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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The New Society, by Walther Rathenau
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The New Society
+
+Author: Walther Rathenau
+
+Translator: Arthur Windham
+
+Release Date: March 29, 2007 [EBook #20936]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE NEW SOCIETY ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Markus Brenner, Irma Špehar and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
+file made using scans of public domain works at the
+University of Georgia.)
+
+
+
+
+
+                    THE NEW SOCIETY
+
+                          BY
+
+                   WALTHER RATHENAU
+
+               AUTHORIZED TRANSLATION BY
+                    ARTHUR WINDHAM
+
+
+                       NEW YORK
+               HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY
+                         1921
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+Walther Rathenau, author of _Die neue Gesellschaft_ and other studies
+of economic and social conditions in modern Germany, was born in 1867.
+His father, Emil Rathenau, was one of the most distinguished figures
+in the great era of German industrial development, and his son was
+brought up in the atmosphere of hard work, of enterprise, and of
+public affairs. After his school days at a _Gymnasium_, or classical
+school, he studied mathematics, physics and chemistry at the
+Universities of Berlin and of Strassburg, taking his degree at the age
+of twenty-two. Certain discoveries made by him in chemistry and
+electrolysis led to the establishment of independent manufacturing works,
+which he controlled with success, and eventually to his connexion with
+the world-famous A.E.G.--_Allgemeine Electrizitätsgesellschaft_--at
+the head of which he now stands. During the war he scored a very
+remarkable and exceptional success as controller of the organization
+for the supply of raw materials. He is thus not merely a scholar and
+thinker, but one who has lived and more than held his own in the thick
+of commercial and industrial life, and who knows by actual experience
+the subject-matter with which he deals.
+
+The present study, with its wide outlook and its resolute
+determination to see facts as they are, should have much value for all
+students of latter-day politics and economics in Europe; for though
+Rathenau is mainly concerned with conditions in his own land the same
+conditions affect all countries to a greater or less degree, and he
+deals with general principles of human psychology and of economic law
+which prevail everywhere in the world. It is not too much to say that
+"The New Society" constitutes a landmark in the history of economic
+and social thought, and contains matter for discussion, for sifting,
+for experiment and for propaganda which should occupy serious thinkers
+and reformers for many a day to come. His suggestions and conclusions
+may not be all accepted, or all acceptable, but few will deny that
+they constitute a distinct advance in the effort to bring serious and
+disinterested thought to the solution of our social problems, and in
+this conviction we offer the present complete and authorized
+translation to English readers.
+
+
+
+
+THE NEW SOCIETY
+
+
+I
+
+Is there any sign or criterion by which we can tell that a human
+society has been completely socialized?
+
+There is one and one only: it is when no one can have an income
+without working for it.
+
+That is the sign of Socialism; but it is not the goal. In itself it is
+not decisive. If every one had enough to live on, it would not matter
+for what he received money or goods, or even whether he got them for
+nothing. And relics of the system of income which is not worked for
+will always remain--for instance, provision for old age.
+
+The goal is not any kind of division of income or allotment of
+property. Nor is it equality, reduction of toil, or increase of the
+enjoyment of life. It is the abolition of the proletarian condition;
+abolition of the lifelong hereditary serfage, the nameless hereditary
+servitude, of one of the two peoples who are called by the same name;
+the annulment of the hereditary twofold stratification of society, the
+abolition of the scandalous enslavement of brother by brother, of that
+Western abuse which is the basis of our civilization as slavery was
+of the antique, and which vitiates all our deeds, all our creations,
+all our joys.
+
+Nor is even this the final goal--no economy, no society can talk of a
+final goal--the only full and final object of all endeavour upon earth
+is the development of the human soul. A final goal, however, points
+out the direction, though not the path, of politics.
+
+The political object which I have described as the abolition of the
+proletarian condition may, as I have shown in _Things that are to
+Come_,[1] be closely approached by a suitable policy in regard to
+property and education; above all, by a limitation of the right of
+inheritance. Of socialization in the strict sense there is, for this
+purpose, no need. Yet a far-reaching policy of socialization--and I do
+not here refer to a mere mechanical nationalization of the means of
+production but to a radical economic and social resettlement--is
+necessary and urgent, because it awakens and trains responsibilities,
+and because it withdraws from the sluggish hands of the governing
+classes the determination of time and of method, and places it in the
+hands that have a better title, those of the whole commonalty, which,
+at present, stands helpless through sheer democracy. For only in the
+hands of a political people does democracy mean the rule of the
+people; in those of an untrained and unpolitical people it becomes
+merely an affair of debating societies and philistine chatter at the
+inn ordinary. The symbol of German bourgeois democracy is the tavern;
+thence enlightenment is spread and there judgments are formed; it is
+the meeting place of political associations, the forum of their
+orators, the polling-booth for elections.
+
+But the sign that this far-reaching socialization has been actually
+carried out is the cessation of all income without work. I say the
+sign, but not the sole postulate; for we must postulate a complete and
+genuine democratization of the State and public economy, and a system
+of education equally accessible to all: only then can we say that the
+monopoly of class and culture has been smashed. But the cessation of
+the workless income will show the downfall of the last of
+class-monopolies, that of the Plutocracy.
+
+It is not very easy to imagine what society will be like when these
+objects have been realised, at least if we are thinking not of a brief
+period like the present Russian régime, or a passing phase as in
+Hungary, but an enduring and stationary condition. A dictatorial
+oligarchy, like that of the Bolshevists, does not come into
+consideration here, and the well-meaning Utopias of social romances
+crumble to nothing. They rest, one and all, on the blissfully ignorant
+assumption of a state of popular well-being exaggerated tenfold beyond
+all possibility.
+
+The knowledge of the sort of social condition towards which at present
+we Germans, and then Europe, and finally the other nations are tending
+in this vertical Migration of the Peoples, will not only decide for
+each of us his attitude towards the great social question, but our
+whole political position as well. It is quite in keeping with German
+traditions that in fixing our aims and forming our resolves we should
+be guided not by positive but by negative impulses--not by the effort
+to get something but to get away from it. To this effort, which is
+really a flight, we give the positive name of Socialism, without
+troubling ourselves in the least how things will look--not in the
+sense of popular watchwords but in actual fact--when we have got what
+we are seeking.
+
+This is not merely a case of lack of imagination; it is that we
+Germans have, properly speaking, no understanding of political
+tendencies. We are more or less educated in business, in science, in
+thought, but in politics we are about on the same level as the East
+Slavonic peasantry. At best we know--and even that not always--what
+oppresses, vexes and tortures us; we know our grievances, and think we
+have conceived an aim when we simply turn them upside down. Such
+processes of thought as "the police are to blame, the war-conditions
+are to blame, the Prussians are to blame, the Jews are to blame, the
+English are to blame, the priests are to blame, the capitalists are to
+blame"--all these we quite understand. Just as with the Slavs, if our
+good-nature and two centuries of the love of order did not forbid it,
+our primitive political instincts would find expression in a pogrom in
+the shape of a peasant-war, of a religious war, of witch-trials, or
+Jew-baiting. Our blatant patriotism bore the plainest signs of such a
+temper; half nationalism, half aggression against some bugbear or
+other; never a proud calm, an earnest self-dedication, a struggle for
+a political ideal.
+
+We have now a Republic in Germany: no one seriously desired it. We
+have at last established Parliamentarianism: no one wanted it. We have
+set up a kind of Socialism: no one believed in it. We used to say:
+"The people will live and die for their princes; our last drop of
+blood for the Hohenzollerns"--no one denied it. "The people mean to be
+ruled by their hereditary lords; they will go through fire for their
+officers; rather death than yield a foot of German soil to the foe."
+Was all this a delusion? By no means; it was sincere enough, only it
+did not go deep. It was the kind of sincerity which depends on not
+knowing enough of the alternative possibilities.
+
+When the alternatives revealed themselves as possible and actual, then
+we all turned republican, even to the cottagers in Pomerania. When the
+military strike had broken down discipline, the officers were
+mishandled; when the war was lost, the fleet disgraced, and the
+homeland defiled, then we began to play and dance.
+
+But was this frivolity? Not at all; it was a childish want of
+political imagination. The Poles, a people not remotely comparable to
+the German in depth of soul and the capacity for training talent, have
+for a century cherished no other thought than that of national unity,
+while we passively resign our territories. No Englishman or Japanese
+or American will ever understand us when we tell him that this
+military discipline of ours, this war-lust, did not represent a
+passion for dominion and aggression, but was merely the docility of a
+childish people which wants nothing, and can imagine nothing, but that
+things should go on as they happen, at the moment, to be.
+
+We Germans know but little of the laws which govern the formation of
+national character. The capacity of a people for profundity is not
+profundity, either of the individual or of the community. It may
+express itself in the masses as mere plasticity and softness of
+spirit. The capacity for collective sagacity and strength of will
+demands from the individual merely a dry intelligence in human
+affairs, and egoism. It would be too much to say that our political
+weakness may be merely the expression of spiritual power, for the
+latter has not proved an obstacle to success in business. Indolence
+and belief in authority have their share in it.
+
+But have we not been the classic land of social democracy, and have we
+not become that of Radicalism? Well, we have been, indeed, and are,
+with our submissiveness to authority and our capacity for discipline,
+the classic land of organized grumbling; and the classic land, too, of
+anti-semitism which deprived us of the very forces we stood most in
+need of--productive scepticism and the imagination for concrete
+things. Organized grumbling is not the same thing as political
+creation. A Socialism and Radicalism poorer in ideas than the
+post-Marxian German Socialism has never existed. Half of it was merely
+clerical work, and the other half was agitators' Utopianism of the
+cheapest variety.
+
+Nothing was more significant than the fact that the mighty event of
+the German Revolution was not the result of affection but of
+disaffection. It is not we who liberated ourselves, it was the enemy;
+it was our destruction that set us free. On the day before we asked
+for the armistice, perhaps even on the day before the flight of the
+Kaiser, a plébiscite would have yielded an overwhelming majority for
+the monarchy and against Socialism. What I so often said before the
+war came true: "He who trains his children with the rod learns only
+through the rod."
+
+And to-day, when everything is seething and fermenting--no thanks to
+Socialism for that--all intellectual work has to be done outside of
+the ranks of social-democracy, which stumbles along on its two
+crutches of "Socialization" and "Soviets."[2] Orthodox Socialism is
+still a case of the "lesser evil," what the French call a _pis aller_.
+"Things are so bad that any change must be for the better." What is to
+make them better we are told in the socialist catechism; but _how_ it
+is to do so, how and what anything is to become, this, the only
+question that matters, is regarded as irrelevant. It is answered by
+some halting and insincere stammer about "surplus value" which is to
+make everybody well off--and which would yield all round, as I have
+elsewhere shown, just twenty-five marks a head. Fifteen millions of
+grown men are pressing forward into a Promised Land revealed through
+the fog of political assemblies and in the thunder of parrot-phrases--a
+land from which no one will ever bring back a bunch of grapes.
+
+If one would interrogate not the agitators, but their hearers, and
+find out what they instinctively conceive this land to look like, we
+should get the answer, timid and naïve but at the same time the
+deepest and shrewdest that it is possible to give--that it is a land
+where there are no longer any rich.
+
+A most true and truthful reply! And yet a profound error silently
+lurks in it. You imagine, do you not, that in a land where there are
+no more rich people there will also be no more poor? "Why, of course
+not! How can there be poor people when there are no more rich?" And
+yet there will be. In the land where there are no more rich there will
+be _only_ poor, only very poor, people.
+
+Whoever does not know this and is a Socialist, that man is merely one
+of the herd or he is a dupe. He who knows it and conceals it is a
+deceiver. He who knows it, and in spite of that, nay, on account of
+that, is a Socialist, is a man of the future.
+
+Though the crowd be satisfied with some dim feeling that this, anyhow,
+is the tendency of the times and that with this stream one must swim;
+though the more thoughtful contemplate the evils of the time and
+decide to put up with the _pis aller_; the responsible thinker is
+under the obligation of investigating the land into which the people
+are being led. We must know what it looks like, where there are no
+rich people and where no one can have an income without working for
+it, we must understand what we call the "new society" so as to be able
+to shape it aright.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 1: _Von Kommenden Dingen_, by Walther Rathenau. Berlin. S.
+Fischer.]
+
+[Footnote 2: Workers' and Soldiers' Councils.]
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+The question is not very urgent.
+
+As surely as the hundred years' course of the social World-Revolution
+cannot be arrested, so surely can we prophesy that the process cannot
+maintain all along the line the rapid movement of its beginning. The
+victorious and the defeated countries will have to work out to the end
+the changes and interchanges of their various phases, for in the
+historical developments which we witness to-day, we find mingled
+together the phenomena of organic growth and of disease; already we
+see that the Socialism of the healthy nations is different from that
+of the sick ones. It is in vain that those who are sick with the
+Bolshevist disease dream that they can infect the world.
+
+The small daily and yearly movements in our realm of Central Europe
+cannot be determined beforehand, because they depend upon small,
+accidental, local, and external forces. The great and necessary issues
+of events can be predicted, but it would be folly to discuss their
+accidental flux and reflux. When an unguarded house is filled with
+explosives from the cellar to the roof, then we know that it will one
+day be blown up; but whether this will happen on a Sunday or a
+Monday, in the morning or in the evening, or whether the left door
+post will be left standing or no, it would be idle to inquire.
+
+From the historical point of view it is of no consequence whether
+Radicalism may make an inroad here and there, or whether here and
+there the forces of reaction and restoration may collect themselves
+for a transitory triumph. The great movement of history, as we always
+find when a catastrophe has worked itself out, grows slower, and this
+retardation in itself looks like reaction. We, who are not accustomed
+to catastrophes, and who did not produce this first one, but rather
+suffered it, we, who easily get sea-sick after every rapid
+movement--think, for instance, of the former Reichstag--we shall
+certainly experience, as the first deep wave of the Revolution sinks
+into us, an aristocratic, dynastic, and plutocratic Romanticism, a
+yearning for the colour and glitter of the time of glory, a revolt
+against the spiritless, mechanical philanthrophy of unemployed orators
+of about fourth-form standard intellectually; against the monotonous
+and insincere tirades of paid agitators and their restless disciples;
+against laziness; ignorance, greed, and exaggeration masquerading as
+popular scientific economy; and against the brutal and extortionate
+upthrust from below. And so we shall arrive at the reverse kind of
+folly, an admiration and bad imitation of foreign pride and pomp, an
+arrogant individualism and a hardening of our human feeling. The
+intellectual war profiteers, who are all for radicalism to-day, will
+soon be wearing cornflowers[3] in their button-holes.
+
+For the third time we shall see an illustration of the naïve
+shamelessness of the turn-coat. The spiritual process of conversion is
+worth noticing; Paul was converted to be a converter. But the
+scurrying of the intellectual speculator from the position which has
+failed into the position which has won, with the full intention of
+scurrying back again if necessary, and always with the claim to
+instruct other people, is an expression of the alarming fact that life
+has become not an affair of inward conviction, but of getting the
+right tip.
+
+The turn-coat movement began when a shortsighted crowd, incapable of
+judgment, and with their minds clouded with a few cheap phrases,
+expected from a quick and victorious war the strengthening of all the
+elements of Force, and feared to be left stranded. Even the most
+threadbare kind of liberalism appeared to be compromising, they
+clamoured for "shining armour." The most wretched victims in soul and
+body, who were obliged to flee forwards because they could not flee in
+any other direction, were called heroes, and the manliest word in our
+language, a word of which only the freest and the greatest are worthy,
+was degraded. One who has experienced the hate and fury of the
+turn-coats who poured contempt upon every word against the war and the
+"great days," is unable to understand how a whole people can throw
+its errors overboard without shame and sorrow--or he understands it
+only too well. At this day we are being mocked and preached at by the
+turn-coats of the second transformation, and to-morrow we shall be
+smiled at by those of the third.
+
+But it does not matter. The moving forces of our epoch do not come
+from business offices nor from the street, the rostrum, the pulpit, or
+the professorial chair. The noisy rush of yesterday, to-day and
+to-morrow is only the furious motion of the outermost circle, the
+centre moves upon its way, quietly as the stars.
+
+We have in our survey to leap over several periods of forward and
+backward movement and we shall earn the thanks of none of them. What
+is too conservative for one will be too revolutionary for another, and
+the æsthete will scornfully tell us that we have no fibre. When we
+show that what awaits us is no fools' paradise, but the danger of a
+temporary reverse of humanity and culture, then the facile Utopianist
+will shout us down with his two parrot-phrases,[4] and when we, out of
+a sense of duty, of harmony with the course of the world and
+confidence in justice at the soul of things, tread the path of danger,
+precipitous though it be, then we shall be scorned by all the
+worshippers of Force and despisers of mankind.
+
+But we for our part shall not pander either to the force-worshippers
+or to the masses. We serve no powers that be. Our love goes out to the
+People; but the People are not a crowd at a meeting, nor a sum-total
+of interests, nor are they the newspapers or debating-clubs. The
+People are the waking or sleeping, the leaking, frozen, choked, or
+gushing well of the German spirit. It is with that spirit, in the
+present and in the future, as it runs its course into the sea of
+humanity, that we have here to do.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 3: The emblem of the Hohenzollerns.]
