and total institutional license that made them maximally available. When the Red Guards had served their purpose — when the rival party faction had been destroyed and Mao had reasserted supremacy — he discarded them with characteristic ruthlessness. Between 1968 and 1980 approximately 16 million urban youth were “sent down” to the countryside for “re-education through labour.” The mass was disbanded and dispersed, its members’ youth and ideological energy consumed in the factional struggle, its leadership dead, imprisoned, or scattered. Discard pattern: total.
Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge (Cambodia, 1975–79) represent the logical extreme of the strategy — the case in which the demagogic intellectual class selects a mass defined by its complete absence of cultural formation precisely because that absence makes it maximally useful as an instrument of destruction. The Khmer Rouge leadership was almost entirely composed of Paris-educated intellectuals: Pol Pot (Saloth Sar) had studied radio electronics in Paris; Ieng Sary and Khieu Samphan had studied economics and political science respectively at the Sorbonne. This was a demagogic class in the most precise Spenglerian sense — urban, highly educated, abstractly ideological, entirely detached from the productive substance of the country they proposed to transform. The mass they mobilised was the rural peasantry of the poorest provinces, deliberately selected for its absence of education, its impermeability to the competing influences of urban culture and the existing party apparatus, and its total availability as an instrument. The explicit programme — “Year Zero,” the evacuation of all cities, the execution of everyone with secondary education or above — was the logical conclusion of the surplus-value doctrine Spengler diagnosed: the elimination of the entire class of administrators, inventors, engineers, and organisers as parasites on the productive mass. The result was the destruction of between 1.5 and 2 million people, constituting between 25% and 33% of the entire Cambodian population. When the Khmer Rouge were eventually displaced by the Vietnamese invasion of 1979, the demagogic leadership retreated to the Thai border and continued to deploy its dwindling mass as a guerrilla movement for another two decades — the mass too damaged and disoriented to escape its instrumentalisation.
In the Middle East, Hamas and Hezbollah represent a structurally related but institutionally distinct variant. Both organisations were established and are sustained by an educated political-military-clerical leadership — Hamas with its Gaza-based political bureau and its Damascus and Qatar connections, Hezbollah with its Iranian-trained cadres with a link to the Supreme Leader in Tehran — that mobilises populations maintained in deliberate material and institutional deprivation. The Gaza population under Hamas is a textbook case of Spengler’s “pensioner of society” converted into a permanently mobilisable mass: sustained by UNRWA transfers that create structural dependency without enabling economic development, prevented by Hamas governance from building the autonomous economic institutions that would give the population an independent stake in stability and peace, kept in conditions of grievance and resentment that the leadership can activate at strategically chosen moments. The 2023 Hamas attack on Israel and its aftermath demonstrated the operational logic of the strategy with terrible clarity: the mass population bore the consequences of the leadership’s decision while the leadership remained in Doha hotel suites. Hezbollah has performed the same function for the Shia population of South Lebanon and the southern suburbs of Beirut: a population made dependent on Hezbollah’s parallel state structure, deprived thereby of the independent economic and institutional development that would reduce its mobilizability, and deployed as needed against Israel, against the Lebanese state, and against the Sunni and Christian communities of Lebanon. (To avoid misunderstanding: the reference to Hamas and Hezbollah here is serves as illustration of the general socio-political dynamic that is – following Spengler - my topic here, and does not imply any positioning with respect to the underlying conflict and its origins.)
The Rwandan genocide of 1994 adds a further variant: the use of the strategy for ethnic rather than class-based political goals, with the radio broadcast replacing the party cell or the mosque as the instrument of mass activation. The Hutu Power leadership — Habyarimana’s inner circle and the network of local officials and militia leaders — deployed radio (RTLM) to activate an impoverished, land-hungry rural mass against the Tutsi population and against moderate Hutus. The RTLM broadcasts were not spontaneous popular expression; they were a managed instrument of incitement, operated by educated politicians and journalists who knew exactly what they were doing. The “Interahamwe” — literally “those who attack together” — were recruited from unemployed urban youth, exactly the most uprooted segment of the Rwandan population. The genocide’s hundred days resulted in between 500,000 and 800,000 deaths. When the Rwandan Patriotic Front ended the genocide by military force, the Hutu Power leadership fled to Zaire, where they continued for years to attempt the same mobilisation with the remnants of their following. The discard pattern appeared again: when flight became necessary, the leadership departed; the mass was left behind.
Hugo Chávez’s Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela (1999–2013) and its Maduro continuation represent the contemporary democratic variant of the strategy, operating through electoral rather than violent mechanisms but with the same underlying structure. Chávez was a military officer turned media personality — the demagogic type, equipped with the oil windfall of the 2000s — who used the “misiones” (social programmes providing health, education, and subsidised food) to construct a welfare-client constituency among the urban poor of the barrios, and then deployed that constituency electorally and through the “colectivos” (armed neighbourhood organisations) against the business, professional, and middle classes. The analytical point is the Spenglerian one: the misiones were not primarily welfare instruments but constituency-manufacturing instruments, creating a client population structurally dependent on continued Bolivarian governance. As oil revenues fell after 2014 and the economic basis of the client-construction collapsed, the productive base that sustained it had already been progressively dismantled — nationalisations, expropriations, capital controls, destruction of the agricultural sector. What remained was a dependent population, a narco-military political apparatus, and an economy incapable of feeding its own people. The Spenglerian outcome: the demagogic class consumed the productive substance that had paid for its clientele, leaving a ruin.
The summer of 2020 in the United States — 140 American cities in simultaneous unrest, some sustained for months — provides the most contemporary instance and the one whose infrastructure is most continuous with the welfare-administrative and NGO ecology whose critique occupies earlier sections of this essay. The intellectual-activist class — university-educated, NGO-financed, media-amplified, legally supported through bail funds operated by organisations linked to the Democratic Party’s fundraising apparatus — mobilised and partially directed urban unrest whose participants ranged from genuine grievants to ideologically-motivated activists to opportunistic criminal elements. The mass deployed was heterogeneous, but the management of its political extraction — the narrative framing, the translation of street action into institutional demands on universities, corporations, and city governments, the defund-the-police programme — was entirely the work of an educated activist-administrative class. The subsequent political retreat from these demands — as the electoral consequences became visible — left the deployed communities bearing the costs of the policing vacuum the activist class had created and then abandoned when inconvenient: the classic discard structure.
Three analytical conclusions follow from this survey. The first is that the strategy is trans-ideological. It has been deployed by the socialist left (Lenin, Mao, Chávez), the fascist right (Mussolini, Hitler), theocratic Islamism (Khomeini, Hamas, Hezbollah), ethnic nationalist movements (Hutu Power, various), and the contemporary liberal-progressive activist class. The specific ideology of the demagogic class varies; the structural logic of the deployment is constant. This trans-ideological constancy is what Spengler’s analysis captures and what purely ideological accounts of these phenomena miss. The phenomenon is not fascism, or communism, or Islamism. It is the recurring deployment of the uprooted mass by an intellectual class that requires a mass through which to operate.
The second conclusion is what may be called the Lumpenproletariat production thesis. The uprooted mass is not a naturally occurring historical formation that political entrepreneurs merely discover and activate. In many of the most important cases — the welfare-administrative state’s client populations, the UNRWA-sustained Gaza population, the Maoist-educated Red Guards, the Chávez-era barrio clientele — the uprooted mass is actively produced by the political arrangements that then deploy it. The welfare-administrative state does not merely find a dependent population and provide for it; it creates and continuously reproduces the dependent population it then mobilises. This is the deepest sense of Spengler’s insight that the demagogic class is logically prior to the constituency it claims to represent. It does not merely claim to represent a pre-existing mass; it first of all gathers and indeed constructs this mass.
The third conclusion is the libertarian one, and it follows directly from the previous two. If the uprooted mass is produced by identifiable political-institutional arrangements — primarily the welfare-administrative state, the NGO-activist complex, the proceduralised displacement of substantive competence by credentialed compliance, and the various instruments of administered dependency — then its production can be stopped by the dismantling of those arrangements. The libertarian project, in its welfare-reform dimension, its anti-regulatory dimension, and its charter-city and secessionist dimension, is precisely the systematic withdrawal of the institutional mechanisms through which the uprooted mass is produced and maintained. It is also, therefore, the systematic dissolution of the political infrastructure of the demagogic strategy. A society of genuinely productive, economically embedded, culturally rooted, institutionally self-responsible individuals — each bearing the reality-contact that Spengler called instinct and the amor fati that comes from genuine existential responsibility — is a society that is structurally resistant to the demagogic mobilisation that has torn apart every major political culture of the past two centuries.
This historical-genealogical insight reinforces and deepens the critique of welfare developed in Pathways. Here too, I note the connection of welfare and violent crime. The welfare-administrative apparatus is not, as its defenders claim, a humanitarian instrument for the relief of misfortune. It is the structural mechanism through which the political (demagogic) class has produced and continues to reproduce the mobilizable mass on which its political existence depends. The withering of welfare is therefore not only an economic project (necessary for prosperity) and not only a moral project (necessary for the restoration of self-respecting dedication to tasks). It is also a structural-political project: the dismantling of the institutional apparatus through which the political class manufactures its own constituency. Once the political pensioner-structure is withdrawn, the populations currently mobilised by it will be re-integrated, by the ordinary operation of productive incentives and discursive engagement, into the productive economy and its associated cultural substance. The “uprooted mass” will be progressively re-rooted. The demagogic class will then find itself in the position in which it found itself between 1789 and 1840 — in search of a constituency, and unable readily to find one. This is the deepest sense in which the libertarian roll-back of the welfare-administrative state is also the dissolution of the contemporary demagogic apparatus.
It is worth dwelling on Spengler’s identification of journalism as the characteristic modern form of cultural authority. The passage is worth quoting in full:
“At this point journalism becomes the dominant expression of the time. It is the critical esprit of the eighteenth century diluted and lightened for intellectual mediocrity — and let us not forget that the Greek word krinein means to part, to dissect, to disintegrate. … “Party” becomes the Liberal substitute for rank and State; revolution, in the form of periodic mass elections fought by all available means of money, brains, and even — after the Gracchan method — physical violence, is exalted into a constitutional process; government, as the meaning and duty of State existence, is either opposed and derided or degraded to the level of a party business. But the blindness and cowardice of Liberalism goes further still. Tolerance is extended to the destructive forces of the city dregs, not demanded by them.” (Spengler, 1934, p.117)
Today Antifa militants are ready to use violence against the enemy on the right, knowing this will be tolerated, quietly enjoyed and if necessary justified by the established mass media and the left-liberal intellectuals who have long since captured these media. Together they are manufacturing consent and “public opinion”. Today the “journalistic” expands to encompass NGO communications, university DEI offices, corporate compliance dashboards, social-media activism, and the entire ecology of professional shame-and-praise distribution. Its function is the same: dissection without creation, criticism that operates as a permanent solvent of every institution, every authority, every distinction of competence and achievement, while professing to be the moral conscience of progress.
An important and not always sufficiently understood aspect here is the connection of woke agitation with the political-administrative subsidy, re-distribution and alimentation machine. This connection is not incidental but crucial as it conveys material power - via the material enfranchisement of the respective target constituencies - to the agitators which in turn can be exploited by the agitators for their own material benefit via well paid jobs as legislators, party functionaries or, - this is a new facet today - as functionaries in the state-grant funded NGO complex. (State funds are channelled to these NGOs via the ideologically aligned political parties who in turn receive ideological support and fire power.)