+
+[Footnote 4: The reference, apparently, is to the argument that any
+change must be for the better, and to the reliance on surplus value.
+See pp. 13, 14.]
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+The criterion which we have indicated for the socialized society of
+the future is a material one. But is the spiritual condition of an
+epoch to be determined by material arrangements? Is this not a
+confession of faith in materialism?
+
+We are speaking of a criterion, not of a prime moving force. I have no
+desire, however, to avoid going into the material, or rather we should
+say mechanical, interpretation of history. I have done it more than
+once in my larger works, and for the sake of coherence I may repeat it
+in outline here.
+
+The laws which determine individual destinies are reproduced in the
+history of collective movements. A man's career is not prescribed by
+his bodily form, his expression, or his environment; but there is in
+these things a certain connexion and parallelism, for the same laws
+which determine the course of his intellectual and spiritual life
+reflect themselves in bodily and practical shape. Every instant of our
+experience, all circumstances in which we find ourselves, every limb
+that we grow, every accident that happens to us, is an expression or
+product of our character. We are indeed subject to human limitations;
+we are not at liberty to live under water or in another planet; but
+within these wide boundaries each of us can shape his own life. To
+observe a man, his work, his fate, his body and expression, his
+connexions and his marriage, his belongings and his associations, is
+to know the man.
+
+From this point of view all social, economic and political schemes
+become futile, for if man is so sovereign a being there is no need to
+look after him. But these schemes re-acquire a relative importance
+when we consider the average level of man's will-power, as we meet it
+in human experience--a power which, as a rule, shows itself unable to
+make head against a certain maximum of pressure from external
+circumstances. And again, these schemes are really a part of the
+expression of human will, for through them collective humanity battles
+with its surroundings, its contemporary world, and freely shapes its
+own destinies.
+
+The inner laws of the community harmonize with those of the
+individuals who compose it. The fact that certain national traits of
+will and character are conditioned or even enforced by poverty or
+wealth, soil and climate, an inland or maritime position, tends to
+obscure the fact that these external conditions are not really laid on
+the people but have been willed by themselves. A people _wills_ to
+have a nomadic life, or wills to have a sea-coast, or wills
+agriculture, or war; and has the power, if its will be strong enough,
+to obtain its desire, or failing that to break up and perish. It is
+the same will and character which decides for well-being and culture,
+or indolence and dependence, or labour and spiritual development. The
+Venetians did not have architecture and painting bestowed upon them
+because they happened to have become rich, nor the English sea-power
+because they happened to live on an island: no, the Venetians willed
+freedom, power and art, and the Anglo-Saxons willed the sea.
+
+There is a grain of truth in the popular political belief that war
+embodies a judgment of God. At any rate character is judged by it; not
+indeed in the sense of popular politics, that one can "hold out" in a
+hopeless position, but because all the history that went before the
+war, the capacity or incapacity of politics and leadership is a
+question of character--and with us it was a question of indolence, of
+political apathy, of class-rule, philistinish conceit and greed of
+gain. Nowhere was this conception of the judgment of God so
+blasphemously exaggerated as with us Germans, when the lord of our
+armed hosts, at the demand of the barracks greedy for power, of the
+tavern-benches, the state-bureaus and the debating societies was
+summoned, and charged with the duty, forsooth, of chastising
+England--England, which they only knew out of newspaper reports!
+To-day this exaggeration is being paid for in humiliation, for God did
+not prove controllable, and His naïve blasphemers must silently and
+with grinding teeth admit that their foes are in the right when they,
+in their turn, appeal to the same judgment to justify, without limit,
+everything they desire to do.
+
+After these brief observations on the psycho-physical complex, Spirit
+and Destiny, we hope we shall not be misunderstood when for the sake
+of brevity we speak as if the spirit of the new order were determined
+by its material construction, while in reality it incorporates itself
+therein. The structure is the easier to survey, and we therefore make
+it the starting-point of our discussion.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+All civilisations known to us have sprung from peoples which were
+numerous, wealthy and divided into two social strata. They reached
+their climax at the moment when the two strata began to melt into one.
+
+It is not enough, therefore, that a people should be numerous and
+wealthy; it must, with all its wealth and its power, contain a large
+proportion of poor and even oppressed and enslaved subjects. If it has
+not got these, it must master and make use of other foreign cultures
+as a substitute. That is what Rome did; it is what America is doing.
+
+It is terrible, but comprehensible. For up to this point the
+unconscious processes of Nature, the law of mutual strife, has
+prevailed. So far, collective organizations have been beasts of prey;
+only now are they about to cross the boundaries of the human order.
+
+Comprehensible and explicable. For all creations of culture hold
+together; one cannot pursue the cheaper varieties while renouncing the
+more costly. There is no cheap culture. In their totality they demand
+outlay, the most tremendous outlay known to history, the only outlay
+by which human toil is recompensed, over and above the supply of
+absolute necessaries.
+
+The creations of civilisation, like all things living and dead, follow
+on each other--plants, men, beasts and utensils have their sequence
+generation after generation. Men must paint and look at pictures for
+ten thousand years before a new picture comes into existence. Our
+poetry and our research are the fruit of thousands of years. This is
+no disparagement to genius in work and thought, genius is at once new,
+ancient and eternal, even as the blossom is a new thing on the old
+stem, and belongs to an eternal type. When we hear that a native in
+Central Africa or New Zealand has produced an oil-painting we know
+that somehow or other he must have got to Paris. When a European
+artist writes or paints in Tahiti, what he produces is not a work of
+Tahitian culture. When civilisation has withered away on some
+sterilized soil, it can only be revived by new soil and foreign seed.
+
+The continuity of culture, even in civilized times, can only, however,
+be maintained by constant outlay, just as in arid districts a
+luxuriant vegetation needs continuous irrigation. The flood of
+Oriental wealth had to pour itself into Italy in order to bring forth
+the bloom of Renaissance art. Thousands of patricians, hundreds of
+temporal and spiritual princes, had to found and to adorn temples and
+palaces, gardens, monuments, pageants, games and household goods in
+order that art and science, schooling, mastership, discipleship and
+tradition might grow up. The worship of foreign culture which
+characterized Germany in the seventeenth and half of the eighteenth
+centuries only meant that our soil was grown too poor to yield a crop
+of its own. The culture of the Middle Ages remained international only
+so long as the population of Europe was too sparse and the
+opportunities of work too scanty to occupy local energies; even in the
+thinly populated, Homeric middle-ages of Greece, the builder and the
+poet were not settled in one place, they were wandering artists. If
+to-day the Republic of Guatemala or Honduras should want a
+senate-house or a railway-station they will probably send to London or
+Paris for an architect.
+
+Even technique in handicraft and industry, that typical art of
+civilization, cannot dispense with a great and continuous outlay on
+training, commissioning and marketing in order to maintain itself.
+Although it has not happened yet, there is no reason why a Serb or a
+Slovak should not make some important discovery if he has been trained
+at a European University and learnt the technical tradition. That will
+not, however, give rise to an independent and enduring Serbian or
+Slovakian technique, even though the costliest Universities and
+laboratories should be established in the country and foreign teachers
+called to teach in them. After all that, one must have a market in the
+country itself; expert purchasers, manufacturers, middle-men, a
+trained army of engineers, craftsmen, masters, workmen and a foreign
+market as well--in short, the technical atmosphere--in order to keep
+up the standard of manufacture and production.
+
+A poor country cannot turn out products of high value for a rich one;
+it has not had the education arising from demand. In products relating
+to sport and to comfort, for instance, England was a model, but in
+France these products were ridiculously misunderstood and imitated
+with silly adornments, while on the other hand French products of
+luxury and art-industry were sought for by all countries. German wares
+were considered to be cheap and nasty, until the land grew rich, and
+brought about the co-operation of its forces of science and technique,
+production and marketing, auxiliary industries and remote profits,
+finance and commerce, education and training, judgment and criticism,
+habits of life and a sense of comparative values.
+
+But human forces need the same nurture, the same outlay and the same
+high training, as institutions and material products. Delicate work
+demands sensitive hands and a sheltered way of life; discovery and
+invention demand leisure and freedom; taste demands training and
+tradition, scientific thinking and artistic conception demand an
+environment with an unbroken continuity of cultivation, thought and
+intelligence. A dying civilisation can live for a while on the
+existing humus of culture, on the existing atmosphere of thought, but
+to create anew these elements of life is beyond its powers.
+
+Do not let us deceive ourselves, but look the facts in the face! All
+these excellent Canadians, with or without an academic degree, who
+innocently pride themselves on a proletarian absence of prejudice, are
+adoptive children of a plutocratic and aristocratic cultivation. It is
+all the same even if they lay aside their stiff collars and
+eye-glasses; their every word and argument, their forms of thought,
+their range of knowledge, their strongly emphasized intellectuality
+and taste for art and science, their whole handiwork and industry, are
+an inheritance from what they supposed they had cast off and a tribute
+to what they pretend to despise. Genuine radicalism is only to be
+respected when it understands the connexion of things and is not
+afraid of consequences. It must understand--and I shall make it
+clear--that its rapid advance will kill culture; and the proper
+conclusion is that it ought to despise culture, not to sponge on it.
+The early Christians abolished all the heathen rubbish and
+abominations, the early Radicals would have hurried, in the first
+instance, to pick out the plums.
+
+Culture and civilization, as we see, demand a continuous and enormous
+outlay; an outlay in leisure, an outlay in working power, an outlay in
+wealth. They need patronage and a market, they need the school, they
+need models, tradition, comparison, judgment, intelligence,
+cultivation, disposition, the right kind of nursery--an atmosphere.
+One who stands outside it can serve it, often more powerfully with
+his virgin strength than one who is accustomed to it--but he must be
+carried along and animated by the breath of the same atmosphere.
+Culture and civilization require a rich soil.
+
+But the richness of the soil is not sufficient; culture must be based
+upon, and increased by, contrast. Wealth must have at its disposal
+great numbers of men who are poor and dependent. How otherwise shall
+the outlay of culture be met? One man must have many at his disposal;
+but how can he, if they are all his equals? The outlay will be large,
+but it must be feasible; how can it, if the labour of thousands is not
+cheap? The few, the exalted, must develop power and splendour, they
+must offer types for imitation: how can they do that without a
+retinue, without spectators, without the herd? A land of well-being,
+that is to say, of equally distributed well-being, remains petty and
+provincial. When a State and its authorities, councils of solid and
+thrifty members of societies for this or that, take over the office of
+a Mæcenas or a Medici, with their proposals, their calculations, their
+objections, their control, then we get things that look like
+war-memorials, waiting-rooms, newspaper-kiosks and drinking-saloons.
+It was not always so? No; but even in the most penurious times it was
+kings who were the patrons.
+
+But if culture is such a poison-flower, if it flourishes only in the
+swamp of poverty and under the sun of riches, it must and ought to be
+destroyed. Our sentiment will no longer endure the happiness and
+brilliance of the few growing out of the misery of the many; the days
+of the senses are over, and the day of conscience is beginning to
+dawn.
+
+And now a timid and troubled puritanism makes itself heard: Is there
+no middle way? Will not half-measures suffice? No, it will not do; let
+this be said once for all as plainly as possible, you champions of the
+supply of "bare necessities" who talk about "daily bread" and want to
+butter it with the "noblest pleasures of art." It will not do!
+
+No, half-measures will not do, nor quarter-measures. They might, if
+the whole world, the sick, the healthy and the bloated all together
+were of the same mind as ourselves. In Moscow it is said that people
+are expecting the world-revolution every hour, but the world declines
+to oblige. Therefore, if culture and civilization are to remain what
+they were, is there nothing for it but with one wrench to tear the
+poisoned garment from our body? Or--is there then an "or"? Let us see.
+We have a long way before us. First of all we must know how rich or
+how poor we and the world are going to be, on the day when there will
+be no income without working for it and no rich people any more.
+
+If our economic system made us self-supporting we might arrange
+matters on the model of the Boer Republic which had all it needed, and
+now and then traded a load of ostrich feathers for coffee and hymn
+books. But we, alas! in order to find nourishment for twenty
+millions[5] have to export blood and brains. And if, in order to buy
+phosphates, we offer cotton stockings and night-caps as the highest
+products of our artistic energies, and declare that they are all the
+soundest hand-work--for in our "daily bread" economy we shall have
+long forgotten how to work such devil's tools as the modern
+knitting-machine--then people will reply to us: in the first place we
+don't want night-caps, and if we did we can supply them for one-tenth
+of the cost; and our cotton goods will be sent back to us as
+unsaleable.
+
+A world-trade, even of modest dimensions, can only be carried on upon
+the basis of high technical accomplishment, but this height of
+accomplishment cannot be attained on the basis of any penny-wise
+economy. Whoever wills the part must also will the whole, but to this
+whole belongs not merely the conception of a technique, but of a
+civilization, and indeed of a culture. One might as well demand of a
+music-hall orchestra which plays ragtime all the year round that once
+in the year, and once only, on Good Friday, it should pull itself
+together to give an adequate performance of the Passion Music of Bach.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 5: By this figure the author seems to be referring to the
+population of the impoverished Germany of the future if the course of
+Socialism proceeds on wrong lines.]
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+For some decades Germany will be one of the poorest of countries. How
+poor she will be does not depend on herself alone, but on the power
+and the will for mischief of others--who hate us.
+
+However, poverty and wealth are relative terms; Germans are still
+richer on the average than their forefathers; richer than the Romans
+or Greeks. The standard of well-being is set by the best-off of the
+competitors, for he it is who determines the current standard of
+technique and industry, the methods of production, the minimum of
+labour and skill. We cannot, as we have already seen, keep aloof from
+world-competition, for Germany needs cheap goods. We must therefore
+try to keep step so far as we can.
+
+Even if we shut our eyes and take no more account of our debt to
+foreign lands than we do of the war-tribute, we must admit that the
+average standard of well-being in America far surpasses the German.
+Goods are not so dear as with us, and the wages of the skilled worker
+amounts to between seven and ten dollars a day--more than 100 marks in
+our money; and many artisans drive to their workshops in their own
+automobiles.
+
+If, now, we ask our Radicals how they envisage the problem of
+competition with such a country, which in one generation will be
+twenty-or thirty-fold as rich as we are, they will blurt out a few
+sentences in which we shall catch the word "Soviet system," "surplus
+value,"[6] "world revolution." But in truth the question will never
+occur to them--it is not ventilated at public meetings.
+
+Among themselves they talk, albeit without much conviction, about
+"surplus value"--which has nothing whatever to do with the present
+question, and in regard to which it has been proved to them often
+enough that so far as it can be made use of at all, it only means
+about a pound of butter extra per head of the population.
+
+The economic superiority of the Western powers, however, goes on
+growing, inasmuch as to all appearance they are getting to work
+seriously to establish the new economy (which we have buried) in the
+form of State Socialism. A healthy, or what is to-day the same thing,
+a victorious economy, does not leap over any of its stages; it will
+work gradually through the apparently longer, but constant, movement
+from Capitalism to State Socialism and thence to full Socialism; while
+we, it seems, want to take a shortcut, and to miss out the intervening
+stage. And we lose so much time and energy in restless fluctuations
+forward and backward, hither and thither, that this leap in advance
+may fall short.
+
+If anything could be more stupid and calamitous than the war itself it
+was the time when it broke out. There was one thing which the big
+capitalism of the world was formed to supply, which it was able to
+supply, and, in fact, was supplying: the thing which not only
+justified capitalism, but showed it to be an absolutely necessary
+stage in the development of a denser population. This was the
+enrichment of the peoples, the rapid, and even anticipatory
+restoration of equilibrium between the growing population and the
+indispensable increase in the means of production; in other words,
+general well-being. The unbroken progress of America, and the almost
+unbroken progress of England will demonstrate that in one, or at most
+two, generations the power of work and the output of mechanism would
+have risen to such a pitch that we could have done anything we liked
+in the direction of lightening human labour and reconciling social
+antagonisms.
+
+Alas, it was in vain! The rapid advance to prosperity of the people of
+Central Europe, who had been accustomed to thrift and economy, went to
+their heads; they fell victims to the poison of capitalism and of
+mechanism; they were unable, like America in its youthful strength, to
+make their new circumstances deepen their sense of responsibility; in
+their greedy desire to store as much as possible of the heavenly manna
+in their private barns they abandoned their destinies to a
+superannuated, outworn feudal class and to aspiring magnates of the
+bourgeoisie; they would not be taught by political catastrophes, and
+at last, in the catastrophe of the war, they lost at once their
+imaginary hopes, their traditional power and the economic basis of
+their existence.
+
+Those who are now pursuing a policy of desperation are unconsciously
+building their hopes on the breakdown which brought them to the top:
+they are avowedly making the hoped-for revolution in the West the
+central point of their system. If the West holds out, they will be
+false prophets; but it will not only hold out, it will in the
+beginning at all events, witness a great and passionate uprising of
+imperialistic and capitalistic tendencies. If there is any one who did
+not understand that a policy based on hopes of other peoples'
+bankruptcy is the most flimsy and frivolous of all policies, he might
+well have learned it from the war.