At this point a serious critical engagement with Spengler is required, because his polemic against levelling, brilliant in its descriptive force, rests on a sociological premise that needs explicit correction. Spengler rightly sees that the urban-democratic Liberalism of the late 19th and early 20th century is engaged in the dissolution of a complex, evolved, highly structured society:
“Only the pulling-down of all the products of civilization, of the State, of society, to the level of little people, above which its pitiful emotionalism cannot soar to understand. That is all that the prefix “folk” or “people” means today, for “the people” in the mouth of any Rationalist or Romanticist does not mean the well-formed nation, shaped and graded by Destiny in the course of ages, but that portion of the dull formless mass which every one senses as his equal, from the “proletariat” to “humanity”.” (Spengler, 1934, p. 33)
Spengler seems to locate the problem of social dissolution and atomisation in the fact of large urban agglomerations per se:
“The scene of this revolution of life, its foundation, and, at the same time, its expression, is the Megalopolis which is found arising in the Late period of all Cultures. Into this world of stone and petrifaction flock ever-growing crowds of peasant folk uprooted from the land, the “masses” in the terrifying sense, formless human sand from which artificial and therefore fleeting figures can be kneaded: parties, organizations modelled on program and ideal, but in which that inherent power of growth that the course of the generations had saturated with tradition, and that most of all expresses itself in the fruitfulness of all life — the instinct for the permanence of family and race — is extinct. An abundance of children, the chief sign of a healthy race, becomes tiresome and absurd. This is the gravest sign of the egoism of the Megalopolitans, who have themselves become atoms, of the egoism which is the opposite not of present-day collectivism — between these two there is no difference; a pile of atoms is no more alive than a single one — but of the urge to live on in the blood of posterity, in the creative care for it, in the lastingness of the name. Cold intelligence, on the other hand, that solitary bloom, the weed of the pavements, sprouts in incredible masses.” (Spengler, 1934, pp. 92-93)
Spengler contrasts this modern levelling with the finely cultured and structured traditional society. He says that genuine Culture is a naturally grown Culture. Spengler writes:
“Culture is a growth. The more perfectly a nation represents its Culture — and amongst the noblest creations of a Culture are its nations themselves — the richer its organic disposition by status and rank, and the more genuine the respect of distances between ranks, from the strong-rooted peasantry to the urban patriciate. Here the high level of form, tradition, training, and custom, innate superiority in the ruling families, circles, and personalities, signify the life, the destiny of the whole. A society in this sense remains untouched by “rational” classifications and visions, or else it has ceased to exist. Above all, it is constituted according to rank and not economic classes.”(Spengler, 1934, p.93).
Spengler emphasises “the necessity of a structure that assigns to every sort of person and human activity their place in the life of the whole” and “the essential unlikeness, inequality, of the parts that is identical with organic formation.” (Spengler, 1934, p.95). Spengler elaborates:
“Society rests upon the inequality of men. That is a natural fact. There are strong and weak natures, natures born to lead or not to lead, creative and untalented, honourable, lazy, ambitious, and placid natures. Each has its place in the general order of things. The more significant the Culture, the more it resembles the structure of a noble animal or vegetable body and the greater are the differences between its constituent elements — the differences, not the conflicts, for these are only introduced by reasoning. No good retainer dreams of regarding peasants as his equals, and every foreman who knows his job refuses to allow unskilled labourers to address him on terms of equality. This is the natural feeling in human relations. “Equal rights” are contrary to nature, are an indication of the departure from type of ageing societies, are the beginning of their irrevocable decline.” (Spengler, 1934, p.96).
Spengler is right that this levelling is destructive. He is right that the dissolution of substantive distinction in the name of an abstract equality is corrosive of any social order capable of carrying difficult projects. But he then makes a conceptual move that is, in my view, the central weakness of his social theory. He equates social structure with social stratification. He understands the “well-formed nation, shaped and graded by Destiny,” as essentially a layered hierarchy of social rank, and he can therefore conceive of the loss of structure only as the loss of stratification. The aristocratic ethic, the Prussian rank-order, the soldier-statesman caste, the graded estates of pre-revolutionary Europe — these are for Spengler the very form of substantive social structure, and their dissolution by the levellers is therefore the dissolution of structure as such. This conflation runs through his entire polemic. When he writes that “the opposition of graded social structure and town masses, of tradition and Bolshevism, of the higher existence of the few and the lower of mass labour (however labelled), is upon us — there is no third alternative,” he is offering only two possibilities: stratified hierarchy or unstructured mass.
The conflation is wrong, and the correction was supplied by Niklas Luhmann in the work I have drawn on at several points in my own writing. Luhmann’s decisive contribution to social theory is the recognition that modern society is not de-structured but differently structured. The primary form of structuration in pre-modern society was indeed stratification: society was organised into estates, ranks, and castes, and a person’s position in that vertical order largely determined his access to all social domains. Modern society has a quite different primary form of differentiation, which Luhmann calls functional differentiation. Society is organised into functional subsystems — the economy, science, the legal system, the political system, the art world, the education system, religion, the health system, intimate relationships and the family as system — each operating according to its own distinct code, criteria of success, and internal rationality. The economy operates on the code of deal/no deal and the criterion of profitability. Science operates on the code of true/false and the criterion of evidence-supported argument. Law operates on the code of legal/illegal and the criterion of lawfulness. Each subsystem is autonomous in its operational closure, and no one of them stands above the others as a master code.
This is a momentous structural shift, and Spengler missed it entirely. The dissolution of the stratified estate-order in the nineteenth century was not the dissolution of social structure but the completion of a long transition from stratification to functional differentiation as the primary mode of societal organisation. The structure that emerged is in many ways more complex, more demanding, and more productive than the structure it replaced. Modern society can do things that no stratified society could ever do: it can simultaneously sustain world-spanning markets, autonomous science, evolving law, the art world, mass education, advanced medicine, and the technological civilisation that depends on all of them operating at once. It can do these things precisely because no single hierarchical principle now subordinates the operations of one subsystem to those of another. The Holy Inquisition no longer ratifies scientific findings. The aristocrat no longer determines who may trade. The king no longer sets the price of bread or the conclusions of the trail judge.
This does not mean that hierarchy has disappeared. The Spenglerian instinct that a society without internal hierarchy is incoherent is correct — just misplaced. Hierarchy in modern society migrates from the primary level of social structure (which is now functional rather than stratificatory) to the secondary level of internal organisation within each functional subsystem. The firm has a hierarchy of competence and authority. The university has a hierarchy of scholarly standing. The court has a hierarchy of judicial seniority. The hospital has a hierarchy of medical expertise. The professional discipline has a hierarchy of demonstrated contribution. These hierarchies are real, demanding, and indispensable. What is rejected in modernity is not hierarchy as such but the ascription of an over-arching, society-wide rank-order that determines a person’s position across all subsystems by reference to a single criterion of nobility, ancestry, or political subordination.
Once this correction is made, much of Spengler’s polemic regains its force while shedding its reactionary implication. He is right that the contemporary Liberal-democratic-rationalist mentality, in its degenerate form, attacks not only the obsolete stratificatory hierarchy of pre-modern Europe (which deserved to go) but also the legitimate internal hierarchies of modern functional subsystems. Contemporary egalitarian ideology does not stop at insisting that the duke and the merchant have equal standing as citizens; it proceeds to insist that the brilliant scientist and the mediocre activist have equal standing as participants in scientific discourse, that the proven entrepreneur and the random “stakeholder” have equal standing in corporate decision-making, that the experienced judge and the latest legislative novelty have equal weight in law. This is the genuinely destructive levelling, and Spengler’s denunciation of it is just. But the libertarian, with the Luhmannian apparatus, can articulate the objection precisely: the problem is not the absence of an overarching political stratification, which is rightly absent in modern society; the problem is the political-administrative invasion of functionally differentiated subsystems with a levelling moral code that destroys their internal hierarchies of competence.
The libertarian project, on this reading, is the defence of functional differentiation against political re-totalisation. The roll-back of the state is the roll-back of the only social formation in modern society that still attempts to operate as a master code subordinating all other subsystems to its own logic. Markets and discourses, taken together, are the institutional form in which functional differentiation can complete itself without political tutelage. Within each subsystem, hierarchies of competence will emerge, be tested, be revised, and command the kind of substantive respect that Spengler rightly cherished. What will not emerge — and need not emerge — is the single political pyramid Spengler thought necessary to give modern society any internal form at all.
Spengler observes, with considerable acuteness, that the bourgeoisie did not have its dissolution imposed on it from outside. It actively, eagerly, ingested it:
“It is a chapter of shame that here presents itself to the historian of the future. Built up though it was on the basic human facts of rulership, grade, and property, society met the Nihilist attack upon these with submission, “understanding,” acclamation, and support. This intellectual suicide was the common fashion of last century.” (Spengler, 1934, p.116).
And again, on the active complicity of the propertied classes in the manufacture of the very ideology of “the worker” that would dispossess them:
“It was the middle classes who successfully “put over” this notion of him (the “worker”), and the very business-like “representatives of the people” continue to sponge upon the legend. They dinned it into the wage-earners until they believed it; until they felt themselves to be really ill-treated and wretched, until they lost all sense of proportion with regard to their output and their importance. Liberalism vis-à-vis the demagogic trend is the form of suicide adopted by our sick society.” (Spengler, 1934, p.119)
The contemporary parallel is exact. The most aggressive expansions of contemporary regulatory and ideological orthodoxy — in universities, corporations, philanthropy, financial institutions — have been carried out not against the resistance of the propertied and credentialed classes but largely by them and through them. In my ‘Thesis on Government Destruction of Corporate Management’ I have argued that the contemporary firm operates under a structural pathology in which it is held to expanding external responsibility while being progressively stripped of internal sovereignty: Contemporary firms increasingly operate under a profound structural tension: they are held ever more responsible for outcomes in their external relations while simultaneously losing authority and sovereignty in their internal governance. A schism opened that undermines the rational management our prosperity depends on: Internal sovereignty is eroded while external responsibility is increasing. … Externally, the firm is treated by law and public opinion as a unified, decisive, and fully responsible actor. … Internally, however, the same firm is governed under a markedly different logic. Employment law, data protection regimes, and equality legislation increasingly constrain the ability of management to observe, evaluate, and discipline employees. … As a result, authority becomes fragmented, proceduralised, and legally risky, while decisional latency increases and informal judgement is displaced by defensive compliance. (Schumacher, 2026)
This is, in different vocabulary, precisely what Spengler diagnoses at the level of the late-modern political order: an erosion of accountability, a hollowing of authority, a substitution of paper for command, of procedure for responsibility, of the appearance of governance for governance itself. In the language of the previous section, it is the violation of the functional differentiation of the economy by the political-administrative system, which insists on importing its own moral-procedural code into the operational logic of the firm. The result is what I have called an “internal compliance apparatus mediating between the administrative state and the firm. Its dominant orientation is not performance optimisation but liability containment.” Spengler’s “true statesmen become rarer and rarer” finds its contemporary form in the CEO who is, increasingly, an apologetic compliance-officer of last resort, hauled before the moral tribunal of journalism whenever his firm’s output collides with the latest sensitivity, while denied the practical authority to manage the operations for which he will be blamed.