+
+Germany must forge her own destinies for herself, without side-glances
+at the good or ill fortune of others. Had time only been given us to
+pass naturally from the stage of a prolonged and corrupted childhood
+into that of a manly responsibility, our ultimate recovery would be
+assured. But we have to accomplish in months what ought to be the
+evolution of decades; our national training has left us without
+convictions, we have no eye for the true boundaries of rights, claims
+and responsibilities, and we hesitate as to how far we must or ought
+to go. Unprepared, weakened, impoverished and sick, we are required,
+at the most unlucky moment, to work out a new and unprecedented order
+of life. Before even the educated classes are capable of forming a
+judgment on the question, the most incapable masses of the rawest
+youth, of the lowest classes of society, are let loose, and sit upon
+the judgment-seat.
+
+It is not only that we have been rich and have become very poor, but
+we were always politically immature, and are so still. If the order of
+Society is to be that of root-and-branch Socialism, it will mean the
+proletarian condition for all of us, and for a long time to come.
+There is no use in flattering ourselves and painting the future better
+than it is; the truth must be spoken with all plainness. If we work
+hard, and under capable guidance, each of us will at most have an
+effective income of 500 marks in pre-war values, or, say, 2000 marks
+for the family. This average will be higher if we proceed on the
+principles of the New Economy,[7] but again will be reduced by the
+necessity for allowing extra pay for work of higher value. If to-day
+the average income available is markedly higher than the above, the
+reason is that we are living on our capital; we are living on the
+products of work which ought to be reserved for the maintenance and
+renewal of the means of production; in other words we are exhausting
+the soil and slaughtering our stock. We are also consuming what
+foreign countries give us on credit; in other words, we are living on
+borrowed money.
+
+It is childish lying and deception to act on the tacit assumption that
+thoroughgoing Socialism means something like a garden-city idyll, with
+play-houses, open-air theatres, excursions, picturesque raiment and
+fire-side art. This in itself quite decent ideal of the average
+architect, art-craftsman and art-reformer if expressed in dry figures
+would, "at the lowest estimate" as they say, demand about fivefold the
+capacity for production attainable by the utmost exertions and with a
+ten hours' day _before the war_--before the downfall of our economy
+and our exploitation by the enemy.
+
+To place one-third of our working-class in decent, freehold dwellings
+would alone, if the material and means of production sufficed, require
+the whole working-capacity of the country for two years. Even after
+the last manufacturer's villa-residence, the last palace-hotel, have
+long been turned into tenements, the solution of the most urgent part
+of the housing-question will still be an affair of decades. For the
+sake of the last remnant of our self-respect we must finally tear
+asunder that web of economic falsehood, woven out of ignorance, mental
+lethargy, concealment and illusion, which has taken the place of the
+political. Let us see any one attempt to prove that Germany can carry
+on, I do not say a well-off, but even a petty tradesman's kind of
+existence, unless our means of production can by some stroke of magic
+be multiplied tenfold--on paper it can be done with ease--or unless
+the production value (not turnover), which an adult working-man can
+with the utmost exertion bring into being in the course of a year does
+not many times exceed the average value of 2000 marks.
+
+No doubt the young folk of our big cities promise themselves a merry
+time for six weeks when they have got power, the shops, the wardrobes
+and the wine-cellars into their hands. For the leaders, it may last a
+little longer than for the rank-and-file. And then, for those of the
+former who have any sense of honesty, will come a question of
+conscience, which may be delayed by printing paper-money, but cannot
+be solved by any appeal to the people.
+
+If Bolshevism were the contrary to what it is--if it were a success, a
+thing not absolutely impossible in a peasant-State, we might
+understand the self-assurance of those who, in opposition to our
+forecast, expect everything from the will of the people, the Soviet
+system and the inspirations of the future. We do understand it in the
+case of the drawing-room communists, and the profiteer-extremists who
+are out not for the cause, but for power, and perhaps only for
+material objects.
+
+I know that by these observations I am favouring the cause of those
+sorry dignitaries of a day, the Majority Socialists, but I cannot help
+that. The truth is not false because it favours one party, nor is
+falsehood truth because it harms the other. The Socialism now in
+power is doing the right thing, although it is doing it out of
+ignorance and helplessness--it is waiting, and getting steam up. It is
+better to do the right thing out of error than to do the wrong thing
+out of wisdom. Out of error: for besides omitting to do what ought not
+to be done it also omits the things it ought to do--among others, the
+introduction of the New Economy.[8] It is like mankind before the
+Fall; it does not know good from evil, what is useful and what is
+noxious, what can be done and what cannot. Well--let it take its time;
+it shall have time enough.
+
+This time must be turned to good account. When we have come to the end
+of these observations we shall understand what a huge task lies
+between us and the realization of the new social order. In this case
+the longest way round is the shortest way home. And even if Germany
+should choose the mountain road with its broad loops and windings, we
+shall stray often enough, and go backward now and then; while if, in
+impatient revolt, we try to climb straight up, we shall slip down
+lower than where we started. Let us never forget how mysteriously our
+social and political immaturity seems to be bound up with our once
+lofty and even now remarkable intellectuality and morality.[9] We have
+not won our liberties, they have fallen into our laps; it was by the
+general breakdown, by a strike, by a flight, that Germany and her
+former rulers have parted company. These liberties, social and
+political, are not rooted in the soil, they can hardly be said to be
+prized among the treasures of life, it is not their ideal, but their
+material side which attracts us. Those who used to shout Hurrah! now
+cry "All power to the Soviets!" and the day will come when they will
+again shout Hurrah! Then we shall witness a real sundering of our
+different visions of the world, visions now buried under a mass of
+interests and speculations.
+
+In any case, whether the change is to be catastrophic or evolutionary,
+the journey will be a long one, and every attempt to hurry it will
+only prolong it further; it will throw us back for years, or it may be
+decades. Above all things, we must know whither we are going. In order
+to adapt ourselves to a new form of society we must know what it _may_
+look like, what it _ought_ to look like, and what it _will_ look like.
+We shall find that Germany is not going to be landed in an earthly
+Paradise, but in a world of toil, and one which for a long period will
+be a world of poverty, of a penurious civilization and of a
+deeply-endangered culture. The unproved, parrot-phrases of a cheap
+Utopianism will grow dumb--those phrases which offer us entrance into
+the usual Garden of Eden with its square-cut, machine-made culture and
+gaudy, standardized enjoyments--phrases which assure us that when we
+have introduced the six-hours' working day and abolished private
+property, the cinema horrors will be replaced by classical concerts,
+the gin-shops by popular reading-rooms, the gaming-hells by edifying
+lectures, highway robberies by gymnastic exercises, detective novels
+by Gottfried Keller, bazaar-trifles and comic vulgarities by works of
+refined handicraft; and that out of boxing contests, racecourse
+betting, bomb exercises, and profiteering in butter, we shall see the
+rise of an era of humility and philanthropy.
+
+In the Promised Land as we conceive it, the classes which are now the
+bearers of German culture will lose almost everything, while the gain
+of the proletariat will be scarcely visible. And yet for the sake of
+this scarcely visible gain we must tread the stony path that lies
+before us. Willingly and joyfully shall we tread it; for out of this,
+at first, dubious conquest of equal rights for all men will grow the
+might of justice, of human dignity, of human solidarity and unity.
+
+That is truly work for a century, and yet for that very reason the
+hard path will lead to its reward. We must learn to know it, and to
+understand that it is a path of sacrifice. We must not accept the
+invitation of fools to a Christmas party--fools who will make the
+welkin ring with their outcries when they find out their
+self-deception. Let us tread our path of suffering with a pride which
+disdains to be consoled by illusions.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 6: By surplus-value (_Mehrwert_) the author means all that
+is produced above and beyond the bare necessities of life.]
+
+[Footnote 7: _Die Neue Wirtschaft_, by Walther Rathenau (S. Fischer).
+In this brief study, Rathenau urges (1) the unification and
+standardization of the whole of German industry and commerce in one
+great Trust, working under a State charter, and armed with very
+extensive powers; and (2) a great intensification of the application
+of science and mechanism to production.]
+
+[Footnote 8: See p. 37, _note_.]
+
+[Footnote 9: Morality, _Sittlichkeit_, a word of broader meaning than
+"morality," for it comprehends not only matters of ethical right and
+wrong, but the general temper and habit of mind of a people as
+expressed in social life.]
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+
+In order to throw some light into the obscurity of that social
+dreamland which no one seriously discusses because no one honestly
+believes in it, let us, as it were, cut out and examine a section from
+the fully socialized Germany of the future. Let us suppose that
+certain economic and social conditions have lasted for a generation or
+so, and have therefore become more or less stabilized. At a normal
+rate of progress this state of things should be reached about the end
+of this century.
+
+To begin with, let us make two very optimistic assumptions--first,
+that technical progress in Germany shall have developed to a point at
+which we are no longer impossibly outclassed and distanced by foreign
+nations, and, secondly, that by a timely and far-reaching reform of
+education and culture (the lowest cost of which must be set down at
+about three milliards of marks) the complete breakdown of civilisation
+may be averted. This reform is one which must be taken in hand very
+early, for _after_ the event its adoption is improbable. A third, less
+optimistic but on that account more probable assumption may be added
+to this--namely, that the Western countries shall have progressed
+towards Socialism more steadily and therefore more slowly, and that
+at the period of our comparison America shall find itself at the stage
+of State-Socialism, not of full socialization. We know that in making
+this assumption we are smoothing the way for attack to our
+professional opponents, uncritical and self-interested, who with one
+blast of the fanfare of world-revolution can scatter our further
+observations to the winds.
+
+Full Socialism is characterized, as we have seen, by the abolition of
+all incomes that are not worked for, and the fact that there are no
+more rich. But this criterion must be limited in its application, for
+it can never be fully realized.
+
+According to the theory and the laws every one must hold some
+appointment and be paid for his work, or for not working. What he is
+paid, however, he can at will utilize, or waste, or hoard up, or give,
+or gamble away, or destroy. He cannot invest it, or get interest on it
+or turn into capital, because these private undertakings or means of
+production will no longer exist.
+
+Now each of these assumptions is so shaky that not only must trifling
+divergences and shortcomings be winked at, but the meshes of the
+system are so wide that only a rough approximation to the ideal is
+possible.
+
+It is true that every one can be made to hold some appointment and be
+paid for some minimum of work, but no one can be prevented from
+devoting his leisure hours to some work of rare quality and turning it
+into value for his own purposes. He can make himself useful by
+subsidiary employment of an artistic, scientific or technical
+character, by rendering services or assistance of various kinds, by
+advising, or entertaining, or acting as a guide to strangers, or going
+on employment abroad, and no law can prevent him from turning his
+services into income even if he was merely paid in kind. Gaming and
+betting will flourish and many will grow rich by them. A man who has
+lost his money and who has exhausted his rights to an advance from the
+public institutions for that object will have recourse to lenders who
+will supply him with bread and meat and clothes, and who will make
+money by it. Similarly with people who are tempted to make
+acquisitions beyond their standard remuneration. On every side we
+shall see private stores of goods of all kinds, which will take the
+place of property as formerly understood.
+
+There will be an enormous temptation to smuggling and profiteering
+which will reach a height far surpassing all scandals of the war and
+revolution periods. Foreigners and their agents, who look after the
+export trade "from Government to Government," will help hoarders and
+savers to turn their goods to account. Suppose citizens are attacked
+because their senseless expenditure is a mockery of their legal
+remuneration, they will say: I got this from friends--that I got by
+exchange--this came from abroad--my relatives in America sent me that.
+Law, control, terrorism, are effective just so long as there is not a
+blade of grass in the land--once remove the fear of hunger and they
+are useless. Great properties will arise, drawing interest both abroad
+and at home, and they will grow by evasions and bribery. The
+profiteer, the true child of the "great days," will not perish from
+the land, on the contrary, he will grow tougher the more he is
+persecuted, he will be the rich man of the future, and he will form a
+constant political danger if he and his fellows combine.
+
+So long as we have not acquired an entirely new mentality, one which
+detaches men from possessions, which points them towards the Law,
+which binds the passions, and sharpens the conscience, so long will
+the principle of "No rich people and no workless income" have to be
+contracted into the formula, "There ought to be none."
+
+Without this profound alteration of mentality, even the legally
+prescribed incomes will exhibit quite grotesque variations, and will
+adapt themselves to the rarity-value of special gifts, to
+indispensable qualities, to favouritism, with a crudity quite unknown
+to-day. A scarcity of Ministers, a Professor's nourishment, and
+soldiers' supplies, will then as now be met according to the law of
+supply and demand. Consider what ten years' practice in the war for
+wages and strike-management, with the public in it as partisans, will
+bring with it in the way of favouritisms, celebrities, and
+indispensabilities. Popular jockeys, successful surgeons, managers of
+sports' clubs, tenors, demimondaines, farce-writers and champion
+athletes could, even to-day, if they were class-conscious and joined
+together to exploit their opportunities, demand any income they liked.
+Even as a matter of practical political economy, the cinema-star (or
+whatever may succeed her) will be able to prescribe to the Government
+what amount of adornments, drawn from Nature or Art, are necessary for
+her calling, and what standard of life she must maintain in order to
+keep herself in the proper mood.
+
+Organizers, popular leaders, authors and artists will announce and
+enforce their demands to the full limit of their rarity-value. At a
+considerable distance below these come the acquired and more or less
+transferable powers and talents. The Russians for the first few months
+believed in a three-fold order of allowances, rising within a limit of
+about one to two. If the ideas now prevailing have not undergone a
+radical change, then we may, in the society of the future, look for
+divergences of income in the limit of one to a thousand.
+
+Therefore the principle that there shall be no more rich people must
+again be substantially limited. We must say, "There will be people
+receiving extraordinary incomes in kind to which must be added the
+claims to personal service which these favoured persons will lay down
+as conditions of their work."
+
+In its external, arithmetical structure, the fabric of life and its
+requirements in the new order will resemble that of to-day far more
+closely than most of us imagine--on the other hand, the inward and
+personal constitution of man will be far more different. Already we
+can observe the direction of the movement.
+
+Extravagance and luxury will continue to exist, and those who practise
+it will be, as they are to-day, and more than to-day, the profiteers,
+the lucky ones, and the adventurers. Excessive wealth will be more
+repulsive than it is now; whether it will be less valued depends upon
+the state of public ethics, a topic which we shall have to consider
+later. It is probable that in defiance of all legislation wealth will
+turn itself into expenditure and enjoyment more rapidly and more
+recklessly than to-day.
+
+But the relics of middle-class well-being will by that time have been
+consumed; the families which for generations have visibly incorporated
+the German spirit will less than others contrive to secure special
+advantages by profiteering and evading the laws; as soon as their
+modest possessions are taxed away or consumed they will melt into the
+general mass of needy people who will form the economic average of the
+future.
+
+The luxury which will exhibit itself in streets and houses will have a
+dubious air; every one will know that there is something wrong with
+it, people will spy and denounce, and find to their disgust that
+nothing can be proved; the well-off will be partly despised, partly
+envied; the question how to suppress evasions of the law will take up
+a good half of all public discussions, just as that of capitalism does
+now. The hateful sight of others' prosperity cannot, even at home,
+not to mention foreign countries, be withdrawn from the eyes of the
+needy masses; capitalism will have merely acquired another name and
+other representatives.
+
+The fact that the average of more or less cultivated and responsible
+folk are plunged in poverty will not be accepted as the consequence of
+an unalterable natural law, nor as a case of personal misfortune; it
+will be set down to bad government, and the rising revolutionary
+forces of the fifth, sixth and seventh classes will nourish the
+prevailing discontent in favour of a new revolt. For the greater
+uniformity of the average way of life and its general neediness will
+not in itself abolish the division of classes. I have already often
+enough pointed out that no mechanical arrangements can avail us here.
+
+At first there will be three, or more probably four classes who, in
+spite of poverty, will not dissolve in the masses, and who, through
+their coherence and their intellectual heritage are by no means
+without power. The Bolshevist plan of simply killing them out will not
+be possible in Germany, they are relatively too numerous; persecution
+will weld them closer together, and their traditional experiences,
+habits of mind, and capacity, will make it necessary to have recourse
+to them and employ them again and again.
+
+The first of these classes is that of the feudal nobility. Their
+ancient names cannot be rooted out of the history of Germany, and even
+in their poverty the bearers of these names will be respected--all
+the more if, as we may certainly assume, they maintain the effects of
+their bodily discipline, and the visible tradition of certain forms of
+life and thought. They will be strengthened by their mutual
+association, their relationship with foreign nobility will give them
+important functions in diplomacy; these are two elements which they
+have in common with Catholicism and Judaism. They will retain their
+inclination and aptitude for the calling of arms and for
+administration; their reactionary sentiments will lead now to success,
+now to failure, and by both the inner coherence of the class will be
+fortified. Finally, the inevitable reversion to an appreciation of the
+romantic values of life will make a connexion with names of ancient
+lineage desirable to the leading classes, and especially to the
+aristocracy of officialism.