The most disquieting Spenglerian observation, however, is the one about complicity. The propertied class did not merely fail to defend itself; it actively participated in the construction of the ideology of its own dispossession. So today: corporate management does not merely tolerate the proceduralisation of its authority but funds it, promotes it, hires for it, and rewards those most fluent in its idiom. Shareholders ratify executive compensation linked to ESG and DEI metrics. Boards appoint Chief Sustainability and Chief Diversity Officers with veto powers over operational decisions. Foundations of capitalist origin pour vast resources into the activist-academic infrastructure that produces the ideology under which their grantors are themselves to be eventually disestablished. The “intellectual suicide” Spengler observed in the late 19th and early 20th Century bourgeoisie has its precise contemporary expression in the voluntary capitulation of contemporary corporate management to the moral terms of its dispossessors.
The eagerness with which the top echelons corporate America and then corporate Europe embraced and internalised the latest left-liberal ideological onslaught in the last 15 years was out of a panicked fear of an even more severe, material onslaught the spectre of which was the post-2008 Occupy movement. Further, this external intimidation was paralleled by an internal intimidation from within originating with the latest cohorts of graduate recruits delivered into the corporate workforce from the universities - especially elite universities - who had been targeted and captured by the left-liberal intellectuals and failed revolutionaries who had been en masse absorbed as a new crop of professors into the massively expanded universities (which they had first occupied and then pried wide open) since 1968.
Spengler’s analysis of his contemporaries’ cowardice before mass opinion is so precise, and so prophetic of the contemporary phenomenon of “cancel culture” and the regime of “political correctness,” that the passage deserves to stand at the head of this section:
“Courage to see what is actually happening would be the initial requirement, and I fear that the stock of this is very low. At no time has the whole world shown such cowardice before the general opinion of parliaments, parties, speakers, and writers. They are all on their knees before the “people,” the masses, the proletariat, or whatever they may call that which blindly and unsuspectingly serves as weapon for the leaders of the World-Revolution. The reproach of being “the enemy of the worker” causes every politician to pale.” (Spengler, 1934, p.137)
Read this passage with one substitution. Wherever Spengler writes “the worker,” write instead “the marginalised,” “the vulnerable,” “the oppressed,” or any of the contemporary moral categories that perform the same function. The diagnosis becomes a vigorous description of our own moment. “At no time has the whole world shown such cowardice.” Every politician, every executive, every university administrator, every editor, every artist, every academic pales at the reproach of being “the enemy of” whichever sacralised category the moral entrepreneurs of the moment have nominated for protection. The structure of the cowardice is identical: a fabricated political abstraction is invested with sacred status; a class of professional outrage-managers monopolises the right to speak in its name; and the entire propertied, credentialed, and political world performs its submission to avoid the verdict of “enemy.”
What is being weaponised is not, in either case, the actual interest of the actual workers, or the actual interest of any actual marginalised person. Spengler saw this clearly. The “worker” of nineteenth-century progressive sentiment had little to do with the actual skilled tradesman, who in fact “scorned and felt as a disgrace” the proletarian designation imposed on him by literary radicals. The “worker” was a political weapon, useful precisely because of its abstraction from any concrete person whose actual preferences might inconveniently disagree. The contemporary “marginalised community” functions identically. Surveys repeatedly demonstrate that the actual members of the supposedly protected categories — working-class minorities, ordinary migrants, the religiously observant, women outside the activist class — hold views markedly different from, and frequently opposed to, the views attributed to them by their self-appointed spokesmen. The abstract category is the weapon. The actual persons it claims to represent are largely irrelevant to its political operation.
Spengler’s phrase “They are all on their knees” deserves emphasis. He is describing a posture, a physical attitude of submission, that has become so habitual in his contemporaries that they no longer notice it. The contemporary parallel could not be more exact. The corporate apology, the public confession of historical complicity, the kneeling on one knee at sporting events, the proliferation of pronoun declarations, the territorial acknowledgments at the openings of conferences, the Diversity Statements required of academic job candidates, the mandatory implicit-bias trainings, the elaborate genuflections of resignation statements from executives caught on the wrong side of the latest moral panic — these are the ritualised contemporary forms of Spengler’s “on their knees before the people.” The performance of submission has been so successfully demanded that those who perform it no longer experience it as humiliation. They experience it as virtue.
The mechanism by which this submission is enforced is not state coercion in any direct sense. It is the threatened withdrawal of respectability — the moral excommunication that Spengler described as causing every politician to pale, and that we describe, with insufficient analytical seriousness, as “cancellation.” I have argued in ‘Multi-culturalism and Ethnic Pride as Barriers to Prosperity’ that this mechanism is best understood through Niklas Luhmann’s analysis of morality as the conditioning of respect and disrespect. The point is worth restating in this context. The threat is not physical. The threat is professional, social, and reputational excommunication, and the threat is effective in roughly the proportion that one has anything to lose. The university dean, the corporate executive, the senior editor, the established scholar, the celebrity, the politician — each has built a position whose continued occupation requires the recognition of respectable opinion, and each is therefore exquisitely vulnerable to the threatened withdrawal of that recognition. The dynamic Spengler describes — universal cowardice before mass opinion organised by a small class of moral entrepreneurs — is structurally identical, only the moral categories have been updated.
The libertarian project is intimately bound up with the diagnosis and remedy of this pathology, and it is worth being precise about how. The libertarian does not propose to abolish moral disagreement, social pressure, or the capacity of communities to set conditions of respectability. These belong to the discursive substance of any free society and cannot be legislated away. What the libertarian does propose to abolish is the structural feature of the contemporary order that makes the cowardice so devastating: the convergence of state authority, mass media, corporate compliance, educational credentialing, professional licensing, and the financial-payment infrastructure into a single network through which moral excommunication, once successfully demanded, becomes practically total. When one’s university, employer, bank, payment processor, social-media presence, professional licence, and access to public discourse can all be withdrawn simultaneously by the same enforcement mechanism responding to the same moral panic, the threat of “cancellation” acquires a totalitarian weight that no merely cultural or moral threat could otherwise carry. The contemporary cancel-regime is what political-administrative-corporate fusion has made of what would otherwise be the ordinary frictions of moral disagreement in a free society.
Activist moral entrepreneurs are today funded by state grants channelled to them via left-liberal charities - the NGO complex. The existence of this complex feeds back into the universities who offer activist grievance studies of many kinds. The popularity of these courses is fuelled and sustained by this prospect of lucrative, cushy government subsidised NGO jobs - campaigning as well-paid profession - operating outside of the market pressures that, rightly, discipline all economically productive jobs. The point here is not to denigrate charities - indeed the role of charities might even increase in a libertarian society - but to identify the perverse incentives that come into play when charities rely on tax revenue rather than collect from the public in the competitive market for voluntary donations via convincing missions and on the basis of a track record of efficient achievements. The universities too should be market disciplined in their offering. The current flourishing of “academic” rabble rousing demagogy is dependent on the subsidized political NGO complex and on publicly funded universities.
This is one of the ways in which the libertarian roll-back of the state is also, and inseparably, a roll-back of the conditions that make contemporary political correctness so devastating to the substantive life. The fragmentation of jurisdictions through secession, charter cities, and special zones; the privatisation of education and the consequent diversification of educational credentials; the proliferation of payment systems and financial infrastructures beyond the reach of any single regulatory authority; the privatisation of all discourse platforms; the dissolution of state-licensed monopolies in law, medicine, and the professions; the withering of the welfare-administrative apparatus that underwrites the activist class — each of these libertarian moves directly weakens the infrastructure through which moral excommunication is currently made total. In a libertarian order, the ordinary frictions of moral disagreement would persist, as they should. What would not persist is the capacity of a small class of moralising demagogues, operating through a unified network of state, corporate, and credentialing institutions, to make the cost of dissent ruinous.
It is worth dwelling on Spengler’s observation that “the reproach of being ‘the enemy of the worker’ causes every politician to pale.” The contemporary version — “the enemy of the marginalised,” “the racist,” “the bigot,” “islamophobe”, “the transphobe,” and the entire vocabulary of moral disqualification — functions identically. The reproach is not an argument. It operates ad hominin and is the threatened withdrawal of respectability, calibrated to the position one occupies and the network of dependencies through which one occupies it. Spengler saw this with a clarity our contemporary commentators rarely match, because most contemporary commentators are themselves operating within the dependency network and have powerful incentives not to see clearly. The libertarian, whose project is precisely to dismantle the structural conditions of this dependency, is among the few positioned to see it and to articulate it. What this cowardice before mass opinion purchases, and what in turn funds it, is the substantive subject of the next section: the political extraction of incomes, transfers, and existential immunities from the productive economy on a scale and through a mechanism that Spengler diagnosed with exceptional precision and polemic force.
The cowardice before mass opinion described in the previous section has its concrete economic counterpart in what Spengler called the political wage: the extraction of incomes, benefits, and existential immunities from the productive economy by political rather than economic means. The two phenomena are inseparable. The political wage is what the cowardice purchases, and the cowardice is what the political wage funds. Spengler grasped both the mechanism and its consequences with a clarity that places his pages among the most acute economic-political analyses of his day, independently coming close to the Mises-Hayek calculation argument and the libertarian critique of the welfare state that would only later be systematically developed.
The opening move of Spengler’s analysis is the displacement of economic competence by political demagogy. He poses the question as a rhetorical accusation:
“Is not economic, bureaucratically administered Socialism the reigning ideal in the national labour parties of Germany, England, and even Italy? Have not the men with creative economic ideas, the promoters of private economic enterprise, been sacrificed to this dictatorship on the platform of the world-economic ruin? The economic leader, the expert in economic life, has been ousted by the party leader, who, if he knows nothing of economics, knows all there is to know about demagogic propaganda. He rules as a bureaucrat in the drafting of economic legislation, which has displaced the free decisions of the man who knows, as leading spirit in countless committees, courts of arbitration, conferences, cabinet meetings and whatever the forms of his dictatorship may call themselves, and even in the Fascist Ministry of Corporations. He is out for State Socialism, for the elimination of private initiative, for economic “planning” — all of which mean the same thing: Communism.” (Spengler, 1934, p.139)
Read in 1933 this passage was prescient. Read in 2026 it is descriptive. The economic leader, the expert in economic life, has been thoroughly ousted by the regulatory functionary, the parliamentary committee-member, the central-bank governor with his appointed advisory board, the cabinet office strategist, the Treasury official, the European Commissioner, the ESG-rating administrator. Each of these is a “party leader” in Spengler’s sense — an official whose authority derives from the political-administrative apparatus, not from any demonstrated competence in the production, allocation, or coordination of economic resources. The “free decisions of the man who knows” have been replaced, decision by decision and domain by domain, by the deliberations of “countless committees, courts of arbitration, conferences, cabinet meetings.” The forms of the dictatorship have proliferated, but their function is constant: to substitute political determination for economic judgement throughout the productive system.
I detect here a certain resonance with Friedrich von Hayek’s important distinction between a “nomos” and “thesis”, between a spontaneous order as playing field and a deliberate social organisation that wants to determine social outcomes. This distinction is important for us libertarians in our engagement with the current crop of aggressive justice warriors and their counterparts within government, administration and NGO complex. Hayek posits the stark, initially counterintuitive thesis that “social justice” is an oxymoron, an incoherent, contradictory concept. Hayek talks about “the mirage of social justice”. This phrase even serves as subtitle to the second volume of Hayek’s ‘Law, Legislation and Liberty’. “Social justice” appears to name a morally compelling ideal, but dissolves under analysis when applied to the outcomes of a free, impersonal market order. Justice applies to conduct, not to impersonal outcomes. For Hayek, justice and injustice are properties of intentional human action. A person, an individual action, or a legislated regulation can be just or unjust, and there will be somebody (or some organisation) responsible for this injustice. But nobody is responsible for the “distributive” results of a spontaneous market order. It is the aggregate result of countless individual transactions, plans, accidents, skills, scarcities, preferences, and discoveries. Any attempt to secure “Social justice” in such a context requires continuous coercive correction. If one insists that the distribution produced by the market must conform to some prior pattern—equality, need, merit, proportional reward, dignity, inclusion, status security, or any other distributive ideal—then the state must continuously intervene to correct the outcomes of voluntary exchanges. This is one of Hayek’s central points: patterned distributive justice is incompatible with a dynamic market order. Markets constantly change relative positions. Innovation, competition, consumer choice, luck, shifts in demand, and entrepreneurial discovery alter incomes and wealth. To preserve a politically preferred distribution, government must repeatedly override contracts, prices, property rights, inheritance, wages, rents, profits, and investment returns. This is why he connects social justice with the erosion of the rule of law. General rules valid for all are replaced by discretionary commands aimed at particular distributive results. Hayek’s key philosophical move is: justice is a property of conduct (following or violating a rule), not of outcomes (the aggregate result of a spontaneous order). Since no one intends the distributive result of a market process, no one can be responsible for it, and therefore it cannot be unjust — it is simply the unforeseeable outcome of many voluntary interactions. To correct it coercively is therefore not the correction of an injustice but the commission of one: it violates the voluntary contracts, property rights, and free exchanges of real people in order to satisfy an abstract pattern that no one chose.
Again, Hayek’s core point is that “social justice” requires the substitution of particular commands (aimed at specific distributive outcomes) for general rules (valid for all, without regard to outcome). This substitution is the erosion of the rule of law — “nomos” replaced by “thesis”, or in his later vocabulary, the “Great Society” governed by abstract rules replaced by an organisation governed by commands in pursuit of shared purposes.
Spengler’s entire analysis of the political wage rests on the distinction between economic determination of rewards (the result of the organic whole of productive activity, prices, productivity, market demand) and political determination (the imposition of a wage-level by party-political force irrespective of the economic basis). The political wage is “inorganic” precisely because it overrides the emergent, unplanned result of countless productive interactions — exactly the spontaneous order Hayek is describing — in favour of a politically-preferred distributive outcome. Spengler’s vocabulary of “organic” vs. “inorganic,” “economic leader” vs. “party leader,” “living order” vs. “paper system” maps directly onto Hayek’s nomos vs. thesis.
The most direct Spengler anticipation of Hayek’s formal argument is actually in Spengler’s implicit theory of organisational legitimacy. When Spengler distinguishes the “economic leader, the expert in economic life” from the “party leader, who, if he knows nothing of economics, knows all there is to know about demagogic propaganda,” he is distinguishing between two types of authority: authority grounded in functional competence within the spontaneous order (the economic leader whose authority is confirmed by the success or failure of his decisions in the market) and authority grounded in political appointment and demagogic power (the party leader whose authority is confirmed by electoral success and whose decisions are insulated from the feedback of the productive process). The first type of authority operates, in Hayek’s vocabulary, under nomos — general rules that apply to all including the decision-maker, who bears the consequences of his decisions. The second type operates under thesis — discretionary commands that the decision-maker is not subject to and the consequences of which are borne by others. “Social justice” is the ideology that legitimises the second type of authority’s claim to override the first.
Spengler’s anticipation lies in this: the political wage as the destruction of nomos. When Spengler writes that the wage “is settled by the party leader, not by the economic leader, and if the latter does not and cannot consent to it, it is enforced by strikes, sabotage, and pressure on parliament,” he is describing exactly Hayek’s transition from general rules to particular commands. The economic leader’s authority is grounded in general rules confirmed by market feedback. He decides in response to ever-changing needs and scarcities signalled via market data. The party leader’s authority is grounded in discretionary political power insulated from productive feedback. Where Spengler goes further than Hayek: Hayek shows the logical incompatibility between patterned distributive justice and a dynamic market order. However, he does not dwell on the characterological consequences for those exempted from the market’s reality-test. Spengler does.
The contemporary “social justice” apparatus with its ever expanding clientele and sets of concern — racial equity, gender pay gaps, boardroom representation, decolonisation, DEI enforcement — is the latest instance of the same demand, operating through the same legal mechanism (general rules displaced by discretionary commands), the same cultural-characterological mechanism (protected client categories exempted from the market’s reality-test), and the same political mechanism (the demagogic class that constructs and manages both).
Spengler’s final equation — “State Socialism, the elimination of private initiative, economic ‘planning’, all of which mean the same thing: Communism” — deserves to be taken with full seriousness. The libertarian project, on the basis of the Mises-Hayek argument, identifies the same equivalence. State planning, the regulatory displacement of private decision, and the various intermediate forms of “mixed economy” and “stakeholder capitalism” do not represent intermediate stages between capitalism and communism. They represent gradations of the same underlying error: the substitution of political-bureaucratic command for the economic-rational coordination of dispersed knowledge through prices and competitive bidding. I have argued the point at length in Pathways towards a Stateless World Society: In advanced economies the state controls often up to 50% of GDP and moreover burdens 100% of GDP production with questionable regulations that stifle the free flow of entrepreneurship and market exchanges, lowering productivity and slowing down innovation. The protections state regulations impose can be much more effectively delivered by market competition or voluntary industry self-regulation whereby rules do not require enforcement via compulsory powers in order to be effective. Government and parliaments are certainly massively overburdened by the task of optimally allocating 40% or 50% of GDP, even more so by the task of regulating all economic activities. In either case incentives through direct existential feedback are missing and ideological rhetoric, if not outright demagogy, guide the parliamentary work more than the kind of direct feedback market participants are continuously exposed to. (Schumacher,2024, p.262)
Spengler’s “demagogic propaganda” and the “demagogy” I identify in parliamentary economic decision-making are the same thing. The mechanism by which competent economic judgement is displaced is identical: incentives for direct existential feedback are removed, ideological rhetoric replaces practical experience, and the politically successful displaces the economically rational. Mises and Hayek explained why this substitution is necessarily fatal to economic rationality. Spengler’s contribution is to show, with equal force, that the displacement was already largely accomplished a century ago, and that the world-economic crisis of his own moment was its predictable result.
Spengler’s deeper analytical contribution lies in his account of how the political wage actually operates within the productive economy. He starts from a conception of economic value that is essentially modern — a recognition that the value of output depends not merely on the labour-time consumed in production but on the integrated coordinative intelligence applied to the whole productive process. The passage is worth quoting at length:
“This was the fighting method of the strike in a disguised, slowly penetrating form. It first took on meaning through the fact that the price for this form of goods, the weekly wage … was forced steadily upward. Now, the “value,” the actual product of the work done, is not an independent quantity. It is a result obtained from the organic whole of industrial labour, in which the administrative work of controlling and regulating operations, the obtaining of materials, the marketing of products, the thinking out of costs and yield, of lay-out and equipment, and of new possibilities, are of far greater importance. The total output depends upon the order and amount of head-work, not hand-work, that is put into it. If there is no yield, if the product is unsaleable, then the work put into the process has been valueless and ought really not to be paid for at all. This is what happens to the peasant and the craftsman. But through the activities of the trade unions the hourly wage of the hand-worker has been removed from the unit of the organism.” (Spengler, 1934, p.141)
The point is exact, and it is the point that the entire Marxian labour-theory of value and its progressive descendants are constructed precisely to deny. Spengler identifies that value emerges from the integrated economic operation as a whole — from the head-work of organisation, design, market-anticipation, equipment-investment, materials-procurement, and innovation in equal or greater measure than from the hand-work of execution. The libertarian inherits this insight directly. As I have argued repeatedly in Markets and Discourses, the contemporary post-Fordist economy intensifies this principle to an unprecedented degree: The technologies of Fordism were rigid without agile adaptivity and without the ability to quickly absorb and utilize innovations. In contrast, the new numerically controlled systems like robotic fabrication, 3D printing as well as the massive new field of software-as-a-service (SaaS) are capable of absorbing unlimited numbers of innovations. This in turn dynamizes business and business organisation and pulls workers away from assembly lines into R&D, marketing, finance etc. All work becomes innovative and project-like rather than routine. (Schumacher, 2025)
What Spengler called head-work and hand-work are no longer even meaningfully separable in the post-Fordist economy. The integrated coordinative intelligence that produces value is distributed across the entire productive organisation, embedded in software systems, design specifications, market-analytical models, supply-chain protocols, and the discursively informed judgements of countless actors. The contemporary “worker” — software engineer, designer, financial analyst, marketing strategist, project manager — is himself overwhelmingly engaged in headwork. The Spenglerian distinction between economically rational integration and politically imposed wage-extraction therefore applies more sharply today than in 1933, not less.
Spengler’s decisive observation is what happens when the wage is removed from the economic-organic unit and politically determined:
“It is settled by the party leader, not by the economic leader, and if the latter does not and cannot consent to it, it is enforced by strikes, sabotage, and pressure on parliament. … Everyone actively employed in the economic system is dependent for his gain on the economic situation — everybody except the wage-earning workman. He has a claim to the wage-level that is fixed inorganically and fought for by party-political means, even when it can only be maintained by allowing works to fall into decay, cutting out profits altogether, and selling goods at less than cost price — until the factories themselves give in.” (Spengler, 1934, p.142)
The passage requires almost no translation to apply to contemporary conditions. The minimum wage legislated by parliaments without reference to local productivity; the centrally-negotiated collective wage agreement extended by political fiat to non-signatory firms; the minimum wages, maximum working hours, the mandated paid holidays, and notice periods imposed across heterogeneous industries; the compliance-bureaucratic overhead loaded onto every employer in the name of employee protection; the politically-driven minimum corporation-tax rates designed to prevent jurisdictional competition; the government regulation of working conditions; the unfair-dismissal regimes that convert employees from contracting partners into legally-entrenched stakeholders — each of these is a contemporary instance of the political wage in Spengler’s sense.
None of these government-imposed or trade union imposed protective measures can in fact protect, guarantee or improve the long-term position of employees – they are in fact guaranteeing the very opposite: stagnation and impoverishment. The real protection for all employees (except perhaps of those who are out to shirk and free-ride) is ease of starting/doing business and unhampered competition between employers for employees in an economy with free contracting and free of regulatory barriers to growth. Even those employees who are currently exploiting the protections afforded by employment law to cling to a job they cannot really fill, are in the final analysis victims of this nanny-state system because this system freezes up the labour market to such an extent that makes resigning from a mismatched job to find a better match too risky. The result is that a large part of the total societal workforce is stuck in unhappy, suboptimal employments, stressing both employers and employees, while spoiling much productive potential that could be released in an unhampered, much more liquid labour market.
In Spengler’s terms, the wage and the terms of employment are “fixed inorganically and fought for by party-political means,” without reference to the productive operation from which the wage must in fact be drawn. And the consequence is the one Spengler identified: firms maintain politically-imposed cost-structures by “allowing works to fall into decay, cutting out profits altogether, and selling goods at less than cost price” — or, in the contemporary version, by relocating to less politically-burdened jurisdictions, by automating out the affected categories of employment, by withdrawing from labour-intensive product lines entirely, or by simply ceasing to exist. This is then the final triumph of the parasite over the host, in the moment the host expires. The cumulative consequences of this invisible death by a thousand cuts on prosperity are devastating for all, not least for those who seem to be the object of care and protection here.