+
+This aristocracy of officialism forms the second of the new strata
+which will come to light. The first office-bearers of the new era, be
+their achievements great or small, are not to be forgotten. Their
+descendants are respected as the bearers of well-known names; in their
+families the practice of politics, the knowledge of persons and
+connexions are perpetuated; fathers, in their lifetime, look after the
+interests of sons and daughters and launch them on the same path. From
+these, and from the first stratum, the representatives of Germany in
+foreign lands are chosen, and in this way a certain familiarity with
+international life and society will be maintained. They will have the
+provision necessary for their position abroad, and will also find
+ways and means to keep up a higher standard of life at home. Persons
+in possession of irregular means of well-being will offer a great deal
+to establish connexions with these circles, which control so many
+levers in the machine of State.
+
+The third group consists of the descendants of what was once the
+leading class in culture and in economics. Here we find a spirit
+similar to that of the refugees, _émigrés_ and Huguenots of the past.
+The lower they sink in external power, the more tenaciously they hold
+to their memories. Every family knows every other and cherishes the
+lustre of its name, a lustre augmented by legendary recollections, all
+the more when the achievements of their class are ostentatiously
+ignored in the new social order. People spare and save to the last
+extremity in order to preserve and hand down some heirloom--a musical
+instrument, a library, a manuscript, a picture or two. A puritanical
+thrift is exercised in order, as far as possible, to maintain
+education, culture and intellectuality on the old level; to this class
+culture, refinement of life as an end in itself, the practice of
+religion, classical music, and artistic feeling will fly for refuge.
+No other class understands this one; it holds itself aloof, it looks
+different from the rest in its occupations, its habits, its garb and
+its forms of life. It supplies the new order with its scholars, its
+clergy, its higher teaching power, its representatives of the most
+disinterested and intellectual callings. Like the monasteries of the
+Middle Ages, it forms an island of the past. Its influence rises and
+falls periodically, according to the current ideas of the time, but
+its position is assured by its voluntary sacrifices, by its knowledge
+and by the purity of its motives.
+
+A fourth inexpugnable and influential stratum will in all probability
+be formed by the middle-class landowners and the substantial peasants.
+Even though the socialization of the land should be radically carried
+through--which is not likely to be the case--it will remain on paper.
+A class of what may be called State-tenants, estate-managers, or
+leaders of co-operative organizations will very much resemble a
+landowning class. Its traditional experience and the ties that bind it
+to the soil make it a closed and well-defined body, self-conscious and
+masterful through the importance of its calling, its indispensability
+and its individualism. It suffers no dictation as regards its manner
+of life. Here we shall see the conservative traditions of the country
+strongly mustered for defence, incapable of being eliminated as a
+political force, and forming a counterpoise to the radical democracy
+of the towns.
+
+Everywhere we find a state of strain and of cleavage. The
+single-stratum condition of society cannot be reached without a
+profound inward change; politics are still stirred and shaken by
+conflicts, and society by the strife of classes. A very different
+picture from the promised Utopian Paradise of a common feeding-ground
+for lions and sheep!
+
+We are all aggrieved by the illegal opulence of the profiteers, but we
+are all liable to the infection. The feudalistic Fronde awaits its
+opportunity. The aristocracy of office endeavours to monopolize the
+State-machine. The _émigrés_ of culture find themselves looked askance
+at, on suspicion of intellectual arrogance, and they insist that the
+country cannot get on without them. The agriculturalists are feared,
+when they show a tendency to revolt against the towns. The ruling
+class, that is to say the more or less educated masses of the
+city-democracy, looks in impatient discontent for the state of general
+well-being which refuses to be realized, lays the blame alternately on
+the four powerful strata and on the profiteers, and fights now this
+group now that, for better conditions of living.
+
+But the conditions of living do not improve--they get worse. The level
+of the nation's output has been sinking from the first day of the
+Revolution onwards. The absolute productivity of work, the relative
+efficacy and the quality of the product, have all deteriorated. With a
+smaller turnover we have witnessed a falling-off in the excellence of
+the goods, in research-work, and in finish. Industrial plant has been
+worked to death and has not yet recovered. Auxiliary industries,
+accessories and raw materials have fallen back. High-quality
+workmanship has suffered from defective schooling, youthful
+indiscipline and the loss of manual dexterity. The new social order
+has lost a generation of leaders in technique, scholarship and
+economics. Universities, with all institutions of research and
+education, have suffered from this blank. Technical leadership is
+gone, and the deterioration in quality has reacted detrimentally on
+output. We can now turn out nothing except what is cheap and easy, and
+what can be produced without traditional skill of hand, without
+serious calculation and research. For all innovations, all work of
+superior quality, Germany is dependent on the foreigner. The
+atmosphere of technique has vanished, and the stamp of cheap hireling
+labour is on the whole output of the country.
+
+In the weeks of the Revolution street orators used to tell us that
+five hundred Russian professors had signed a statement that the level
+of culture had never been so high as under Bolshevism. And Berlin
+believed them! To educate Russia it would take, to begin with, a
+million elementary schools with a yearly budget of several dozen
+milliards of roubles, and a corresponding number of higher schools and
+universities: if every educated Russian for the next twenty years were
+to become a teacher, there would not be enough of them--not to speak
+of the requirements of transport, of raw materials and of agriculture.
+The fabric of a civilization and a culture cannot be annihilated at
+one blow, nor can it grow up save in decades and centuries. The
+maintenance of the structure demands unceasing toil and unbroken
+tradition; the breach that has been made in it in Germany can only be
+healed by the application in manifold forms of work, intellect and
+will; and this hope we cannot entertain.[10]
+
+But we have not yet done with the question of social strata and inward
+cleavage. Revolutionary threats are causing strife every day.
+Revolution against revolution--how is this possible? We are not
+speaking of a reactionary revolution but of the "activist."
+
+In an earlier work I discussed the theory of continuous
+revolution.[11] Behind every successful revolutionary movement there
+stands another, representing one negation more than its predecessor.
+Behind the revolt of the aristocracy stood that of the bourgeoisie,
+behind that of the bourgeoisie stood Socialism. Behind the now ruling
+fourth class[12] rises the fifth, and a sixth is coming into sight. If
+a ninth should represent pure Anarchism, we may see an eleventh
+proclaiming a dictatorship, and a twelfth standing for absolute
+monarchy.
+
+To-day the Majority Socialists are in power, that is to say the Right
+section of the fourth class. This is composed of the older, trained
+and work-willing Trade Unionists, who are amazed at the Revolution,
+who do not regard it as quite legitimate, but who are determined to defend
+the _status quo_ in so far as a certain degree of self-determination
+and elbow-room in the material conditions of life still remain to them.
+
+The Left section consists of youths and of persons disgusted with
+militarism, ignorant of affairs but cherishing a certain independence
+of judgment; still ready for work but equally so for politics. To
+these, as a "forward" party, the doctrinaire theorists have allied
+themselves. The designation of the party "The Independents" is
+characteristic; its goal, "All power to the Soviets," is a catchword
+from Russia.
+
+A fifth class is now emerging--the work-shy. The others call them the
+tramp-proletariat, the disgruntled, the declassed, who set their hopes
+on disorder. Their goal is still undetermined--their favourite
+expression is "bloodhound," when those in power, or Government troops,
+are referred to.
+
+Then comes the sixth class, still partly identified with the Left of
+the fourth and embryonically attached to the fifth. These are the
+indomitable loafers and shirkers, physically and mentally unsound,
+aliens in the social order, excluded by their sufferings, their
+punishments, their vices and passions; self-excluded, repudiators of
+law and morality, born of the cruelty of the city, pitiable beings,
+not so much cast out of society as cast up against it, as a living
+reproach to its mechanical organization. If these ever come into the
+light in politics, they will demand a kind of syndicalistic
+communism.
+
+That is as far as we can see at present into the as yet unopened germs
+of continuous revolutionary movement. In these are contained the
+infinite series of all principles that can conceivably be supported;
+and it would be wholly false to see in this series merely so many
+successive steps in moral degeneration, even though the earlier stages
+should proceed on a flat denial of ethical principles. Later on will
+come revivals and restorations, political, ethical and religious, and
+each time we shall see the rising stratum attaching to itself strays
+and converts, above all, the disappointed and ambitious, from those
+that went before.
+
+But the number of revolutions will grow till we lose count of them,
+and each, however strenuously it may profess its horror of bloodshed,
+will have only one hope and possibility: that of defending itself by
+armed force against its successor. The game is a grotesquely dishonest
+one, because every aspirant movement will cast against its forerunner
+the charge of ruling by bloodshed, while it itself is already
+preparing its armed forces for the conflict.
+
+It is therefore wholly vain to hope that an advanced social
+organization implies stability, that a brotherhood mechanically
+decreed will exclude further revolutions, and will establish eternally
+an empire of righteousness and justice according to any preconceived
+pattern.
+
+The fiercest hatred will prevail amongst those who are most closely
+associated--for instance, between handworkers and brainworkers,
+between leaders and followers; and this hate will be all the more
+inappeasable when it is open to every one to rise in the world, and
+none can cherish the excuse that he is the victim of a social system
+of overwhelming power. To-day this hatred is masked by the general
+class-hatred--hatred of the monopolists of culture, of position and of
+capital.
+
+At the bottom of it, however, lies even to-day the more universal
+hatred of the defeated for the victor, and when those three monopolies
+have fallen, it will emerge in its original Cain-like form. It cannot
+be appeased by any mechanical device. Human inequality can never be
+abolished, human accomplishment and work will always vary, and the
+human passion for success will always assert itself.
+
+We have discussed the material foundation and the stratification of
+the German people when full socialization has been realized. Let us
+now forecast the manner of their existence.
+
+The future community is poor; the individual is poor. The average
+standard of well-being corresponds, at best, to what in peace-time one
+would expect from an income of 3000 marks.[13] But the requirements of
+the population are not mediævally simplified--they could not be, in
+view of the density of the population and the complexity of industrial
+and professional  vocations. They are manifold and diverse, and they
+are moreover intensified by the spectacle of extravagance offered by
+the profiteering class and the licence of social life. The traditional
+garden-city idyll of architects and art-craftsmen is a Utopia about as
+much like reality as the pastoral Arcadianism of Marie Antoinette.
+
+All things of common use are standardized into typical forms. It must
+not be supposed, however, that they are based on pure designs and
+models. The taste of the artist will clash with that of the crowd, and
+since the former has no authority to back him he will have to
+compromise. The compromise, however, consists in cheap imitation of
+foreign models, for in foreign countries art-industry will exist, and
+no legislation can prevent its products from finding their way (in
+reproductions or actual examples) into Germany and being admired
+there. Our half or wholly imitative products are turned out as cheaply
+as possible, in substitute-materials, and are made as well or as ill
+as the relics of our craftsmanship permit, or as our existing
+machinery for the purpose is capable of. Cheapness and ease of
+manufacture are the principles aimed at, for even with narrow means no
+one will want to do without certain things; fashions still prevail,
+and will have to be satisfied with things that do not last, but can be
+constantly changed.
+
+How far will a new system of education tend to simplify the needs of
+men and women and to purify their taste? Probably very little, for
+good models will be lacking, poverty is not fastidious, and the taste
+of the populace is the sovereign arbiter. But on this taste it depends
+whether vulgar ornaments and gewgaws, frivolities and bazaar-horrors,
+are to satisfy the desires of the soul.
+
+Objects of earlier art and industry have been alienated through need
+of money or destroyed by negligence. Here and there one may find an
+old cup or an engraving, as we do to-day in plundered territories, but
+these things are disconnected specimens; all they can do is
+occasionally to interest an artist. Whoever wants to procure some
+object or to get something done which has not been standardized in the
+common range of approved requirements must gain it by a tedious course
+of pinching and saving. Personal possessions in the way of books,
+musical instruments, works of art, as well as travel outside the
+prescribed routes are rarities; a tree of one's own, a horse of one's
+own are legendary things.
+
+Thus luxury in its better aspect has gone to ruin quicker than in the
+bad. All outlay devoted to culture, to beauty, to invigoration has
+dried up; all that survives is what stimulates, what depraves and
+befouls; frivolities, substitutes and swindles. What we have arrived
+at is not the four-square simplicity of the peasant-homestead, but a
+ramshackle city suburb. To some of us it is not easy, and to many it
+is not agreeable to picture to themselves the aspect of a thoroughly
+proletarianized country, and the difficulty lies in the fact that the
+popular mind has, as it were by universal agreement, resolved to
+conceive the future on a basis of domestic prosperity about tenfold as
+great as it can possibly be. The leaders and office-holders of the
+proletariat have an easy task in convincing themselves and others that
+what they approve and are struggling for is the so-called middle-class
+existence with all the refinement and claims of historic culture.
+Tacitly, as a matter of course, they accept what plutocracy has to
+give them, and imagine that the loans they take up from the
+civilization and culture of the past can be redeemed from the social
+gains of the future.
+
+The stages at which a nation arrives year by year, can be estimated by
+its building. In the new order, little is being built. Apart from
+certain perfunctory garden-cities, which are being erected for the
+principle of the thing, to meet the needs of a few thousand favoured
+households, and which perhaps will never be finished, we will for
+decades have to content ourselves with new subdivisions and
+exploitation of the old buildings; old palaces packed to the roof with
+families, will stand in the midst of vegetable gardens and will
+alternate with empty warehouses in the midst of decayed cities. In the
+streets of the suburbs the avenues of trees will be felled, and in the
+cities grass will grow through the cracks of the pavement.
+
+For a long time it used to be believed that the passion of the
+landscape painters of the seventeenth century for introducing ruins
+with hovels nestling among them arose from a feeling for romance.
+This is not so--they only painted what they saw around them after the
+ravages of the Thirty Years' War. It must not be supposed, however,
+that the forecast in these pages is based on the consequences of the
+war; these no doubt must darken our picture of the future; but the
+shadows, which I have put in as sparingly as I could, are essentially
+the expression of a greatly reduced economic efficiency, combined with
+the uniformity produced by the general proletarianization of life with
+the absence of any correcting factor in individual effort of a
+rational character and of the influence of higher types.
+
+A brighter trait in the material conditions of life will be formed by
+effort of a collective character, such as even the most penurious
+community may be able to undertake. The more severely the domestic
+household has to pinch, and the more unattractive it thereby becomes,
+the more completely will life be forced into publicity. Private claims
+and aspirations, which cannot be satisfied, will be turned over to the
+public. Men will gather in the streets and places of public resort,
+and have more mutual intercourse than before, since every transaction
+of life, even the most insignificant, will have to be a subject of
+discussion, agreement and understanding. In all the arrangements of
+social life, _e.g._ for news, communications, supplies, discussion and
+entertainment, and demands will be made and complied with for greater
+convenience and comprehensiveness, for popular æsthetics and popular
+representation. In these arrangements and in these alone Art will
+have to find its functions and its home. Public buildings, gardens,
+sanatoriums, means of transit and exhibitions will be established at
+great cost. All the demands of the spirit and of the senses will seek
+their satisfaction in public. There will be no lack of popular
+performances, excursions, tours and conducted visits to collections;
+of clubs, libraries, athletic meetings and displays. The aspect of
+this tendency from the point of view of culture and ethics we have
+still to consider; in its social aspect (apart from the fact that it
+causes a vacuum in the home and forces young people to the surface of
+life, and in spite of its mechanical effect) it will act as a
+comforting reminiscence of the civic commonalty and solidarity of
+mediæval times.
+
+In considering the spiritual and cultural life of a fully socialized
+society, we have to start with the assumption that any one man's
+opinion and decision are as good as another's. Authority, even in
+matters of the highest intellectual or spiritual character, only
+exists in so far as it is established, acknowledged and confirmed
+either by direct action of the people's will, or indirectly through
+their representatives. Every one's education and way of life are much
+the same; there are no secrecies, no vague authority attaching to
+special vocations; no one permits himself to feel impressed by any
+person or thing. Every one votes, whether it be for an office, a
+memorial, a law, or a drama, or does it through delegates or the
+delegates of delegates. Every one is determined to know the how and
+where and why of everything--just as to-day in America--and demands a
+plausible reason for it. The reply, "This is a matter you don't
+understand," is impossible.
+
+Everything is referred to one's own conscience, one's own
+intelligence, one's own taste, and no one admits any innate or
+acquired superiority in others. In debate, the boundaries between the
+ideal and the practicable are obliterated; for on the one hand every
+one is too much preoccupied with material needs, and on the other, too
+confident, too unaccustomed to submit himself to what in former days
+was called a deeper insight, too loosely brought up to let himself be
+taught. We never, therefore, hear such judgments as: This, although it
+is difficult, is a book to be read; this drama ought to have been
+produced although it is not sensational; I don't myself care for this
+memorial, but it must remain because a great artist made it; this is a
+necessary branch of study, although it has no practical application; I
+will vote for this man on account of his character and ability,
+although he has made no election-promises. On the other hand, the
+following kind of argument will have weight: This historic building
+must be demolished, for it interferes with traffic; this collection
+must be sold, for we need money; we need no chair of philosophy, but
+we do need one for cinema-technique; these ornamental grounds are the
+very place for a merry-go-round; tragedies are depressing, they must
+not be performed in the State theatres. Let us recall certain oversea
+legislation--carried out, be it noted in countries still swayed by the
+traditional influence of culture--and these examples will not seem
+exaggerated.