Spengler’s observation that the wage-earner is the sole participant in the economic system who is not “dependent for his gain on the economic situation” is the most analytically important sentence in the entire passage. The economic logic of the firm requires that all factor returns — to capital, to entrepreneurship, to land, and to labour — must in some way reflect the underlying productivity and saleability of the operation. The political extraction of one of these factor returns from this dependency does not eliminate the underlying constraint; it merely transfers the consequences of its violation onto the other factors and ultimately, when those have been exhausted, onto the existence of the firm itself. The political wage is paid by the destruction of the productive substance that would have paid the economic wage.
Spengler’s analysis culminates in the most extraordinary passage of all, and the one most directly aimed at what we today call the welfare state. He argues that the political wage in its developed form extends beyond money payment to encompass the entire existence of the wage-earner, transferring the existential burden of life itself from the individual onto a generalised “rest”:
“We must realize how comprehensive is the term “political wage” before we can estimate the pressure of this wage-dictatorship on the economic life of nations. Reaching out far beyond money payment, it embraces concern for the “worker’s” whole existence, the burden of which is taken from him to be loaded onto “the rest.” “The worker” has become a pensioner of society and of the nation. Every human being … has his own personal cares, full responsibility for himself, and must inevitably make his own decisions in all dangers threatening himself and his aims. No one dreams of relieving, at the expense of others, farmers from the consequences of bad harvests, cattle disease, fire, and failing markets; or artisans, doctors, engineers, tradespeople, and scientists from the threat of economic ruin. … Each of these has to deal with such things himself and at his own expense or else bear the consequences and beg or go under in any other way he pleases. Such is life. The craving to insure oneself, against … fate in every conceivable form — which is a sign of sinking vitality, beginning from Germany, has now embedded itself in one way and another in the mentality of all white nations.” (Spengler, 1934, p.144)
And he proceeds to identify the psychological-cultural consequence:
“All the rest in seeking to evade or to meet the unforeseen do so according to their own resolve and in their own strength; it is only the “worker” who is spared this decision. He alone can rest assured that others will think and act for him. The degenerating effect of this freedom from all responsibility, which is seen similarly in children of very rich parents, has overtaken the whole working class, especially in Germany: at the first sign of any distress, appeal for help is made to the state, the party, society, or, in any case, “others.” We have forgotten how to take decisions ourselves.” (Spengler, 1934, p.145)
Spengler’s phrase “pensioner of society and of the nation” is, in 2026, no longer a polemic. It is a sociological description of the entire dependent segment of every advanced Western society. The category has expanded beyond the original “worker” to include vast administrative apparatuses of insurance, redistribution, unemployment benefit, sickness benefit, disability benefit, housing benefit, child benefit, in-work benefit, and the proliferating sub-categories of conditional and unconditional transfer. It encompasses populations that have never worked at all, populations that have ceased to work, populations that work nominally while being substantively sustained by transfers, and populations whose entire occupational existence consists of administering the transfers to others. The “rest” — the segment from whose productive output the entire apparatus is funded — has correspondingly shrunk and, in country after advanced country, is no longer adequate to the demands placed on it. This is not a only moral judgement; it is also an accounting one. The fiscal crisis of the advanced welfare states, which dominates the politics of every European country and increasingly of the United States, is the actuarial confirmation of Spengler’s 1933 diagnosis.
The libertarian analysis converges with Spengler’s on every essential point. I have argued in Pathways that the welfare state operates as the central engine of the social pathologies that contemporary commentators routinely blame on capitalism, on globalisation, on immigration, or on cultural decline. The argument deserves restatement in this context: State welfare provisions incentivise and subsidize unproductive, even counter-productive, milieux and lives, certainly lives lived far below their potential. The unconditionally guaranteed provision of a livelihood invites drug and alcohol abuse and becomes all too easily the basis for using the plentiful time and energy for topping up incomes via petty crime, drug dealing etc. … State welfare is eroding spontaneous solidarity, family ties, social responsibilities and commitments etc. thereby undermining all private social bonds, especially in the affected milieux, leading to increased anonymity, loneliness, exclusion. Further, society is bifurcating into an economically active part and an economically inactive part, with a different sense of reality, diverging cultures, and learning curves (Schumacher, 2024, p.267).
Spengler’s “pensioner of society” and my “economically inactive part of society” are the same population, observed at intervals of nearly a century. The “different sense of reality, diverging cultures, and learning curves” that I identify is the contemporary form of what Spengler called the “degenerating effect of this freedom from all responsibility.” Both diagnoses point to the same underlying mechanism: the political extraction of the existential burden from a designated category creates that category as a distinct social formation, with its own characteristic patterns of inertia, dependency, and resistance to participation in the productive economy. And both diagnoses converge on the same culprit: not the dependent population itself, but the political-administrative apparatus that has constructed and continuously reproduces its dependency by systematically removing the existential pressures that would otherwise impel self-development and economic integration.
Spengler’s most striking conceptual move — the comparison of the politically pensioned worker to “children of very rich parents” — deserves emphasis. The contemporary critic of welfare-state pathology, hampered by a moral vocabulary in which only the materially poor can be culturally diagnosed, has lost access to this comparison. Spengler had not. His point is that the structural feature responsible for the cultural degeneration is not poverty as such but the removal of existential responsibility, and that this removal produces the same degenerative consequences whether the agent of removal is parental wealth or political guarantee. The trust-fund child and the third-generation welfare recipient share the same defining structural feature: someone else has assumed the burden of their existence. Both populations exhibit the predicted consequences: an attenuated relation to reality, a habituation to having decisions made on their behalf, an inability to bear the stress of adversity, an atrophy of the capacity for self-direction and self-responsibility. Spengler’s analytical insight cuts across the moral vocabulary of left and right and identifies the underlying mechanism with precision.
The libertarian remedy is precisely the restoration of what Spengler called amor fati — the acceptance of personal responsibility for one’s own existence and fate — through the institutional withdrawal of the political pensioner-structure that systematically extinguishes it. This withdrawal must be phased, as I have argued, to allow the affected populations time to transition into self-reliance: The escape from the trap and poison of state welfare is crucial in its own right for the health of society, with or without state, and is of course a necessary step in moving towards a libertarian and finally stateless society. However, this escape can only happen via a long period of phasing out to give the victims of welfare dependency enough time to transition into self-sufficiency. … A first step, over and above the usual attempts to tighten means testing, incapacity testing, penalties for refusing job offers etc., would be to announce a full stop, perhaps with a not-too-distant deadline, to any new entry into the welfare system, while giving a more generous deadline for achieving self-reliance to all who are currently welfare dependent. State pension schemes should also be phased out on a timetable that recognizes contributions paid. (Schumacher, 2024, p.267).
What replaces the political pensioner-structure is not a vacuum but the dense network of voluntary, contractual, and charitable arrangements through which pre-welfare societies in fact provided for misfortune — mutual aid societies, friendly societies, trade-affiliated insurance pools, religious charities, private pensions, family solidarity, and the ordinary market provision of insurance against accident, illness, and old age. These arrangements are not utopian speculation. They are historical fact, and the historical record on this point is one of the most consequential and least known features of the modern social-political landscape. I have summarised it in Pathways as follows: That a decent society without state welfare is feasible and that civil society can organise its welfare privately and voluntarily has been demonstrated by the flourishing world of mutual aid societies during the 19th century and early 20th century up to the usurpation of the welfare sector by the welfare state. Private welfare provision in England was nearly comprehensive via the eco-system of various mutual aid societies, also referred to as friendly societies, benefit societies, or benevolent societies. Such societies were based on religious, political, or trade affiliations, organised locally but some also nationally, for purposes of insurance, pensions and savings. They were operating self-sufficiently, without subsidies, and able to more effectively control benefit fraud or free riding (Schumacher, 2024, p.267).
Friendly societies trace back to the burial societies of ancient Greek and Roman artisans, with medieval European and English guilds expanding on this idea of providing funds for funerals to provide mutual assistance in cases of illness and distress. Some of most important mutual aid societies – which established a national network of hundreds of branches – developed from guilds and free mason lodges. The elimination of the economic power of trade guilds implied their refocus on their social support functions. In major cities like London, some guilds (e.g. the “Free Masons” and the “Odd Fellows”) survived by adapting their roles to focus on the social security function. Both had their base in London but had established branches (called ‘Lodges’) across the country.
Here is how William Beveridge described the widespread and varied ecosystem of friendly societies of early 20th Century Britain:
“Friendly societies were and are creatures not of Parliament but of brotherly feeling and felt need in small groups of ordinary men throughout the length and breadth of Britain. … Organization in small units is characteristic not only of the early friendly societies but of friendly societies at all stages of their history, at least till the coming of State insurance. The very full returns published by the Registrar for the year 1905 make possible a complete survey of the field. There were at that time in Britain about 20,000 branches of the societies known as Affiliated Orders; as is shown later, each of these branches, though in federal union with others, had its own life and was for many purposes self-governing; the average membership of a branch was 133. There were in addition about 6,700 friendly societies without branches; some of these were specialized on purposes other than provision against sickness and some were large. But the great bulk were small, independent units comparable in size to the branch of an order and doing the same work of provision for sickness; half of them had less than 100 members each, and nearly another third had from 100 to 200 members each.” (Beveridge, 1948, p.30). The small scale and local character of the friendly societies, or at least the small scale of the individual branches are an important aspect of their functioning. The people involved knew each other and this helped with the sense of solidarity as well as with social control preventing abuse.
The historical record of friendly societies carries crucial analytical weight. The standard defence of the welfare state proceeds on the implicit assumption that, in its absence, the working population would simply be exposed to misfortune without provision — that the welfare state arose to fill a vacuum of unmet need. This assumption is false. The welfare state arose by displacing an existing and comprehensive system of voluntary provision that was, by every measurable criterion, functioning well. In England by the early twentieth century the great majority of working men were members of one or more friendly societies, paying small regular contributions in exchange for sickness benefit, unemployment cover, old-age provision, funeral expenses, and access to the society’s medical practitioners. These private civil society social security arrangements via mutual aid societies also included an indirect solidaric redistribution. Since all paid the same contributions and all were equally eligible to the same benefits if falling on hard times, naturally the healthy, strong and young subsidised the sickly, frail and old.
These were not vestigial charitable scraps but the substantive infrastructure of working-class welfare provision. They were administered by elected officers drawn from the membership, with arrangements that produced exactly the social outcomes Spengler invokes against the political wage: members understood the relationship between contributions and benefits; fraudulent and frivolous claims were checked by peer scrutiny; the dignity of mutual provision among equals was preserved; and the populations served by these societies retained the substantive sense of self-reliance and reciprocal obligation that Spengler identifies as the casualty of the political pensioner-structure.
Several features of this historical record deserve emphasis because they directly answer the standard objections to a libertarian withdrawal of the welfare state. First, the societies operated “self-sufficiently, without subsidies.” They were not loss-making operations propped up by external resources; they were actuarially sound mutual insurance arrangements financed entirely by the contributions of their members. Second, they “more effectively control[led] benefit fraud or free riding” — a result of the local, voluntary, peer-administered character of their operation, which contemporary centralised welfare bureaucracies cannot replicate. The administrator of a friendly society knew, personally or through one degree of separation, whether a claimant was genuinely incapacitated or was attempting to work the system. The administrator of a national benefits agency cannot know this and structurally cannot be brought to know it; the system absorbs fraud as an unavoidable operating cost, and that absorbed fraud progressively corrupts both the financial sustainability of the system and the moral self-conception of its claimants. Third, the societies were organisationally diverse — “based on religious, political, or trade affiliations, organised locally but some also nationally” — reflecting the differentiated communities they served. The substantive moral and social meaning of mutual provision varied across societies, and members chose societies whose ethos matched their own. This is the polycentric, voluntary, discursively-informed pluralism for which I argue throughout Markets and Discourses, applied to the specific case of provision for misfortune.
Providence has given to no man an indemnity from affliction, disease and death; it is a duty, therefore, that every man owes to himself and family, to provide against these exigencies and that distress which inevitably attends their visitations.
Preface to original rules of Hearts of Oak Benefit Society, June, 1842.
The political history of the friendly society movement’s resistance to state displacement is almost entirely absent from the standard narratives of the welfare state’s creation, which tend to portray the state’s assumption of welfare functions as a benign gift to society, in response to a supposed absence or inadequacy of social security. The history is, in fact, a protracted struggle extending over seven decades, in which a large, well-organised, financially solvent voluntary sector mounted sustained resistance to each successive wave of political-administrative encroachment. That it ultimately lost is not evidence that it was inadequate; it is evidence of the political-structural logic that Spengler’s analysis predicts.
The first phase of organised resistance came in the 1880s, when the movement united to defeat Canon Blackley’s proposal for compulsory national insurance — the earliest serious legislative attempt to establish state-administered welfare. The Manchester Unity of Oddfellows and the Ancient Order of Foresters jointly convened a conference of eighteen friendly societies representing nearly two million members, and mounted a coordinated parliamentary campaign against Blackley’s scheme. Their objection was principled and precise: compulsory state insurance would undermine the actuarial self-governance and peer-accountability that made their system function. The argument was not merely self-interested. It was the argument from the “voluntary principle” that had sustained the movement since its origins in the eighteenth century: that the efficacy of mutual provision depended on the voluntary character of the membership bond, which created the incentive structures of genuine reciprocity, fraud-resistance, and self-discipline that compulsion would destroy. The societies gave formal evidence to the 1887 House of Commons select committee examining Blackley’s proposals, which duly found itself “unable to agree that the scheme was actuarially sound.” The resistance carried the day.
The second phase concerned old-age pensions. When the Liberal government introduced state pensions in 1908, the societies discovered that the state was clawing back pension entitlement from individuals who received friendly society sick pay — directly penalising the most provident members of the working class for their prior self-provision. The Ancient Order of Foresters protested and documented the consequences: many of its members had been entirely deprived of the state pension, and many more had been partially deprived, as a direct result of receiving friendly-society benefits. This was the social-justice apparatus in Hayek’s precise sense: the state redistributing to the least self-reliant, and actively penalising those who had exercised exactly the self-reliance the state ostensibly wished to encourage. The societies lobbied, published, and protested. They achieved partial legislative corrections on related earlier issues but could not reverse the fundamental direction of policy.
The third and most decisive phase was Lloyd George’s National Insurance Act of 1911 — and here the political history reveals a strategic manoeuvre that constitutes one of the most instructive episodes in the political economy of voluntary sector displacement. The friendly societies initially opposed the 1911 Bill. Their objection, again, was on voluntary-principle grounds: compulsory state insurance would compromise the institutional basis of their efficacy. Lloyd George’s response was not to confront this opposition directly but to neutralise it by incorporation: he offered the friendly societies the role of “approved societies” — administrators of the new state scheme, with the state underwriting the basic benefit guarantees and thereby substantially relieving the societies’ actuarial pressure. The societies accepted. The conferences of 1913 and 1914 record the resulting disillusionment with brutal clarity. One contemporary account, reporting on the conferences of the major orders, noted that “active opposition is, of course, non-existent, the general feeling being that the inevitable must be accepted, and the best must be made of things as they are.” The Grand Master of the Manchester Unity of Oddfellows “laid particular stress upon this loss of independence” and “attached the principal blame for this state of affairs on the members of Approved Societies themselves” — a remarkable piece of self-diagnosis. The societies had been absorbed into the system they had opposed.
The political consequences of absorption were precisely those that the voluntary-principle argument had predicted. Having accepted the role of approved-society administrators, the friendly societies’ resistance to further state expansion was structurally compromised: they could protest from within the system but could no longer credibly offer themselves as a complete alternative outside it. In 1915 the National Conference of Friendly Societies (NCFS) joined forces with the industrial assurance companies in objecting to any proposals for the formation of a “state friendly society,” and in 1917 the president of the National Conference warned that it would be “a bad day for this country” if the state ever attempted to raid the accumulated savings of friendly-society members to subsidise the statutory scheme. These were genuine protests but structurally weakened protests: the societies were now dependent on the state scheme for part of their financial basis, which meant that any confrontation with the state risked the very subsidies they had accepted. Lloyd George’s 1911 manoeuvre had converted the movement’s opponents into its sub-contractors.
By the interwar period the societies’ resistance had largely transformed from principled opposition to competitive lobbying for a share of the expanding state apparatus. In 1920 they lobbied unsuccessfully for a role in the administration of unemployment insurance. They deployed their parliamentary agents — professional lobbyists employed by the major orders — and their sponsored Members of Parliament to protect their institutional interests within the system rather than to challenge the system itself. By the time Beveridge drafted his 1942 Report, the major orders were pressing for a continued role within the new comprehensive system rather than defending the voluntary principle against the system. The language of resistance had been replaced by the language of accommodation. The final blow came in 1946–48. The Attlee government’s implementation of the welfare state bypassed the friendly societies entirely. It wanted a complete and exclusive state administrative machine, and it built one. The Ancient Order of Foresters issued its “Circular 3/46” protesting at the exclusion. The protest came too late and from too weak a position. The Labour government bypassed the friendlies, structuring a complete and exclusive administrative machine of its own. The loss of funding and higher state benefit rates drove many friendlies out of existence.
The most poignant episode in the entire history was the response of William Beveridge himself. Beveridge had intended his 1942 Report to preserve a role for voluntary societies within a framework of state minimum provision. He wanted to keep what he called the “bottom-up approach” that “preserves many instances of lively democratic self-help in small societies.” Attlee’s government cut the societies out entirely. Beveridge responded in 1948 with his “Voluntary Action: A Report on Methods of Social Advance”, in which he made the case for the societies’ indispensable role and warned that “in a totalitarian state or in a field already made into a state monopoly, those dissatisfied with the institutions that they find can seek remedy only by seeking to change the government of the country” (Beveridge, 1948, p.77). The intellectual author of the welfare state wrote a protest against the way his own creation had been implemented. He was ignored.
Three analytical conclusions follow from this history. First, the friendly societies were not passive victims of an irresistible historical tendency. They organised, lobbied, published, protested, and at least once — in the defeat of the Blackley scheme in the 1880s — achieved a genuine political victory. Second, the decisive defeat came not through direct confrontation but through the incorporation trap of 1911: the offer of a share in the state apparatus in exchange for abandoning the voluntary-principle and their opposition. This is the political-structural logic Spengler identifies in a different register: the demagogic class defeats independent institutions not by destroying them directly but by absorbing them, making their continued existence conditional on the apparatus’s continued operation. Third, the memory of the system was erased not spontaneously but by the positive action of the state. The libertarian project of restoring voluntary mutual provision therefore faces not merely the institutional challenge of rebuilding a sector the state destroyed, but the deeper cultural challenge of recovering a memory the state systematically suppressed. The historical record of the friendly societies’ seven-decade resistance is part of that recovered memory. Fourth, and decisively for the present argument, the mutual aid system was destroyed by political displacement, not by its own inadequacy. The Liberal welfare reforms of 1906–1911 in Britain, and their inter-war and post-war extensions through Beveridge and the establishment of the National Health Service, did not arise because the friendly societies had failed. They arose because the political class identified the friendly society infrastructure as an obstacle to its own programme of political-administrative consolidation, and acted to displace it. The state-administered National Insurance scheme of 1911 deliberately incorporated and then progressively subordinated the friendly society sector, replacing genuine mutual insurance with compulsory contribution and politically-determined benefits. The subsequent decades saw the systematic atrophy of the voluntary sector as state provision crowded it out: members no longer needed to subscribe to private societies for benefits they were now compelled to fund through taxation, and the societies progressively lost their economic basis. By the second half of the twentieth century, the institutional memory of working-class self-provision had largely been erased, leaving the political class free to claim that no alternative to its own welfare-administrative apparatus had ever existed or could exist. This claim is false. The alternative existed for the better part of a century, served the great majority of the working population effectively, and was destroyed by political action precisely because it gave the working population a substantive independence that stood in the way of the political class’ accrual of power.
The Spenglerian analysis of the political wage, the libertarian analysis of welfare-induced dependency, and the historical record of the friendly societies thus converge on a single conclusion. The contemporary welfare state is not the necessary instrument of humanitarian provision; it is the structural mechanism through which the political class displaced a pre-existing voluntary system that gave working populations independent dignity and self-reliance, and replaced it with a politically-administered system that produces the dependent, infantilised, “uprooted” population the political-demagogic class requires for its political existence. The libertarian roll-back of the welfare state is therefore not a withdrawal of provision but a restoration of provision in its proper, voluntary, dignity-preserving form. As I argued in the previous section on the search for a mobilizable mass, this is also why the political-administrative class will resist welfare reform with extraordinary intensity even when the economic case against welfare is overwhelming: at stake is not merely the level of public expenditure but the existence of the social formation through which the political class secures its political constituency. The historical record of the friendly societies shows that the alternative is feasible, has functioned, and was destroyed only by deliberate political displacement. It can be restored, and the populations currently dependent on the welfare-administrative apparatus can be progressively re-incorporated into voluntary structures of mutual provision that will return to them what state welfare has progressively eroded: the substantive sense of self-reliance and the dignity of reciprocal obligation among equals.
Only the basis of such a regained self-reliance and existential independence can a self-confident, active, forward looking society be built, a society where Spengler’s Faustian virtues can flourish and gain respect; virtues such as the quiet acceptance of the burdens that a commitment to an important mission demands, the respect for superior skills, knowledge and achievements, and finally the admiration for and deference to those distinguished by such achievement. Spengler rightly identified the widespread, taken for granted aspiration to live up to these virtues and their social elevation as the precondition for societal strength and flourishing, enabling such societies, and only such societies, to carry out projects of world-historical significance. For me the libertarian revolution is such a project, which in turn will enable the proliferation of many more momentous projects.
One further passage from Spengler deserves attention, because it identifies the ideological mechanism through which the political wage was originally justified and through which its contemporary variants continue to be justified. The doctrine of “surplus value” remains, beneath the surface of contemporary policy discourse, the operative theory of value distribution wherever the political extraction of incomes from the productive economy is proposed:
“Once the doctrine of “surplus value” had power to sway the undeveloped reasoning of the masses: the whole output of industrial production was equal to the value of manual labour and had to be allotted accordingly. What the manufacturer deducted from it — for upkeep of the works, payment for raw materials, salaries, interest: the “surplus value,” in fact — was robbery. The administration, the inventors, the engineers, all did no work whatever; and if they had done, mental work such as theirs, which was a kind of doing nothing, had no real value. It was the same “democratic” tendency which scorned and would have destroyed quality of any sort, and thought only in terms of quantity, even in manual work. The distinction between skilled and unskilled labour had to be abolished. Both should receive equal payment. Piece-work and superior production were branded as betrayal of the cause. This attitude has triumphed, and postwar Germany in particular is its triumph. It has eliminated competition among the workers, stifled the impulse to attain higher levels of skill, and thereby reduced the total output.” (Spengler, 1934, p.142)
Spengler points to the irony that in Russia, soon after the revolution, the new masters, now responsible for state and economy left this egalitarian ideology behind. “As soon as “the goal” had been realized long working hours, low wages; the widest possible gulf — wider even than in America — between the payment of skilled and of unskilled work” (Spengler, 1934, p.143) was re-established. Clearly, the levelling and denial of differences in the difficulty, required skill and societal value of different types of work is denying something very fundamental at the root of all large, complex, high-performance societies. As Spengler points out these differences can be very stark and they are the starker the more developed a society is.