+
+Where there is no appeal to authority, where none need fear
+disapproval or ridicule, where convenience is prized and thrift rules
+supreme, there thought and decision will be short-breathed, and will
+never look beyond the needs of the day. Who will then care for far-off
+deductions, for wide arcs of thought? Calculation comes to the front,
+everything unpractical is despised; opinions are formed by discussion,
+everyday reading and propaganda. Men demand proofs, success, visible
+returns. The fewer the aims, the stronger will be their attraction.
+People are tolerant, for they are used to hearing the most varied
+opinions, and all opinions have followers, from the water-cure to
+Tâoism; but the only opinion of any influence is that whose followers
+are many.
+
+Public opinion settles everything. The champions of absolute values
+have to accommodate themselves to the law of competition. Religious
+teaching has to seek the favour of the times by the same methods as a
+new system of physical culture. A work of art must compete for votes.
+Only by popularity-hunting can anything come to life; there will be no
+doing without much talking. As in the later days of Greece, rhetoric
+and dialectic are the most powerful of the arts.
+
+And since manual labour cherishes silently or openly a bitter grudge
+against intellectual labour, the latter has to protect itself by a
+pretence of sturdy simplicity; when two teachers are competing for the
+head-mastership of a classical school each tries to prove that he has
+the hornier hand.
+
+Most things in this new order are decided by weight of numbers.
+Advertisement and propaganda are banished from socialized industry and
+commerce; instead, they compete in the service of personal and ideal
+aims--in elections, theatres, systems of medicine, superstitions,
+arts, appointments, professorships, churches.
+
+Art has for the third time changed its master--after the princes,
+Mæcenas, the middle-class market; after Mæcenas, the plebs, and export
+trade. Whether by means of representation through gilds, by
+compulsion, by patronage, or by favour, Art has become dependent; it
+must explain, exhort, contend; it can no longer rest proudly on
+itself. It must aim at getting a majority on its side, and this it can
+only do by sensationalism. Like all other features of intellectual
+life, it must march with the times. Like all technique, research,
+learning and handicraft it suffers through the loss, for several
+generations, of tradition and hereditary skill, but together with this
+drop there is also a drop in the character of the demand; quality has
+given way to actuality.[14]
+
+Certain reactions based on practical experience are  not excluded;
+the constant comparison with the past and with foreign countries will
+show the value of the cultivation of a science, of an art which has no
+fixed prepossessions and serves no immediate aims. Measures are taken,
+though without much conviction, by free Academies or the like, to win
+back something of this; but the atmosphere is not favourable to such
+attempts, and an artificial and sterile discipline is all that can
+result.
+
+The general tone is that of an excitable, loquacious generation, bent
+on actualities and matters of practical calculation, fonder of debate
+than of work, not impressed by any authority, prizing success,
+watching all that goes on abroad, taking refuge in public from the
+sordidness of private life, and passionately hostile to all
+superiority. Through the constant secession of elements to which this
+tone is antipathetic a kind of natural selection is constantly taking
+place, and the political defencelessness of the transition period
+favours disintegrating tendencies of foreign origin. The carving away
+of ancient German territories works in the same direction. Apart from
+the varying influence of the four strata already referred to, the
+general tone will be set by the half-Slavonic lower classes of Middle
+and North Germany, who have brought about and who control the existing
+conditions, and by the other elements which have been assimilated to
+these.
+
+In place of German culture and German intellectuality we have a state
+of things of which a foretaste already exists in parts of America and
+of Eastern Europe. The fully socialized order, repelling all tutelage
+through those strata which possess a special tradition, outlook and
+mentality, has created its own form of civilization.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 10: Rathenau means that it cannot be entertained except on
+the hypothesis of the profound _inward_ change, which is to be
+discussed later on.]
+
+[Footnote 11: _Kritik der dreifachen Revolution._ S. Fischer.]
+
+[Footnote 12: The classes referred to are (1) the old aristocracy, (2)
+the aristocracy of officialism, (3) that of traditional middle-class
+culture; (4) the mass of what is called Socialism.]
+
+[Footnote 13: £150 in pre-war values. By thrift, by co-operation, and
+by the cheapness of the public services generally, a surprisingly high
+standard of life could be maintained on this kind of income in pre-war
+Germany.]
+
+[Footnote 14: Aktualität; as, for instance, reference to current
+topics.]
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+
+Thoughtful and competent judges to whom I have submitted the foregoing
+section of my work have said to me: This is Hell. That is perhaps
+going too far, since those who will live in that generation and who
+have themselves helped it into being will have become more or less
+adapted to their circumstances.
+
+A large part of the proletariat of to-day will certainly not be
+daunted by the prospect, but will regard it as a distinct improvement
+on their present situation. That is the terrible fact, a fact for
+which we are responsible and for which we must atone, with what ruin
+to German culture remains to be seen.
+
+Who, in this Age of Mechanism, who on the side of the bourgeoisie, who
+of our statesmen, our professors, our captains of industry, above all
+who of our clergy, has pitied the lot of the working-man? The
+statesmen, for peace' sake, worked out the Insurance Laws; the
+professors, with their emphatic dislike to the world of finance and
+their unemphasized devotion to the monopoly of their own stipends,
+preached a doctrinaire socialism; the clergy lauded the
+divinely-appointed principle of subordination; the great
+industrialists, wallowing in their own greed for power, money, favour,
+titles and connexions, scolded the workers for wanting anything. The
+silent subjugation of our brothers was assured through the laws of
+inheritance, our leaders put the socialistic legislation in fetters,
+freedom of combination was thwarted, electoral reform in Prussia was
+scornfully denied, demands for better conditions of living, conditions
+which to-day we think ridiculously low, were suppressed by force. And
+all the time, the cost of a single year of war, a tiny fraction of the
+war-reparations, would have sufficed to banish want for ever from the
+land. At last the millions of the defenceless and disappointed were
+driven into that war of the dynasties and the bourgeois, which was
+unloosed by the folly of years, the dazzlement of weeks, the
+helplessness of hours.
+
+If the state of things I have foreseen is hell, then we have earned
+hell. And it ill becomes us to wrap ourselves in the superiority of
+our culture, to rebuke the masses for their want of intellect, their
+want of character, their greed, and to keep insisting on the
+unchangeability of human character, on the virtues of rulership and
+leadership, on the spiritual unselfishness and intellectual priesthood
+of the classes born to freedom. Where was this heaven-nurtured
+priestly virtue sleeping when Wrong straddled the land and the great
+crime was wrought? It was composing feeble anthologies and pompous
+theories, cooking its culture-soup, confusing, with true professorial
+want of instinct, 1913 with 1813[15]--and putting itself at the
+disposition of the Press Bureau. _That_ was the hour in which to fight
+for the supremacy of the spirit. Now romance comes, as it always does,
+too late.
+
+What is romance in history? It is sterility. It is incapacity to
+imagine, still less to shape, the yet unknown. It is an inordinate
+capacity for flinging oneself with feminine adaptability into anything
+that is historically presented and accomplished--from Michael Angelo
+to working samplers. Fearing the ugly present and the anxious future,
+the romantic takes refuge with the dear good dead people, and spins
+out further what it has learned from them. But every big man was a
+shaper of his own time, a respecter of antiquity and conscious of his
+inheritance as a grown and capable man may be; not a youth in
+sheltered tutelage, but a master of the living world, and a herald of
+the future. "Modernity" is foolish, but antiquarianism is rubbish;
+life in its vigour is neither new nor antique, but young.
+
+True it is indeed that we love the old, many-coloured, concrete,
+pre-mechanistic world; we cannot take an antique thing in our hands or
+read an antique word without feeling its enchantment. It is a joy to
+the heart, and one prohibited to no man, to dream at times romantic
+dreams, to live in the past, and to forget, as we do it, that this
+very dreaming, this  very life, owes its charm to the fact that we
+are of another age. It is a magic like that of childhood--but to want
+to go back to it is not only childish, but a deliberate fraud and
+self-deception. We should realize, as I have shown years ago, that the
+difference of our age from that age is the ever-present fact of the
+density of our population. Any one who wants to go back, really wants
+that forty million Germans should die, while he survives. It is
+ignorant, it is insincere, to put on a frown of offended virtue and to
+say: For shame, what are you thronging into the towns for? Go back to
+the land; plough, spin, weave, ply the blacksmith's hammer, as did our
+forefathers, who were the proper sort of people. And leave the people
+like us, who think and write poetry and brood and dream for you, a
+house embowered in vines--there will be room enough for that!--Ah, you
+thinkers and brooders, what would you say if men answered you: No! Go
+yourself and spin in a factory, for you have shown clearly enough that
+your thinking and brooding are futile. All your fine phrases amount to
+nothing but the one dread monosyllable--Die! Are you so wicked as
+that, and know it? or so stupid, and know it not?
+
+Thought is the most responsible of all functions. He who thinks for
+others must look after them, and if they live he may not slay them. It
+is therefore a mischievous piece of romantic folly to point us to the
+past. We must all pass through the dark gateway, and the sage has no
+right to growl: Leave me out--I am the salt of the earth! The first
+thing we have to do is to save humanity; not a selected pair in the
+Ark but the whole race, criminals and harlots, fools, beggars and
+cripples. We ourselves have cast down Authority, and there will be a
+crush, and many things will look very different from what the sages
+would wish and what the romantics dream. And if it is going to be hell
+for people like you and me, we must only accept it in the name of
+justice, and think of Dante's terrible inscription: "I was made by the
+Might of God, by the supreme Wisdom and by the primal Love."[16]
+
+But is it hell? That depends on ourselves.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 15: In 1913 all Germany was celebrating with great pomp and
+warlike display the centenary of the liberation of the country from
+Napoleon, and also paying a huge property tax for the coming war.]
+
+[Footnote 16:
+
+_Fecemi la divina Potestate
+La somma Sapienza e il primo Amore._
+
+This is part of the inscription over the gates of Hell in the
+_Inferno_, Canto III.]
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+
+Our description of the future order of society was tacitly based on
+the assumption that our mentality, our ethics, our spiritual outlook,
+would remain as they are at present.
+
+This assumption is a probable one, but it is not irrevocably certain.
+What we have endeavoured to demonstrate is simply the obvious
+fact--the fact which our once so rigid but, since November, 1918,
+uprooted and flaccid intellectualism has forgotten--that our salvation
+is not to be found in any kind of mechanical apparatus or
+institutions. Institutions do not mean evolution. If institutions run
+too far ahead of evolution there will be reaction. When evolution runs
+too far, there is revolution.
+
+At this point both groups of our opponents will start up against us.
+
+The Radicals cry: Ha! only give us food, give "all power to the
+Soviets," let us have free-thought lectures, and mentality, insight,
+experience and culture will come of themselves.
+
+The Reactionaries smile: Ho! this man has never learned that there is
+no such thing as evolution; that human character never changes.
+
+I shall not answer either of these. They know, both of them, that they
+are saying what is not true.
+
+Something of unprecedented greatness can and must take place;
+something that in the life of a people corresponds to the awakening of
+manhood in the individual.
+
+In every conscious existence there comes a moment when the living
+being is no longer determined but begins to determine himself; when he
+takes over responsibility from the surrounding Powers, in order to
+shoulder it for himself; when he no longer accepts the forces that
+guide him, but creates them; when he no longer receives but freely
+chooses the values, ideals, aims and authorities whose validity he
+will admit; when he begets out of his own being the relations with the
+divine which he means to serve. For the German people this moment,
+this opportunity, has now arrived--or is for ever lost.
+
+We have made a clear sweep of all authorities. The inherited
+influences which we accepted unconsciously have dropped away from
+us--persons, classes, dogmas. The persons are done with for the
+present. The classes, even though they may still keep up the struggle,
+are broken to pieces together with all the best that they contained:
+mentality, sense of honour, devotion, training, tradition. We can
+never reanimate them and never supply their place. Ideas and dogmas
+have long ago lost their cogency; the power they wielded through
+police and school, the power which we tried to prop up by a
+blasphemous degradation of religion and by developing the church as a
+kind of factory, is gone, and it would be a piece of mechanical
+presumption to suppose that we can breed them again for the sake of
+the objects they fulfilled. If we live and thrive, ideas and faiths
+will grow up of themselves.
+
+We must of our own free choice lay upon ourselves a certain
+life-potency or faculty which we shall freely obey, and which shall be
+so broad and so buoyant that thought and creation can grow out of it.
+A deed without precedent only in its voluntary, conscious
+self-determination: for other peoples in earlier days also accepted
+these faculties, not indeed out of conscious choice, but from the
+hands of prophets, rulers and classes. Thus theocracy was laid upon
+Israel; the caste-system on the Indians; the idea of the city on the
+Greeks; empire on the Romans; the Church on the Middle Ages; commerce,
+plutocracy, colonial dominion, on the modern world; militarism on
+Germany. For these imposed forces men lived and died; they had only a
+mythical conception of where they came from, and they believed and
+some still believe them to be everlasting.
+
+A thunder-stroke of destiny has at once stripped us bare and has
+opened our eyes. The tremendous choice is before us. Are we to reject
+it, and, blinded anew, to resign ourselves to the casual and
+mechanical laws of action and reaction, of needs and interests, and
+the competition of forces? Are we to recover ourselves, and enter into
+the intellectual arena of the nations, to begin a new and enduring
+life with no other guiding thought than that of self-preservation and
+the division of property? In the harbour of the nations is our ship to
+drift aimlessly while every other knows its course, whether to a near
+or distant port? Is that penurious Paradise which we have described,
+the goal of Germany's hopes and struggles?
+
+Compared with us, the French movement of the eighteenth century had an
+easy task. All it had to do was to deny and demolish. When it had
+cleared away the wreckage of feudalism, at once a strong new class,
+the bourgeoisie, sprang up from the soil, more vigorous than its
+aristocratic forerunner, and it was able to take care of itself. And
+the bourgeoisie was also a class of defined boundaries, and already
+trained for its task; it had long ago taken over French culture, it
+alone had for a century been the champion of French ideas, it had
+acquired enthusiasm for the nation, for freedom, for militarism and
+for money; the aspirations for equality and fraternity were not indeed
+fulfilled, but the first mechanized and plutocratic state of the
+Continent came into being.
+
+Germany, as we have seen, is not in the same position. When we are
+stripped we find no new stratum of culture growing up below the
+surface; society is simply dissolved, and in its place we find the
+masses, of which the most hopeful thing we can say is that they are an
+ordered body. Tradition has been torn in two. No--we have to build
+from the foundations up. But whether we shall build according to the
+changing needs of the seasons, according to the casual balance of
+forces, or according to an idea and a symbol--that is the question!
+
+Our current Socialism has no qualms about bringing new nations to
+birth with the aid of a few simple apparatus and radical eliminations;
+it believes that the right spirit will soon enter in if only
+institutions are provided for it. It would be too severe to describe
+this way of thinking solely as contempt for or want of understanding
+of a spiritual mission. Socialism in its prevailing form arises indeed
+simply from material or so-called "scientific" conceptions (as if
+there could be a science of ideal aims and values): but it has, though
+only as a secondary object, annexed to itself the values of a
+spiritual faith--the latter are, as the language of the market has it,
+"thrown in." We have seen to what the material domination of
+institutions and apparatus is leading us. To national dignity, or to
+any mission for humanity, it does not lead.
+
+What is unprecedented in our problem is not, as we have said, that a
+people should beget out of itself its own idea and mission. From the
+Jewish theocracy to the French rationalism, from the Chinese
+ancestor-worship to the pioneer-freedom of America, all the cultured
+peoples have brought this creative act to pass, although in formative
+epochs leading classes and leading men have born the responsibility
+and made it easy for their countrymen to become aware of their own
+unconscious spirit, and through this awareness and consciousness to
+isolate and intensify it.
+
+What is unprecedented is just this: that the process should take place
+as a deliberate act of will, in democratic freedom, without pressure
+and compulsion of authority, in the consciousness of its necessity, on
+our own responsibility. Germany is not at present growing leaders and
+prophets, we are not in a formative stage, all authority has been
+scattered to the winds. It is true that we have one stratum of society
+which is capable of understanding the meaning of the task, but it is
+deeply cloven, the hatreds and interests of its parties make them more
+each other's enemies than the people's.
+
+And yet it is this very class--not as possessor of means but as
+possessor of the tradition, which is capable, which is indispensable,
+and which is summoned to take in hand the transformation of the German
+spirit, to free it from the bonds of mechanism, of capitalism, of
+militarism, and to lead it to its true destinies. It cannot do this
+for itself alone, amid the blind bitterness of the war of classes; it
+cannot do it as a sovran leader relying on its deeper insight, for its
+and every other prestige has gone by the board; it can only do it by
+the way of service and sacrifice--it can only do it if the service and
+the sacrifice are approved and accepted.
+
+The masses will not understand this sacrifice of service; but the more
+responsible of their leaders will. Not to-day, indeed, nor to-morrow;
+but on the day when experience has shown them that I am telling the
+truth. At first they will do as in Russia; when want becomes acute,
+they will seek to buy experience and tradition at a high price from
+individuals. But mentality and spirit cannot be bought--only labour
+and dexterity. Then gradually men will come to understand that the
+highest things are not marketable commodities, they are only given
+away. And at last the responsible leaders, those who rule in order to
+serve, will separate themselves from those of the Cataline type, who
+serve in order to rule.
+
+So long has the narrow, parsonical, cynical contempt for the
+understanding of the lower classes prevailed--through our fault--a
+reversal to blind worship of the masses, of the immature and the
+unsuccessful, is not inexcusable. We are here to love mankind--all
+mankind, the outcast as well as the weak--every man and all men. But
+the masses are not quite the same thing as mankind. The masses who
+congregate in the streets and at public meetings are not communities
+consisting of whole men, but assemblages in which each man takes a
+part and is present, indeed, with his whole body, but by no means with
+his whole being. The masses are absent-minded; and presence of mind
+only comes to them when through the lips of some true prophet the
+Spirit descends upon them. But when that happens, they take no
+decisions; they do not get beside themselves; rather, they sink into
+themselves. Before the distortions of a mob orator, with his
+extravagant promises, the masses become merely a driven crowd eager
+for gain, not human souls. They are the concave reflector of passions
+and greeds that rage in the focal point of the speaker's rostrum; they
+return in concentrated form the rays that dazzle them. He who puts the
+masses in the judgment-seat, who looks for counsel and decision at
+their hands, has neither reverence nor love for man. Sooner or later
+the truth of this will be realized by all honourable men among their
+leaders.
+
+The day is also far when the upper classes will come to their senses.
+They have never understood what the world is, nor what Germany is, nor
+what has happened to themselves. They see houses and fields, streets
+and trees very much as they were; they think, if they only play the
+game a little craftily at the beginning, everything will remain as it
+used to be, and they will come out all right in the end. It is just as
+when some merchant goes bankrupt for a million; for the first
+fortnight the servants wait at table as usual and the family eat off
+silver plate; the ruin is still on paper. But in a year's time
+everything is dispersed to the winds, and men have changed along with
+their utensils. When one sees for what trivialities people are
+fighting to-day one begins to understand how callously and shamelessly
+they gave up a thousand times over that which they had sworn to defend
+with the last drop of their blood; then none of them know what has
+really happened. In a few years' time they will know; and then they
+will fight no more for things that no longer exist; they will be
+meditating a general sacrifice to save what can still be saved, and
+what is worth saving.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+
+Germany is a land without power, without poise, with its prosperity
+shattered, its authorities and its external aims annihilated, its
+intellect and its ethics at a low ebb. In such a condition, if we wish
+to understand the only kind of life-faculty which can save us from
+intellectual and spiritual death, give us force and inspiration to
+shape for ourselves and for the world the new social order of freedom,
+spirituality[17] and justice, and in the true sense to "save" us, we
+must look ourselves and the German character in the face--this
+unknown, problematic character, which for a century in contradiction
+to its own inmost being, has been flattering and lulling itself with
+hackneyed and complacent phrases and unproved judgments. For we can
+undertake nothing and claim nothing which has not its prototype in our
+own soul and is not founded in our own past, our own traditions.
+
+There is no people, not even the French, which in recent decades has
+administered to itself and digested so much praise as we have. We
+never  discussed ourselves but at once the stereotyped toasts began.
+The more German culture declined, the more disgusting became our
+babble about it.
+
+The persons through whose mouths we let ourselves be lauded were
+school-teachers without comparative knowledge, professional
+banquet-orators, nationalists who praised in the service of some
+interested hatred, and scholars with appointments who were simply
+commissioned to demonstrate that the Hohenzollern system was the last
+word of creation. No one dreamed of distinguishing this glorification
+of the German people from the apotheosis of the dynasties--to which we
+had vowed our heart's blood--and the profound insincerity of these
+declamations was shown by the indifference with which the dynasties,
+the main feature in the programme, were afterwards got rid of, and the
+affair of the heart's blood shelved.
+
+We know the stereotyped phrases. German faith, French knavery. The
+world is to find healing in the German soul. We are the heroes--the
+others are hucksters.[18] To be German means to do a thing for its own
+sake. We are a "race of thinkers and poets." We have Culture, the
+others merely Civilization.[19] We alone are free--the others are
+merely undisciplined (or, as the case may be, enslaved). All this we
+owe to the favour of God and our education under the (here fill in
+Prussian, Bavarian or Saxon) reigning House, which all the world
+envies us. Clearly therefore we are destined for world-dominion; we
+have only to fall-to.
+
+In one of these phrases, about doing things for their own sake,[20]
+there is truth. All the more was it for us in particular a vice and a
+sign of degradation to let ourselves be dazzled by the shadowless
+transparency-picture of glorification that was offered to us. There
+were interests concealed in the game, and much lack of moral fibre,
+all of which we passed over in silence; it was out of place in our
+festal oratory.
+
+It would be an equal or even a greater vice, only reversed, if we were
+now to despair of ourselves. Moderation was what we needed then; what
+we need now is vigorous and conscious self-possession. To-day it is no
+easy and attractive business to bring our strong qualities to the
+surface; it implies an amount of conviction which it is hard to
+attain, and self-depreciation means a pitiful faint-heartedness. But
+all sham goods offered by babblers, by selfish interests, prophets of
+hate and commercial travellers must go overboard.
+
+We have never been a "race of thinkers and poets," any more than the
+Jews were a race of prophets, the  French and Dutch a race of
+painters, or Königsberg a city of Pure Reason.[21] The old German
+upper classes have, in three well-defined epochs, had force enough to
+throw up individuals of mighty endowments for music, poetry and
+philosophy; the former lower-classes, whose blood runs in nine-tenths
+of our present population, have scarcely contributed anything to these
+glories. They have in recent years shown themselves thoroughly
+industrious, plastic, apt for discipline, order-loving, intelligent,
+practical, honourable, trustworthy, warm-hearted, prudent and helpful,
+and adapted beyond all expectation to the mechanization of life and
+industry; of their power to produce talent we know little, except
+perhaps in the domain of research and technique, which are less a test
+of creative energy than of applied knowledge and methodical assiduity.
+
+The important question as to what relations exist between the number,
+quality and greatness of individual endowments and genius on the one
+side, and the character of a people on the other, is still unexplored
+and very obscure, although we possess a science which calls itself by
+the quite unjustified name of national psychology.
+
+While on one side we have rarely made any serious study of national
+characteristics, but have confused them with achievements of culture
+and habits of life that mostly proceeded from a thin upper stratum
+alone, on the other we have as a rule tacitly set down individual
+endowment (with a strong emphasis on our own) as illustrations of
+national character. In this respect, too, we showed that laxity in
+proving what we wanted to prove which abounds everywhere from the
+point where calculation with things weighable and measurable leaves
+off, and judgment begins. We think it an established fact--in
+accordance with just this arbitrary test of genius--that genius
+belongs _par excellence_ to the so-called blonde blue-eyed races of
+the earth. The fact that among the score or two of geniuses of all
+ages who have been determining forces in the world it is hardly
+possible to find a single example of this blue-blonde race, but they
+can be proved to have been almost all dark, did not affect the
+question. On the other hand the English, whose influence on culture
+has been surpassed by none, had their genius-forming power, in which
+they are actually deficient, seriously over-estimated. It was the
+reverse with the Jews. The fact that in spite of their small numbers
+they have produced more of world-moving genius than all other nations
+put together, and that from them has proceeded the whole
+transcendental ethics of the Western world, has not prevented their
+being pronounced wholly incapable of creative endowment.
+
+We shall put aside all this rubbish and for the present decline to go
+into theoretic questions. Great individual endowments are related to
+national character--to the character of the mind, not that of the
+will, which must be considered apart--as the blossom to the plant or
+the crystal to the mother-solution; to determine the one from the
+other needs something more than a mechanical generalization. There is
+no such thing as a "race of thinkers and poets." This, however, we can
+say: that a people which begets great musicians, poets and
+philosophers is one which devotes itself to moods and to visions,
+while another, as for instance the Latin group, which creates forms
+and standards, is one that at the cost of mood and vision, incarnates
+its sense of will.
+
+Devotion, receptivity, the feeling for Nature, comprehension, the
+passion for truth, meditative depth, spiritual love, are the fairest
+gifts that can be granted to any people, and to us they have been
+granted. But they exclude other gifts, which stand to-day in high
+repute, and which we affect in vain. They exclude the capacity for
+shaping forms and standards, the aptitude for rule, if not even for
+self-government; in any case the qualities which go to the creation of
+nationalities and civilizations.
+
+It is no mere accident that in not one of the hundredfold provinces of
+life, from art to military organization, from State-craft to
+jointstock-companies, from saintliness to table-utensils, have we
+Germans discovered a single essential and enduring form. And again,
+there is scarcely one of these forms which we have not filled with a
+richer and more living content than those who first discovered it.
+
+For whoever bears the All within himself can be satisfied with no
+form; he finds in himself at once vision and reality, thesis and
+antithesis. He seeks for a synthesis, but all form is one-sided. He
+conceives, chooses, comprehends, fulfils, breaks in pieces and throws
+away. He remains a unity in constant change, like the year as it
+proceeds day by day, hour by hour, and no two of them alike. He does
+not force things--out of respect for creation.
+
+But he who makes forms must use force. He makes himself the standard
+and comprehends himself only. Everything else, everything that is
+extra-normal, unconformable, unintelligible and not understood remains
+for him something alien, trivial, inferior, or negligible. The maker
+of forms can rule, even by compulsion, without being a tyrant, for he
+is convinced of the value of what he brings and knows no doubts. He is
+ruthless, yet only up to a certain limit, which is determined by his
+sense of the inferiority of the other. The man who rejects forms,
+however, cannot rule; the very penetration into the domain of another
+seems to him a wrong to his own, the basis of which is recognition and
+allowance. If he is forced to penetrate, he loses all balance, for in
+wrong-doing he understands no gradations. Similarly he is incapable of
+civilizing, for he cannot take forms seriously; he violates them
+himself--how can he impose them upon others? In his inmost soul he is
+naïve, for creation is seething in him; but in execution he is
+conscious, critical, eclectic and methodical, in order that he may be
+completely master of the one-sided element into which he has forced
+himself. The man of forms, however, is, in his soul, rigid and
+conscious, but in action naïve, because he does not know the meaning
+of doubt.
+
+Forms grow up like natural products in the course of centuries. They
+assume the existence of uniformity in individuals, fathers reproduced
+in sons with scarcely a variation. Egypt, Rome, and that modern land
+of antiquity, France, are examples. For generations France has been
+content with three architectural styles, which are really one and the
+same style. The changes in the language are hardly perceptible. The
+principal domestic utensils are almost the same as they were a hundred
+years ago, fashion is merely a vibration. Foreign living languages are
+little studied, their spirit is not understood, the pronunciation
+remains French. Foreign countries are looked on as a kind of
+menagerie; everything is measured by the native standard. Every one is
+a judge of everything, for he holds fast to the norm. Within the norm
+the French are keenly sensitive, their feeling for relations is very
+sure; the slightest deviation is observed. To doubt the validity of
+the norm is out of question; one might as well criticize the sun and
+moon as the style of Louis Quatorze.
+
+The final judgment of the British in the affairs of life is "this is
+English," "that is not English." Foreign lands are a subject of
+geographical and ethnological study. The whole mighty will of a
+nation is here concentrated in the form of civilizing political
+energy. Every private inclination is a fad, and even fads have their
+fixed forms. An offence against table-manners is banned like an attack
+on the Church. Nature is mastered with consideration and intelligence,
+whether the problem is the breeding of sheep or the ruling of India.
+
+The assurance, self-command and art of ruling which spring from forms
+are lacking in Germany. Our strongest spirits are formless; they are
+eclectic or titanic, whether they despise forms or choose forms or
+burst forms. We have three homes between which we hover--Germany, the
+earth, and heaven. We comprehend and honour everything--every land,
+every man, every art and every language; and we are fertilized by what
+is foreign; on the lower level we enjoy it and imitate it, on the
+higher it spurs us to creation. We are docile, and do not hate what
+rules and determines us, only what contracts us and makes us
+one-sided; an autocratic government may be tolerated, even venerated,
+if it knows how to be national and popular and does not interfere with
+our elbow-room.
+
+We have already touched on the volitional character[22] of the German
+people, a character which has been gravely altered by the subsidence
+of the ancient upper stratum of society, and by long privations and
+miseries. The Germans of Tacitus were a freedom-loving  and turbulent
+people; of this not a trace is left. Any one who did not recognize
+under the autocracy that we care little for self-determination and
+self-responsibility may do so under the revolution, which merely
+arises out of an alteration in external conditions. We are not even
+yet a nation, but an association of interests and oppositions; a
+German _Irredenta_, as it has been and unfortunately will be shown, is
+an impossible conception. And since we are not a nation and represent
+no national idea, but only an association of households, it follows
+that our influence abroad can only be commercial, and not civilizing
+or propagandist.
+
+From this side we are able to understand the German history of the
+past two centuries. Prussia, an extra-German Power, grown up in
+colonized territory, organized itself into a bureaucratic, feudal and
+military State. It succeeded in mastering half Germany and in loosely
+linking up the remainder. By rigid organization, by its federated
+Princes and by the strongest army in the world, it supplied the place
+of the national character and will which were wanting. Mechanism was
+pressed into the service, and bore the colossus into a period of
+blooming prosperity. The system looked like a nation; in reality it
+was an autocratic association of economic interests bristling with
+arms. It was incapable of developing national forces and ideas, not
+even in relation to its settlers in other lands; it was confined to
+commercial competition; weak alliances were relied on to secure the
+position externally; self-government was not granted, because the
+military organization was the pivot of the whole system; the
+drill-sergeant tone at home had its counterpart in the brusqueness of
+our foreign policy; enmities grew and organized themselves, and the
+catastrophe came.
+
+For character of will we had substituted discipline. But discipline is
+not nationality; it is an external instrument, and when it breaks it
+leaves--nothing. Now since the Prussian system which called itself by
+the mediæval title of the German Empire was, in spite of the
+professors, no popular, national fabric, but a dynastic, military and
+compulsory association, with a constitutional façade, the interested
+nationalist elements took on the repulsive and dishonourable forms
+that we all know. The most deeply interested parties, cool and
+conscious of their strength, the Prussian representatives of the
+military and official nobility, avoided all declamation and only
+interfered when their interests were endangered. The greater
+industrialists sold themselves. A higher stratum of the middle-classes
+composed of certain circles of higher teachers and subaltern officials
+took the business seriously, and in order to escape from their drab
+existence created that atmosphere of hatred of Socialists, telegrams
+of homage, and megalomania, which made us intellectually and morally
+impossible before the world. Instead of the Germany of thought and
+spirit one saw suddenly a brutal, stupid community of interested
+persons, greedy for power, who gave themselves out as that Germany
+whose very opposite they were; who, unable to point to any
+achievements, any thought of their own, prided themselves on an
+imaginary race-unity which their very appearance contradicted; who had
+no ideas beyond rancour; the slaverings of league-oratory and
+subordination, and who with these properties, which they were pleased
+to call _Kultur_, undertook to bring blessing to the world.
+
+It was no wonder; for our slavonicized association of interests, bent
+on subordination and on gain, does not produce ideas; its possessions
+were power, mechanism and money; whoever was impressed by these things
+believed they must impress others too, and so the conclusion was
+arrived at that all the great spirits of the past had lived only to
+make this triple combination supreme. Wagner had formed the bridge
+between the old Germany and the new--armoured cruisers and giant guns
+appeared as a free development from Kant and Hegel, and the word
+_Kultur_, a word which Germany ought to prohibit by law for thirty
+years to come, masked the confusion of thought.
+
+To discover now, after our downfall, that Germany ought never to have
+carried on a continental let alone a world policy, would be a pitiful
+example of _esprit d'escalier_. It is true that it was our right, and
+even our duty, by our intellect, our ethics and our greatness, to
+carry it on; but the weakness of our character on the side of Will was
+the cause of its failure. Bismarck, a born realist in politics, grown
+up in the Prussian tradition, trained in the diplomatic tradition by
+Gortschakov, made the calamitous choice. He made us safe for certain
+decades; but it was only an intuitive policy in the manner of
+Stein[23] that could have saved us for centuries.
+
+In the midst of self-administered and self-determining nations the
+German people, from lack of self-consciousness, indolence of will and
+innate servility remained under a patriarchal system of government, a
+minor under tutelage of divinely-appointed dynasties and ruling
+classes. In the childish movement of the educated bourgeoisie of 1848
+Bismarck saw only the helpless and Utopian, but not the symbolic side,
+which Marx might have shown him. His practical spirit judged with a
+smile that a handful of peasantry and grenadiers would suffice to
+bring to reason this dynastically-minded people. It was only too true;
+although the bulk of this people had not for thirty years been formed
+by the peasant class, and although he himself had learned how to make
+use of the power of the modern industrial State in peasant disguise.