“There is higher work, and lower: nothing can deny or alter this truth. It is the expression of the fact that Culture exists. The higher the stage of development in a Culture, the more powerful its creative force, the greater the difference between determining and subordinate actions of all kinds; whether political, economic, or artistic. For Culture is ordered, intellectualized life, a maturing and self-perfecting form, which calls for an ever higher grade of personality. There is work for which one must have an inner call, and other work that one must do, because one can do nothing better to earn a living. There is work for which only a very few men of superior rank are competent, and other work which is valuable only in terms of duration and volume. … It cannot be altered either by Rationalist or by sentimental-romantic equality-talk.” (Spengler, 1934, pp.146-147)
These passages identify two distinct but related errors that the surplus-value doctrine systematically propagates. The first is the denial that head-work — the work of investment, administration, invention, engineering, organisation — constitutes real economic value. The second is the levelling of skill-differentials within the category of manual labour itself. Both errors persist in contemporary policy discourse, though they have shifted vocabulary. The first survives in the contemporary attack on “shareholders,” “executives,” “the one percent,” and “financial capital” as parasitic appropriators of value supposedly produced by ordinary workers — an attack that requires the systematic denial of the actual coordinative, anticipatory, innovative, and risk bearing contributions of these roles. The second survives in the contemporary attack on merit-based differentiation in education, employment, and pay; in the imposition of standardised wage tariffs across heterogeneous productive units; and in the demoralisation of high-performance norms by the elevation of “equity” of outcome over recognition of differential contribution.
Spengler’s closing remark is decisive: this attitude “has eliminated competition among the workers, stifled the impulse to attain higher levels of skill, and thereby reduced the total output.” This is the actual mechanism by which the political wage destroys economic performance, and it identifies the deepest connection between the worker-cult of §III, the political wage of this section, and the welfare-pensioner society. All three operate by suppressing the differential signals — of wage, of recognition, of consequence — through which productive systems coordinate the development of skill, the allocation of effort, and the matching of capacity to task. They achieve their political-redistributive effect by destroying the informational and motivational structure on which productive output depends. The libertarian programme, in this register, is the restoration of these differential signals, and with them the restoration of the productive performance they make possible.
It is worth noting that this Spenglerian analysis maps rather well onto Mises’s and Hayek’s formal arguments about the impossibility of economic calculation under socialism. Mises showed that without competitive bidding for resources there can be no rational allocation. Hayek showed that the relevant knowledge cannot be centralised. Spengler, without the formal apparatus, identified the same impossibility from the cultural side: the political determination of wages, the suppression of skill-differentiation, and the moral inversion that treats coordinative head-work as parasitism together destroy the informational structure through which the productive economy operates. Two independent intellectual traditions - the Austrian-economic and the Spenglerian-cultural - converge on the same diagnosis. The political substitution for the productive economy’s own coordinative mechanisms is not a matter of degree but of kind. It does not merely make the economy less efficient; it dissolves the very informational basis on which economic rationality operates. The libertarian remedy is correspondingly not a matter of degree but of kind: the intrusive political-administrative apparatus must be rolled back to permit the productive economy’s own coordinative mechanisms — prices, profits, competitive bidding, skill-differentiation, head-work recognition, and the rest — to re-emerge in their full operative force.
Only that man counts who can take risks, who has the courage to see and accept things as they are. The age is approaching — nay, is already here — which has no more room for soft hearts and weakly ideals.
— Spengler, The Hour of Decision
The most distinctive and, for our purposes, the most valuable element of Spengler’s political writing is not the diagnosis of decay but the positive evocation of a character type. He returns to it again and again. Consider the opening of The Hour of Decision:
“Is there today a man among the White races who has eyes to see what is going on around him on the face of the globe? … I do not speak of the educated or uneducated city crowds, the newspaper-readers, the herds who vote at elections — and, for that matter, there is no longer any quality-difference between voters and those for whom they vote — but of the ruling classes of the White nations, in so far as they have not been destroyed, of the statesmen in so far as there are any left; of the true leaders of policy, of economic life, of armies, and of thought. Does anyone, I ask, see over and beyond his time, his own continent, his country, or even the narrow circle of his own activities?” (Spengler, 1934, p.24)
And his portrait of the true governor and his inevitable solitude, as he remains misunderstood and opposed:
“Frederick the Great experienced the first of these types of opposition; Bismarck almost fell a victim to the second. Only later generations, and not even they, can appreciate the grândeur and creativeness of such leaders. … Germans in particular are great at suspecting, criticizing, and voiding creative action. They have none of that historical experience and force of tradition which are congenital with English life. A nation of poets and thinkers — in the process of becoming a nation of babblers and persecutors. Every real governor is unpopular among his frightened, cowardly, and uncomprehending contemporaries.” (Spengler, 1934, p.28)
Spengler describes, repeatedly, a character type defined by several constituent traits worth enumerating. There is realism: the willingness, indeed the appetite, to see the world as it actually is, including its harshness, rather than as one would prefer it to be. There is courage: the willingness to act on this realism in the face of opposition, including the opposition of opinion, the press, the “know-betters.” There is purpose: a commitment to a project larger than oneself and one’s comfort, often without immediate reward and frequently against personal interest. There is dignity: the bearing of one who knows the value of what he does, and does not require external validation to maintain it. There is duty: a self-binding to the demands of the project, which appears to the outside as discipline and to the inside as the necessary structure of meaningful action. And there is mission: the sense that one’s individual life is bound up with something historically significant, the destiny of one’s firm, one’s field, one’s civilisation.
This is precisely the character type Ayn Rand articulated and brought to life in her libertarian novels ‘The Fountainhead’ and ‘Atlas Shrugged’ with the leading figures of Howard Roark and John Galt. The Randian hero is defined by the capacity to grasp reality, a creator, a man whose mastery is intrinsic to who he is, a man that commands respect through his inner strength and outer effectiveness. He refuses the mantle of victim or supplicant; he claims the world as the proper field of his creative action.
Spengler’s error — and here we must part company with him — was to locate this character type in a specifically aristocratic-Prussian, soldier-statesman archetype, and to suppose that its survival required a Caesarist political order capable of imposing rank, duty, and command on a society that had lost the instinct for them. The Caesarist hope is, both empirically and conceptually, mistaken. Empirically, every actual twentieth-century Caesarism degenerated into a personalised tyranny that did not regenerate the Faustian virtues but consumed and discredited them, dragging into final disrepute precisely the aristocratic-military ethic Spengler hoped to revive. Conceptually, the Faustian character cannot in fact be commanded into existence. It is a character of self-direction, self-binding, self-respect. It must be chosen, lived, and confirmed by those who carry it. It can flourish only where there is genuine scope for individual undertaking, genuine risk that can be borne or refused, and a public ecology of recognition that distinguishes substantive achievement from mere position.
That ecology is precisely what the contemporary interventionist state suffocates. The proceduralizing of corporate management; the legal-regulatory transformation of substantive decision into defensive paper-trail; the moral-journalistic policing of every controversial undertaking; the welfare-induced bifurcation of society that segregates the productive from the chronically dependent; the educational regime in which the bright young are taught grievance theory rather than the practice of disciplined achievement; and above all, the redistributive apparatus that systematically transfers the rewards of substantive achievement to a parasitic class of credentialed administrators and their clientele — these together constitute a structural war on Faustian character, conducted not by open force but by the patient operation of incentives and humiliations.
The libertarian order, by contrast, is the only social order in which the Faustian character can re-emerge at scale. Not because the libertarian order is itself “Faustian” in any romantic sense — the libertarian is no romantic — but because it is the order that opens space for the substantive undertaking, accepts the substantive risk, and confers genuine recognition on substantive success. The entrepreneur who founds an industry; the engineer who delivers a working system; the legal entrepreneur who builds a competing jurisdiction; the founder of a new town or a charter city; the discourse-leader who develops and defends a body of argument and gathers a following; the scientist whose original findings withstand criticism and are taken up — each of these is the contemporary embodiment of what Spengler honoured. Each requires the libertarian conditions to flourish: scope for action, accountability for results, freedom from the proceduralising apparatus of the contemporary state, free, not forced association, chosen mutual, not imposed solidarity, and a public sphere in which substantive achievement still commands respect.
Once Spengler’s conflation of structure with stratification is corrected, the apparent gulf between his ethical vision and the libertarian project narrows dramatically. Spengler’s deeper concern in evoking duty, rank, and discipline was that the modern world had lost the capacity to bind itself to anything demanding. He puts the point with characteristic force:
“The age is mighty, but all the more diminutive are the people in it. They can no longer bear tragedy, either on the stage or in real life. They crave happy endings of insipid novels, so miserable and weary are they. … If few can stand a long war without deterioration of soul, none can stand a long peace. This peace period from 1870 to 1914, and the memory of it, rendered all White men self-satisfied, covetous, void of understanding, and incapable of bearing misfortune. We see the result in the Utopian conceptions and demands which today form part of every demagogue’s program; demands made on the age, on the State, to parties, and in fact to everyone except themselves, in complete disregard of the limits of feasibility or of duty, and sacrifice.” (Spengler, 1934, p.36)
Spengler’s observation here is acute and continues to apply. The Utopian challenges in “complete disregard of the limits of possibility or of duty, doing, and forgoing” are the staple of contemporary political discourse, on both right and left. The capacity to subordinate oneself, even voluntarily, to a project beyond one’s immediate preferences and pleasures is in increasingly short supply. The “soft hearts and weakly ideals” that Spengler mocked are not mere weakness of will. They are the disabling structural feature of a society that has so thoroughly democratised respect that no real demand can any longer be made on anyone.
The libertarian order, properly conceived, does not deny this concern. It answers it differently. The hierarchies, disciplines, and self-bindings that Spengler thought required the framing of an authoritarian state can in fact emerge endogenously and voluntarily within free institutions and indeed can flourish there better than under coercive frames. A great firm has a hierarchy of merit and capacity — not imposed from outside but assembled by the founder and accepted by those who choose to join and to remain. A great scientific community has a hierarchy of contribution and standing — again, neither legislated nor coerced, but emerging from the practice of giving and asking for reasons that constitutes the community as such. A great undertaking of any kind, from a major infrastructure project to a new legal jurisdiction, from a new private university to a new scientific journal or publishing house, requires and produces internal hierarchies of competence and authority that participants accept because the undertaking matters to them and because they understand that the project cannot be done well in any other way.
The “duty” of the Faustian character is, in this reading, a self-imposed duty: the bond one assumes when one commits oneself to a project, an institution, a craft, or a discourse. It is the bond an entrepreneur accepts toward his investors, his employees, his customers, and his own conception of what his firm is for. It is the bond a scholar accepts toward the truth, his colleagues, and the evolving body of argument in his field. It is the bond a craftsman accepts toward his tools and his materials and the quality of his output. None of these requires a state to enforce them, and indeed the state’s attempt to enforce them reliably destroys them. They are sustained by the structure of the project itself, by the participants’ commitment to its success, and by the surrounding public ecology of recognition.