+And so he refused to allow his countrymen to come of age; broke, with
+the superiority of genius, and with the weapons of success and
+authority, the incompetent forces that resisted him; created, by  the
+magical mechanism of his Constitution, the German Empire as a mere
+continuation of the Prussian bureaucratic State reinforced, by the
+self-glorifying dynasties, with the whole volume of the still existing
+and justly appreciated habit of obedience; and annihilated for a
+generation every aspiration for freedom by branding it with the stain
+of moral and social depravity. Our political worthlessness and
+immaturity came to its climax in the race of office-climbers in 1880,
+which in 1900 gave place to the battle-fleet patriotism of the great
+capitalists.
+
+A self-administered and a self-determining nation--such as the nations
+of the world, except ourselves, Austria and Russia, were, on the
+whole, at the turn of the century--would have been able to carry on a
+sound and steadfast policy in economics and public affairs, and to
+enjoy the confidence of the world, as little begrudged as America. On
+the other hand, a dangerous warship, armed upon an unexampled scale,
+given to backward movements and commanded by an uncontrollable sovran
+dilettante, could only expect sooner or later to be expelled from the
+harbour of the nations. History is apt to overdo it, especially when
+corruption has gone on too long; with every year that passed the doom
+became more certain; instead of being expelled, we were annihilated.
+
+That four years of hunger, a lost war and a military revolt at last
+set us free, does not betoken any change of character; and when to-day
+a servile and facile Press lauds our wretched and idealess
+Constitution as the finest in the world, that gives us no assurance
+of its power to endure. Understanding is no substitute for character,
+but it is at any rate a step towards the goal; and if it is once
+understood that other measures are possible, and if, out of this
+period, certain writings and thoughts shall survive--and survive they
+will--then at any rate we may still be weak, but we shall be no longer
+blind.
+
+It might be possible at the outset of our journey towards strength of
+will that we should grope our way slowly--very slowly--back to the old
+problems of power. It does not matter if we do. Before we get there,
+the world will be changed, and will be pregnant with new thoughts. Let
+us fulfil the duties for which Germany was made what it is. Let us go
+in quest of the idea and the faculty that are laid upon us; let us do
+this in order to live, to recover our health, to shape ourselves anew,
+to remain a People, to become a Nation, to create a future and to
+serve the world.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 17: Geistigkeit. This is a difficult word to translate. It
+sometimes means merely intellectuality, sometimes in addition (as
+here) all that is implied in the phrase, "Ye know not what manner of
+spirit ([Greek: oiou pneumatos]) ye are of."]
+
+[Footnote 18: Referring to Werner Sombart's war-book, _Händler und
+Helden_.]
+
+[Footnote 19: _Cf._ Thomas Mann's remarkable book on the real
+significance of the war: _Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen_ (1918).]
+
+[Footnote 20: Sachlichkeit. Rathenau seems to have in mind the German
+feeling for disinterested study and research as illustrated, for
+instance, by the fact that when the German Government heard of the
+genius of Einstein they brought him to Berlin with a salary of nearly
+£1000 a year and no duties except to think. Modern bigotry has
+expelled him.]
+
+[Footnote 21: Where Kant lived and taught, and published his _Kritik
+der reinen Vernunft_.]
+
+[Footnote 22: As opposed to the inward, intellectual and spiritual
+character.]
+
+[Footnote 23: Stein was the chief leader of Prussia from the
+Frederician into the modern era. His ministry of reform by which a
+peasant-proprietary was established, and municipal institutions
+created, lasted only from September 1807 to November 1808.]
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+
+On balance it seems that the endowments of the German people work out
+as follows:--
+
+High qualities of intellect and heart. Ethics and mentality normal.
+Originative will-power and independent activity, weak.
+
+We give our devotion freely, and the heart rules in action. Our
+feelings are genuine and powerful. We have courage and endurance. Led
+by sentiment rather than by inspiration. We create no forms, are
+self-forgetful, seek no responsibility, obey rather than rule. In
+obedience we know no limit, and never question what is imposed upon
+us.
+
+Of its own accord the German people would never have adopted an ideal
+of force. It was imposed on us by the idolaters of the great
+war-machine and those who gained by it; even Bismarck did not share
+it.
+
+We are not competent to form an ideal of civilization, for the sense
+of unity, will to leadership, and formative energy are lacking to us.
+We have no political mission for the arrangement of other people's
+affairs, for we cannot arrange our own; we do not lead a full life,
+and are politically unripe.
+
+We are endowed as no other people is for a mission of the spirit. Such
+a mission was ours till a century ago; we renounced it, because
+through political slackness of will-power we fell out of step; we did
+not keep pace with the other nations in internal political
+development, and, instead, devoted ourselves to the most far-reaching
+developments of mechanism and to their counterpart in bids for power.
+It was Faust, lured away from his true path, cast off by the
+Earth-Spirit, astray among witches, brawlers and alchemists.
+
+But the Faust-soul of Germany is not dead. Of all peoples on the earth
+we alone have never ceased to struggle with ourselves. And not with
+ourselves alone, but with our dæmon, our God. We still hear within
+ourselves the All, we still expand in every breath of creation. We
+understand the language of things, of men and of peoples. We measure
+everything by itself, not by us; we do not seek our own will, but the
+truth. We are all alike and yet all different; each of us is a
+wanderer, a brooder, a seeker. Things of the spirit are taken
+seriously with us; we do not make them serve our lives, we serve them
+with ours.
+
+"And you dare to say this, in the face of all the brutalizing and
+bemiring that we experience--the profiteering and gormandizing, the
+abject submissiveness, the shameless desertions, the apathy, the
+insincerity, the heartlessness and mindlessness of our day?"
+
+Yes, I dare to say it, for I believe it and I know it. The soul of the
+German people lies still in the convulsions and hallucinations of its
+slow recovery. It is recovery not alone from the war, but from
+something worse, its hundred-years' alienation from itself. The
+much-ridiculed choice of our old romantic unheraldic colours, black,
+red and gold, instead of the bodiless and soulless colours under which
+we waged the war,[24] was, among the whirling follies of the time, a
+faint symbolic movement of our better mind. We must reunite ourselves
+with the days before we ceased to be Germans and became Berliners.
+
+What we need is Spirit. The whole world needs it, no more and no less
+than we do, but will never create it. History knows why it decided for
+Versailles and the Hall of Mirrors. Not mechanism alone, with its
+retinue of nationalism and imperialism, is now again and for the last
+time to be glorified; no, the whole Franco-British policy of
+acquisition mounts up even to the throne of the Sun-king, and it is
+seriously believed that it will govern the destinies of the world for
+centuries to come. An inconceivable, and, in its monstrous irony,
+unsurpassable drama, which is put forward as the introduction to the
+great era. The bourgeois conscience of the West  has no inkling of
+what it means. To this conscience, the war was a huge violation of
+decency, contrived by bandits; its victory is the final triumph of a
+capitalist, rationalistic civilization; the torch lit in the East
+means murder and incendiarism, and the upward migration of the people
+from the depths is to it invisible.
+
+No; it is not here that the spirit of the future is being formed. One
+may discover further ingenious devices, lightning-conductors to
+mitigate the stroke; but gently or violently a natural force will have
+its way, and the new earth which it is preparing needs new seed.
+
+That we have been given the faculty to shape a new spirit does not
+imply that we are at liberty to choose whether we shall do it or not.
+Even if it were not for our life's sake--even if it were against our
+life--still we must obey. But it _is_ for our life's sake, as we have
+seen, and as it is indeed obvious, for every organism can live only by
+fulfilling the purpose of its being.
+
+And now we have got to a very dangerous place--a place where the usual
+moral peroration lies in wait for us--that German peroration which
+announces universal redemption, and immediately, on that lofty note,
+closes the discussion. Fatherland, Morality, Humanity, Labour,
+Courage, Confidence--we all know how it goes, the writer has written
+something fine, the reader has read something fine; emotion on both
+sides, little conviction on either.
+
+It appears, then, that I have just been writing something extremely
+suspect. Has the reader followed me through five-and-thirty of these
+difficult folios in order to arrive in the end at that very everyday
+term, Spirit?[25] Is there any term in commoner use, and what are we
+to think about it? Softly--there is worse to come! The next word is
+still more dubious, philistinishly so, in fact--the word Culture.[26]
+I cannot help it--we must pass on by way of these everyday
+conceptions. We must get through the crowd, where hack-phrases elbow
+us. Any journey you may take, though it were to Tibet, must begin at
+the Berlin Central Railway Station. What is wrong with these popular
+phrases is not that they start from an everyday conception, but that
+they remain content with it, and do not think it out to the end.
+
+Our task, therefore, stated in the most general terms, is to make
+actually spiritual a people which is capable of spirituality. And
+since spirituality cannot be propped up by any external thrust, by
+sermons, newspaper articles, leagues, or propaganda, but must be
+associated with life and developed out of life, so the organic process
+and the condition of life to which it leads is called Culture.
+
+It is only with deep reluctance and after long search that I have
+written down this beautiful word, a word now worn almost beyond
+recognition. Can we find our way back to its application and
+significance? Even when it is not drawn out with a futile prefix[27]
+one can hardly detect its pure meaning by reason of the many
+overtones. The school, if possible the university, some French and
+English, the rules about I and Me, visiting-cards, shirt-cuffs,
+foreign phrases, top-hats, table-manners: these are some of the
+overtones that make themselves heard when we talk of a cultured man,
+or rather as they have it a cultured gentleman. A hundred years ago,
+as the word implies, we understood by culture the unfolding and the
+full possession of innate bodily, spiritual and moral forces. In this
+sense Goethe showed us the two fraternal figures formed after his own
+image: Faust the richer, and the poorer Wilhelm Meister, striving for
+culture.
+
+The ideal which hovers before us is not one of education, not even one
+of knowledge, although both education and knowledge enter into it; it
+is an ideal of the Will. It will not be easy to convey the breadth and
+the boundless range which we are to attach to this conception. That it
+is not an airy figment is clear from the fact that for centuries the
+Greeks, with full consciousness, adopted as their highest law (though
+directed to a somewhat different end) that impulse of the will which
+they called _Kalokagathia_.[28]
+
+From one who has introduced the conception of mechanism into German
+thought, who has rescued the conception of the soul from the hands of
+the psychologists and brought it back to its primal meaning, who has
+written so much about soulless intellectualism, and has put forward
+the empire of the soul as the goal of humanity, it is not to be
+expected that he should preach any mechanical kind of culture, or
+indeed any that it is possible to acquire by learning.
+
+How culture is to be produced we shall see; the first thing necessary
+is that it should be willed.
+
+Willed it must be, in a sense and with a strength of purpose and a
+force of appreciation of which we to-day, when the ages of faith, of
+the Reformation, of the German classics, and the wars of liberation,
+lie so far behind us, have no idea at all.
+
+When the current conception of intellectual culture so much prized in
+family, society and business life, and tricked out with criticisms of
+style, with historical data and incidents of travel is justly
+ridiculed, then the will to complete cultivation of the body, the
+intellect and the soul of the people must be so strong that all
+questions of convenience, of enjoyment, of prestige and of material
+interests must sink far into the background. This word must sound so
+that all who hear it can look in each other's eyes with a full mutual
+understanding and without the slightest sense of ambiguity; just as
+they do in Japan when the name of the common head of all families, the
+Mikado, is named. There must be one thing in Germany and it must be
+this thing, which is altogether out of reach of the yawning, blinking
+and grinning scepticism of the coffee-house, and of the belching and
+growling of the tavern. Any man who puts this thing aside in favour of
+his class-ideas, or his speculations in lard, or his dividends, or the
+demands of his Union, must understand that he is doing something as
+offensive as if he went out in public without washing himself.
+
+The conception of Culture as our true and unique faculty must be so
+profoundly grasped that in public life and legislation it must have
+the first word and the last. Though we become as poor as church-mice
+we must stake our last penny on this, and tune up our education and
+instruction, our models and outlook, our motives and claims, our
+achievement and our atmosphere, to so high a point that any one coming
+into Germany shall feel that he is entering into a new age.
+
+Society must be penetrated by this conception. Those classes which
+already possess something resembling it--such as training, education,
+experience, tradition, outlook, good breeding--must pour out with both
+hands what they have to dispense; not in the way of endowments,
+conventicles, lectures and patronizing visits, but in quiet,
+self-sacrificing, personal service.
+
+All this, of course, cannot be done without the free response of the
+other side. The devoted attempts which have been made, especially in
+England, and for some years with us too, to win this response by long
+and unselfish solicitation were destined to remain merely the mission
+of individual lives, for they were not supported by the will of the
+community as a whole; it rather ran counter to them. A Peace of God
+must be proclaimed, not as between the Haves and the Have-nots, not
+between the proletariat and the capitalists, not between the so-called
+cultured classes and the uncultured, but between those who are ready
+for a mutual exchange of experience, a give-and-take of their
+tradition on both sides. Not an exchange on business principles, such
+as propaganda in satisfaction of demands, or curiosity on one side for
+a new pastime on the other, but a covenant. This, however, is only
+practicable if the class-war, as an end in itself, is put a stop to.
+
+The great change itself cannot be come by so cheaply; it demands other
+assumptions, of which we shall have something to say later. But the
+attitude and temper, the recognition of the task, could not be better
+introduced than through the mutual service of the two social strata.
+
+We have still at our disposal, handed on from the past, certain
+organized methods of investigation and administration. We now need
+chairs and institutes of research, not for the trivial business of
+popular enlightenment and lectures, but for the study and
+investigation of the needs of national culture, the idea which must
+now take the place of national defence. We shall have need of central
+authorities, not, like the late Ministries of Culture skimping the
+scanty endowment of the Board Schools, but doing the work of German
+education, progress, and interchange of labour.[29]
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 24: Black, red and gold were originally the colours of a
+students' Corps in Frankfort. They were adopted as the colours of the
+abortive German Federation of 1848, apparently under a mistaken idea
+that they represented the colours of the ancient Germanic Empire. The
+colours of the Empire of 1870 were the Prussian black and white, with
+the addition of red.]
+
+[Footnote 25: Geist.]
+
+[Footnote 26: Bildung. It is as difficult in English as it is in
+German to render in one word exactly what the author is thinking of.
+In its literal sense Bildung implies a shaping and formative action.]
+
+[Footnote 27: Ausbildung.]
+
+[Footnote 28: A harmony of character, compounded of beauty and
+goodness.]
+
+[Footnote 29: Arbeitsausgleich. The meaning of this will be apparent
+later.]
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+
+Some decades ago the conscience of middle-class society in England was
+stirred. The result was Toynbee Hall and the Settlements-movement,
+which afterwards found praiseworthy counterparts in Germany. Society
+had begun to understand the wrong which it had done to its brothers,
+the proletariat, whom it had robbed of mind, and offered them instead
+soul-destroying, mechanical labour. Then choice spirits arose who
+dedicated their whole lives to the service of their brothers. This
+great and noble work did much to soften pain and hatred, and here and
+there many a soul was saved by it; but it could not act as it was
+intended to act, because it could not become what it imagined itself
+to be.
+
+It ought to have been, and believed itself to be, a simple and obvious
+piece of love-service, a pure interchange of spiritual possessions
+between class and class, no condescending pity or educative mission.
+It was a noble and a splendid error; the movement retained the form of
+sacrifice and benefaction. On both sides social feeling was
+indifferent to it, or even hostile. What one hand gave, a thousand
+others took back; what one hand received, a thousand others rejected.
+The collective conscience of a class had never been stirred, it was
+merely that the conscience of certain members of upper-class society
+had sent out envoys; it had not moved as a body. Individuals were
+ready to sacrifice themselves, but the conditions of labour remained
+unchanged.
+
+So long as a general wrong is allowed to stand, it gives the lie to
+every individual effort. The wrong becomes even more bitter because it
+loses its unconsciousness--men know it for wrong, and do not amend it.
+For this reason a second movement of importance, that of the People's
+High Schools, which has created in Denmark the most advanced
+peasant-class in existence, can achieve no social reform in lands
+cloven by proletarianism. If in addition to this the High School
+movement should depart from its original conception, that of a
+temporary community of life between the teachers and the taught, and
+should, instead of this, resolve itself into a lecture-institution,
+then the danger arises that what is offered will be disconnected
+matter, intended for entertainment, and without any basis of real
+knowledge, something commonly called half-culture which is worse than
+unculture, and is more properly described as misculture.
+
+No work of the charitable type can bring about the reconciliation of
+classes or be a substitute for popular education. The reconciliation
+of classes, however, even if it were attainable, is by no means our
+goal, but rather the abolition of classes, and our ultimate object is
+not popular education but popular culture. We do not intend to give
+with one hand and take back with the other, we shall not condemn a
+brother-people to dullness and quicken a few chosen individuals; no,
+we mean to go to the root of the evil, to break down the monopoly of
+culture, and to create a new people, united and cultured throughout.