The “rank” of the Faustian character is, similarly, a rank of achieved and recognised competence within concrete undertakings, not a permanent caste-position. The libertarian order has no objection to hierarchy, rank, ownership or leadership. It has a profound objection to coerced hierarchy and an equally profound objection to politically enforced levelling. The competitive and discursive processes I have argued for in Markets and Discourses generate hierarchies continuously: hierarchies of firm performance, of professional standing, of intellectual contribution, of demonstrated competence. These hierarchies are entirely compatible with, indeed dependent on, the formal equality of participation in market and discursive processes. What is excluded is the political fiction — the great gift of nineteenth-century parliamentarism to twentieth-century totalitarianism — that the “people,” speaking through whichever demagogic representation has currently captured the legislative machinery, may legitimately overturn these endogenous hierarchies in the name of an abstract “equality” whose actual function is to subordinate substantive achievement to a parasitic political class.
In this respect, the libertarian completes a movement that Spengler began but could not bring to its proper conclusion. Spengler rightly perceived that the dissolving force of late 19th Century and early 20th Century socialist politics and ideology had been the abstract “equality” of mass democracy and its erosion of substantive distinction. He responded by seeking to restore a substantive hierarchy through political means — a Caesarist state capable of imposing rank on a society that had forgotten it. This response was self-defeating. The political imposition of rank produces only the resentful conformity of the subjugated, never the genuine recognition of substantive distinction. The libertarian response is structurally different: dissolve the political mechanism that does the levelling, allow the functional subsystems to operate according to their own internal codes, and substantive hierarchies will re-emerge of their own accord, sustained by the participants in the concrete undertakings that require them.
A further Spenglerian theme requires careful handling: his hostility to “paper systems.” He held this hostility with passion. Recall the passage already quoted:
“Rationalism is at bottom nothing but criticism, and the critic is the reverse of a creator: he dissects and he reassembles; conception and birth are alien to him. Accordingly, his work is artificial and lifeless, and when brought into contact with real life, it kills. All these systems and organizations are paper productions; they are methodical and absurd and live only on the paper they are written on.” (Spengler, 1934, p.30)
Spengler considered the eighteenth-century rationalist construction of political systems on the model of geometric proof, and its twentieth-century descendants in problem novels and party programmes, as themselves a symptom of the urban-intellectual disease. His targets here include not just Marxism and pacifism but, by implication, any project that proposes to redesign a working social order on the basis of theoretical first principles. The libertarian, with his market processes and his discourse capitalism, might at first appear to be exactly this kind of paper-rationalist constructor.
The appearance is misleading, and the libertarian rebuttal converges with Spengler’s own deepest insight. The constructivist treats society as a system to be designed and implemented from a blueprint; both the comprehensive Jacobin and the comprehensive Communist do exactly this. Hayek’s decisive contribution, on which the libertarian project rests, was that this is impossible: the relevant knowledge is dispersed, local, often tacit, and cannot be centralised. Market processes are valuable precisely because they coordinate without requiring centralised design. Discourses, similarly, in the Habermasian sense I have argued for in Markets and Discourses, are not blueprints to be implemented but open, fallible, evolving processes of giving and asking for reasons. As I have put it: Discourses are not markets and operate rather differently. (The metaphor of a “marketplace of ideas” does not imply that discourses are markets.) There is a crucial social difference between market exchanges and discursive “exchanges.” These are very different types of interaction, each with its distinct rules of engagement and criteria of success: Discourses, unlike markets aim for consensus. They operate via the exchange of arguments rather than via the exchange of commodities or services. … Arguments are not a matter of mere personal preference but a matter of evidence-based reasoning (Schumacher, 2025).
What the libertarian project shares with Spengler is, in fact, suspicion of the political pretension to comprehensive social design. What it rejects is Spengler’s further inference that this suspicion implies a return to traditional or aristocratic hierarchies imposed from above. The libertarian inference is the opposite: precisely because no central design can capture the complexity of modern functionally differentiated society, the framing institutions must be ones that permit decentralised experimentation, discovery, and adaptive selection. Markets and open discourses are exactly such institutions. They are not rationalist constructions; they are the conditions under which rationality can operate within each functional subsystem without overreaching itself into a master code.
It is worth noting that Spengler’s most acute aphorism on this subject — “Rationalism is at bottom nothing but criticism, and the critic is the reverse of a creator” — is itself only half right, and the half he missed is the one Habermas later developed. Criticism is indeed not creation. But sustained, disciplined, public criticism is the indispensable framing condition under which creation operates well rather than badly. The entrepreneur whose plans are never publicly tested against arguments and evidence, the engineer whose designs are never exposed to critical review, the legislator whose proposals never face serious discursive challenge, all produce worse results than those whose work is permanently exposed to disciplined criticism. The journalist-critic Spengler rightly despised was the dissolving critic without a counterpart in creation. The libertarian discourse-society does not abolish criticism; it makes criticism the framing condition of consequential creation, while withdrawing from criticism the political power to terminate creation by collectively binding decree.
In such times, there are, under whatever names, two natural parties, two fronts in the class war, two internal forces and tendencies, and only two, no matter how many party organizations exist or whether such exist at all. … Here every individual is confronted with an inevitable choice.
— Spengler, The Hour of Decision
Spengler thought he was writing in an hour of decision — a historical moment in which the long-deferred confrontation between the dissolving forces of urban-democratic levelling and the conserving forces of substantive hierarchy could no longer be evaded. He was right about the moment and wrong about its character. The choice he posed was Caesarism or Bolshevism, soldier-statesman or labour-leader, and the actual history of the following twelve years vindicated none of his hopes and most of his fears.
We stand, I have argued throughout my recent writing, in another hour of decision — differently constituted but no less urgent. The post-Fordist productive revolution has been under way for half a century. The institutional framing inherited from the Fordist-social-democratic settlement is, in country after country, demonstrably incapable of digesting it. Productivity growth has slowed, in some advanced economies effectively to zero. The state grows, but the substantive output it claims to organise stagnates. As I have argued in my 2025 article Pathways towards a Stateless World Society: The libertarian hypothesis is that once this increasingly paralysing current process can be reversed and a process of liberalisation is under way, the prosperity gains that will be unlocked in each step will spurn the process on further. The prospect of such a process might be termed — borrowing a phrase from Karl Marx — “the withering away of the state,” albeit not under communism but under capitalism. Political parties will gradually transform into think tanks or advocacy groups and political leaders will transform from decision makers to proselytizing discourse leaders (Schumacher, 2025, p.261).
Spengler’s hour of decision demanded courage to see and act. So does ours. Spengler’s call for a return of soldier-statesmanship was, in the event, a wrong turn. But the underlying demand — that someone, somewhere, must accept the responsibility of building rather than continuing to drift in the dissolution of inherited institutions — remains. In our hour of decision, the bearers of that responsibility will not be soldier-statesmen at the head of standing armies. They will be founders: of new technologies, of firms, of special economic zones, of jurisdictions, of intellectual movements, of secessionist polities, of new (private) cities, of new schools, of new courts, of new currencies. They will be entrepreneurs in the full and original Spenglerian (and Schumpeterian) sense — men and women of “ambition, love of adventure, who delight in battle and danger” — whose battles will be technological, commercial, intellectual, and at times political, but who will be Faustian in exactly the sense Spengler honoured: in the depth of their commitment to a difficult project, the realism of their assessment of the obstacles, the dignity of their bearing under criticism and ingratitude, the duty they accept to those who depend on them, and the sense of mission that connects their work to the destiny of the civilisation whose productive forces they propose to liberate and propagate.
I have argued that the libertarian project can and should integrate substantial elements of Spengler’s ethical and cultural vision while rejecting his political prescription, and that this integration requires the prior correction of his sociological conflation of structure with stratification. The integration is more than an opportunistic borrowing. It corrects a recurrent and, I think, genuine weakness in libertarian self-presentation: the tendency to describe the future free society as if it were merely a society of comfortable consumers pursuing their preferences through market exchange. Spengler’s contempt for exactly this conception of the human good — the “dollar-society” he attributed to the United States, the “primitive pose” of standardised mass existence — is partly deserved, and the libertarian who wishes his project taken seriously by serious people must answer it.
The answer is not that a libertarian order would be a society of pampered consumers, but that the libertarian order is the only one in which the substantively serious life — the life of the founder, the engineer, the scholar, the craftsman, the institution-builder, the discourse-leader, the entrepreneur in the full and original sense of someone who undertakes a difficult thing and bears its risks — can flourish in our historical moment. The contemporary coercive and controlling nanny state, for all its rhetorical commitment to “service”, is in concrete operation the great enemy of substantive individual and societal flourishing. It proceduralises the manager into a compliance-officer, the scholar into a grant-cycle administrator, the entrepreneur into a permitted petitioner before regulatory commissions, the citizen into an object of administrative determinations. The Faustian-Spenglerian character cannot live in this environment, and the loss of that character to our civilisation is, contra Spengler, not a metaphysical destiny but a contingent and reversible ideological and institutional outcome.
The shared diagnosis with Spengler is therefore deep. The destructive forces are largely as Spengler described them: a rootless intelligentsia organising mass resentment into political power; a moral-political fabrication of victim-categories that displace substantive comparative analysis; a media-cultural apparatus committed to dissolving criticism without compensating creation; a parliamentary-administrative complex that has captured the modern state and turned it against the productive forces it depends on; a propertied class that has bought its own peace by capitulating to the moral terms of its dispossessors; an organised demoralisation of the bulk of the population, a relentless regulatory choking and fiscal squeezing of those who still create and on whose substantive achievement the whole structure rests. Spengler saw all of this clearly. We see it more clearly still, because we have seen another century of its consequences. What we have additionally is the diagnostic apparatus to understand why a Caesarist remedy will not work, why every Caesarism degrades into a parody of the substantive ethic it claimed to restore, and why the actual available remedy is the libertarian one: the rolling-back of the political-administrative apparatus through which the dissolution operates, and the re-opening of the institutional space within which the functionally differentiated subsystems of modern society — science, technology, economy, law, discourse — can each operate according to their own logic, and within which the substantive hierarchies of competence proper to each can re-form.
This is the synthesis. Spengler’s ethics, libertarian institutions. The Faustian character, the Faustian undertaking, the Faustian sense of mission — not in a Caesarist polity that imposes them by command, but in a markets-and-discourses society that opens the institutional space for them to be chosen, lived, and recognised. The hour of decision is now, and the decision is not between the two Spengler offered. The decision is between the continued drift of our institutions into a managed dissolution, and the deliberate rolling-back of those institutions to make room for what they have spent a century displacing. The choice is ours. The course of history, which is stronger than all theory and ideological dreaming, will decide for us if we do not.
Let me end with a final quote from Spengler, a rare quote where pessimism and fatalism seem to recede and point to a project:
“The Faustian nations of the end of the twentieth century will be elective affinities of men with a common feeling about life, with the same imperatives of a strong will and naturally with the same language, but without their knowledge of that language constituting either a hallmark or a limitation. They will be men of race — not in the sense of today’s belief in race, but in my sense of it as a matter of strong instincts, among them that superior eye for the things of reality … men who feel themselves born and called to be masters. What matters number? … A man means a great deal as opposed to a mass of slavish souls, pacifists and world-improvers who yearn for quiet at any cost, even that of “liberty”.” (Spengler,1934, p.69)
If we say 21st instead 20th Century, men & women instead of men, and “leader” instead “master”, this stands as call to action.
End.
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