+
+But the root of the trouble lies in the conditions of labour. It is an
+idle dream to imagine that out of that soulless subdivision of labour
+which governs our mechanical methods of production, the old
+handicrafts can ever be developed again. Short of some catastrophic
+depopulation which shall restore the mediæval relation between the
+area of the soil and the numbers that occupy it, the subdivision of
+labour will have to stand, and so long as it stands no man will
+complete his job from start to finish--he will only do a section of
+it; at best, and assuming the highest mechanical development, it will
+be a work of supervision. But mindless and soulless work no man can do
+with any joy. The terrible fact about the mechanization of industry is
+that productive work, the elementary condition of life, the very form
+of existence, which fills more than half of each man's waking day, is
+by it made hated and hateful. It degrades the industrious man,
+thrilling with energy, into a work-shy slacker--for what else does it
+mean that all social conflicts culminate in the demand for a
+shortening of the hours of work? For the peasant, the research-worker,
+the artist, the working day is never long enough; for the artisan, who
+calls himself _par excellence_ a "worker," it can never be too short.
+
+The advance of technical invention will make it possible in the end to
+transform all mechanical work into supervision. But the process will
+be long and partial, we cannot wait till it is completed, especially
+as times will come when technical knowledge will stand still, or even,
+it may be, go back. Any one who knows in his own flesh what mechanical
+work is like, who knows the feeling of hanging with one's whole soul
+on the creeping movement of the minute-hand, the horror that seizes
+him when a glance at the watch shows that the eternity which has
+passed has lasted only ten minutes, who has had to measure the day's
+task by the sound of a bell, who kills his lifetime, hour after hour,
+with the one longing that it might die more quickly--he knows how the
+shortening of the working day, whatever may be put in its place, has
+become for the factory artisan a goal of existence.
+
+But he knows something else as well. He knows the deadliest of all
+wearinesses--the weariness of the soul. Not the rest when one breathes
+again after wholesome bodily exertion, not the need for relaxation and
+distraction after a great effort of intellect, but an empty stupor of
+exhaustion, like the revulsion after unnatural excess. It is the
+shallowest kind of tea-table chatter to talk about good music,
+edifying and instructive lectures, a cheerful walk in God's free
+Nature, a quiet hour of reading by the lamp, and so on, as a remedy
+for this. Drink, cards, agitation, the cinemas, and dissipation can
+alone flog up the mishandled nerves and muscles, until they wilt again
+under the next day's toil.
+
+The worker has no means of comparison. He does not know what wholesome
+labour feels like. He will never find his way back to work on the
+land, for there he cannot get the counter-poisons which he thinks
+indispensable, and he lacks the organic, ordering mind which
+mechanical employment has destroyed. Even if some did get back, it
+would be in vain, for though agriculture is hungering for thousands of
+hands it cannot absorb millions. The worker has no means of
+comparison; hence his bottomless contempt for intellectual work, the
+results of which he recognizes, but which, in regard to the labour it
+costs, he puts on a level with the idling of the folk whom he sees
+strolling or driving about with their lapdogs in the fashionable
+streets.
+
+The middle-class conscience, and even that of the men of science,
+turns away its face in shameful cowardice from the horror of
+mechanized labour. Apart from the well-meaning æsthetes who live in
+rural elegance surrounded by all the appliances which mechanism can
+supply, who wrinkle their brows when the electric light goes out, and
+who write pamphlets asking with pained surprise why people cannot
+return to the old land-work and handicraft, most of us take
+mechanical labour as an unalterable condition of life, and merely
+congratulate ourselves that it is not we who have to do it.
+
+The Utopianist agitators who knowingly or unknowingly suppress the
+essential truth that their world of equality will be a world of the
+bitterest poverty, treat the situation just as lightly. Before them,
+in the future State, hovers the vision of some exceptional literary or
+political appointment. The others may console themselves with the
+thought that in spite of a still deeper degree of poverty, towards
+which they are sinking by their own inactivity, the hell of mechanical
+work, by no means abolished, will probably be a little reduced, so far
+as regards the time they spend in it. The notion that mechanical work
+will be made acceptable and reconciled with intellectual, if only it
+is short enough and properly paid, has never been thought out; it is a
+still-born child of mental lethargy, like all those visions of the
+future that are being held up to our eyes. Try notions like this on
+any other ill--toothache, for instance! All our rhetoric about
+mechanical work being no ill at all, is ignorant or fraudulent, and if
+nothing further be done than to reduce it to four hours, all our
+social struggles will immediately be concentrated on bringing it down
+to two. The goal of Socialism, so far as it relates to this _pons
+asinorum_ of shortening hours, is simply the right to loaf.
+
+Let us look facts in the face. Mechanical work is an evil in itself,
+and it is one which we never can get rid of by any conceivable
+economic or social transformation. Neither Karl Marx nor Lenin has
+succeeded here, and on this reef will be wrecked every future State
+that may be set up on the basis of current Socialistic ideas. In this
+point lies the central problem of Socialism; undisturbed, as was till
+lately that legendary conception of surplus-value, and bedded, like
+that conception, in a rats'-nest of rhetorical phrases, repeated from
+mouth to mouth and never tested by examination.
+
+The bringing of Mind into the masses, the cultured State,[30] which is
+the only possible foundation of a society worthy of humanity, must
+remain unattainable until everything conceivable has been thought out
+and done to alleviate the mischievous operation of this evil, which
+dulls and stupefies the human spirit and which, in itself, is
+ineradicable. No Soviet-policy, no socialization, no property-policy,
+no popular education, nor any other of the catchwords which form _ad
+nauseam_ the monotonous staple of our current discussion of affairs,
+can go to the heart of the problem. Instead we must establish and put
+into practice the principle which I have called that of the
+Interchange of Labour, and which I must now, in broad outline,
+endeavour to explain.
+
+The object of this principle is to bring mind into labour. It
+demands--since mind cannot be brought into mechanical work beyond a
+certain degree fixed  by technical conditions--that the day's work as
+a whole shall have a share of it, by means of the exchange and
+association of mental and mechanical employment. Until this principle
+shall have been carried into effect, all true culture of the people
+remains impossible. So long as there is no culture of the people, so
+long must culture remain a monopoly of the classes, and of escapes
+from the masses; so long must society be wanting in equilibrium, a
+union open to breach from every side, and one which, however highly
+its social institutions may be developed, holds down the people to
+forced labour, and destroys culture.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 30: Bildungsstaat.]
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+
+There is a way by which the day's work can be ennobled, and even have
+mind brought into it,[31] on capitalistic lines. Before the War we
+were just about to enter on this path--America is treading it now. Its
+fundamental condition is a huge increase in general well-being.
+
+The daily wages of the American working-man have risen, as we have
+already remarked, to seven or even ten dollars, corresponding to a
+purchasing power of over a hundred marks. This amounts to so radical a
+removal of all restrictions in domestic economy that one can no longer
+speak of the proletarian condition as existing in the United States. A
+man who drives to his work in his own automobile can satisfy all his
+reasonable needs in the way of recreation and of extending his
+education, he looks at his sectional job (as has not seldom been the
+case in America even in earlier days) with a critical eye, he forms
+his own judgment of its place in the whole, he improves the processes,
+and amuses himself by  being both workman and engineer. (Consider in
+the light of this fact the value of the prophecy that America is
+standing on the brink of Bolshevism!)
+
+In a country whose wealth at this moment--in consequence of
+war-profits and depreciation of money--is almost equal to that of the
+rest of the world put together, the process of abolishing
+proletarianism can go forward on capitalistic lines. But we Germans,
+since it is decreed that we shall be among the poorest of the peoples,
+and must begin afresh, and live for the future--we shall renounce
+without envy the broad path of the old way of thought, the way of
+riches, in order to clear with hard work the new path on which, one
+day, all will have to follow us. The way of Culture is the way to
+which we are pointed, and we have described Interchange of Labour as
+the fundamental condition which enables us to travel it. It is now
+clear that the conception of popular culture is not, after all,
+represented by any of the five-and-twenty idealizing catchwords with
+which we are wont to console ourselves in our elegiac orations, but
+that by it is meant a clearly defined political procedure.
+
+By the principle of Interchange of Labour it is required that every
+employee engaged in mechanical work can claim to do a portion of his
+day's work in intellectual employment; and that every brainworker
+shall be obliged to devote a portion of his day to physical labour.
+
+There are, of course, fixed limits to the application of this
+principle, on the one side in intellectual, on the other in bodily
+incapacity, as well as in those rare cases where it is recognized that
+the interrupted hours of intellectual work cannot be made good.
+
+We would also establish a year of Labour-Service, to be devoted by the
+whole youth of Germany, of both sexes, to bodily training and work.
+
+The tests of capacity and of the claim to be reckoned as "cultured" is
+not to consist in examinations but in proof of work. Any one who can
+offer some show of claim can demand to be tested, and, if the result
+is favourable, to receive further culture. Thus we shall be taking
+seriously the question of the ascent to higher grades, which, so long
+as it depends on a particular age, or on school certificates, must
+remain on paper.
+
+Let no one say that this testing system is a mere mechanical method,
+that it degrades Culture from its intellectual dignity, and is
+equivalent to the Chinese literary tests for office. True culture is
+distinguished from mere sybaritic æstheticism in that in some sense or
+other it makes for production. Where there is no talent for art or for
+creative thought, then there remain to be developed the educational
+forces of judgment, or a faculty for the conduct of life, which must
+have their influence.
+
+Different categories of Culture will arise of themselves; not ranks or
+castes or classes, but grades of society, each of which may be
+attained by any one. No one must be able to say that any monopoly of
+culture has barred his way, or that training and testing have been
+denied him. If the culture be genuine it will never look down in
+intellectual arrogance on the stages below it; if it have duties
+associated with it, then he who has rejected the path of ascent, or
+has failed in it, cannot claim to fulfil those duties. Any one who has
+no faculty but that of a glib tongue will find in the multiplicity of
+callings some field for his activity; but the rule of the talker,
+backed by force or not, will at any rate be spared us.
+
+At this point we may hear a voice from the average heart of Socialism
+exclaim: "How is this? Do you call that having no castes? We have just
+begun to shake off the yoke of the capitalists and now are we expected
+to put the cultured in command? This is pure reaction!"
+
+Softly! If this is a case of misunderstanding, we shall clear it up.
+If any scruples still remain, we shall consider them further.
+
+Let us take the misunderstanding first. It is apparently forgotten
+that capitalism ruled by hereditary power. Any one who belonged to
+that circle ruled along with it, whether he were competent to rule or
+not. But culture is not a heritable possession; no one can win it save
+by virtue of a higher spirit and will. He who has this spirit and this
+will, can and will win it. He who wins it is fit for higher
+responsibilities. Is the voice from the average heart answered?
+
+No. It replies: "Heritable or not, what do we care? We are out for
+equality. Distinctions in culture are a kind of aristocracy."
+
+Now, good heart, you have revealed yourself. What was the meaning of
+your everlasting talk about the ladder for the rise of capacity? I
+shall tell you. The capable man is to toil, and to rise just so far as
+you permit him, namely, till you can possess yourselves of the fruits
+of his labour: then he is to be thrust down, and the loudest mouth is
+to rule. You are not pleased with this interpretation? Neither am I,
+so we are quits.
+
+For of the folly of imagining a society of equals I do not intend to
+speak. The average man, who cannot understand equality of human
+dignity, equality before God, thinks nothing of demanding equality in
+externals, equality in responsibility and vocation. But this sham
+equality is the enemy of the true, for it does not fit man's burden to
+his strength, it creates overburdened, misused natures, driving the
+one to scamped work and hypocrisy, and the other to cynicism. Every
+accidental and inherited advantage must indeed be done away with. But
+if there is any one who, among men equal in external conditions, in
+duties and in claims, demands that they should also be equal in mind,
+in will and in heart--let him begin by altering Nature!
+
+In remuneration also, that is to say, in the apportionment of
+conditions of work, a mechanical equality would be tantamount to an
+unjust and intolerable inequality in the actual distribution or
+remission of work. Work of the highest class, creative and
+intellectual work--the most self-sacrificing that is known to man
+because it draws to itself and swallows up a man's whole life,
+including his hours of leisure and recreation--this work demands
+extreme consideration, in the form of solitude, freedom from
+disturbance, from trivial and distracting cares or occupations, and
+contact with Nature. This kind of consideration is, from the economic
+point of view, an outlay which mechanical work does not require. If
+mechanical and intellectual work are to be placed under the same
+specific conditions, under which the highest standard of output is to
+be maintained and the producers are as far as possible to bear an
+equal burden, then the scale of remuneration must be different.
+Starting from a subsistence minimum it must for intellectual work be
+graded two stages upward, one for the output,[32] and one for the
+grade of culture implied.
+
+Women will also be subject to this system of grading whether they
+exercise any vocation outside their homes or not, for society has a
+deep interest in the culture of its mothers, and in external
+incentives to culture women must share equally with men.
+
+An intimate sense of association will grow up within each grade of
+culture. This, however, will not impair the general solidarity of the
+people, since no hereditary family egoism can arise. This sense of
+association, renewed with elements that vary from generation to
+generation, and corresponding very much to the relations between
+contemporary artists who spring from different classes or territories,
+will dissolve the relics of the old hereditary sentiment and absorb
+into itself whatever traditional values the latter may possess.
+
+Between the separate grades there will not only be the connexion
+afforded by the living possibilities of free ascent from one to the
+other, but the system of ever-renewed co-operation in rank-and-file at
+the same work will in itself promote culture, tradition, and the
+consciousness of union. We need only recall the old gilds and military
+associations in order to realize what a high degree of manly civic
+consciousness can arise from the visible community of duty and
+achievement. The mechanical worker will become the instructor of his
+temporary comrade and guest, and the latter will in turn widen the
+other's outlook, and emulate him in the development of the processes
+of production. The manual worker will bring to the desk and the
+board-room his freedom from prepossessions and the practical
+experience of his calling; he will learn how to deal with abstractions
+and general ideas; he will gain a respect for intellectual work, and
+will feel the impulse to win new knowledge and faculty, or to make
+good what he has neglected.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Two objections remain to be considered and confuted.
+
+First: there are far more places to be filled in mechanical than in
+intellectual employment. Is it possible so to organize the interchange
+of work that every one who desires intellectual employment can find
+it? The answer is: that, whether we like it or not, all work tends
+more and more to take on an administrative character. Just as in
+industry there is ever more talk and less production, so our economic
+life is working itself out through thousands upon thousands of new
+organizations. Industrial Councils, Councils of Workers,
+Gild-Councils, are forming themselves in among the existing agencies
+of administration; and the immediate consequence of this is a
+tremendous drop in production, to be followed later by a more highly
+articulated and more remunerative system of work. It is as if a marble
+statue came to life, and then had to be internally equipped with
+bones, muscles, veins and nerves. Or it resembles the transformation
+of a shabby piece of suburban building-ground: it has to be dug up,
+drained, paved, fenced; and until traffic has poured into it, it
+remains a comfortless and dismal waste.
+
+But the administrative side of our future economic and national life
+demands the creation of so many posts of intellectual work that at
+present there is not the trained _personnel_ to fill it. If the Year
+of Labour-Service is introduced, there will be still more defections
+and gaps to be filled. The rush for intellectual work is more likely
+to be too small than too great.
+
+Let us come to the second objection. Will not confusion be worse
+confounded if there are many who have to fill two jobs, if, in these
+jobs constant exchanges are taking place, if the periods of work are
+brief and subject to untimely interruptions, if time and work are lost
+through never-ending rearrangement?
+
+Assuredly. And any one who starts with the idea of the old high-strung
+work done, as it were, under military discipline, any one who
+cherishes the remotest idea that this system can ever return, in spite
+of the fact that its clamps and springs have been dashed to pieces,
+may well lament these unsettlements. One who starts from the
+fluctuating conditions of our present-day, make-believe labour will
+take organic unsettlements as part of the price to be paid, if they
+only lead in the end to systematic production. But one who weighs the
+fact that the make-believe life of our present economy has not even
+yet reached its final form, will discern in every new transition-form,
+however tedious, the final redemption; in so far, at least, as any
+equilibrium is capable of being restored at all.
+
+The essence of the interchange of labour will, therefore, consist in
+this, that while the distinction between physical and intellectual
+work will still exist, there will be no distinction between a physical
+and intellectual calling. Until advanced age may forbid, it will be
+open to every man not merely to acquire some ornamental branches of
+knowledge but seriously and with both feet to take his footing in the
+opposite calling to his own.
+
+The different callings will learn to know and respect each other, and
+to understand their respective difficulties. This applies particularly
+to those who call themselves the operative workers.
+
+As soon as hereditary idleness has come to an end and loafing has been
+trampled out, then many a one, who now thinks that mental work is mere
+chattering, will learn through his novitiate at the desk, that
+thinking hurts. If he does not feel himself equal to this kneading and
+rummaging of the brain, he will go back with relief to his workshop;
+he will neither envy nor despise those who are operative workers with
+the brain, and will understand, or at least unconsciously feel, the
+oppositions in human nature and the differences in conditions of life,
+and will know them to be just. He cannot and must not keep himself
+wholly aloof from the elements of mental training; his contact with
+brainworkers will not cease; and thus his complete and passive
+resignation to the domination of ignorant rhetoric will lose its
+charm.
+
+Any man will be respected who contents himself with the lowest
+prescribed measure of culture, who modestly renounces further study,
+and goes back to manual work. But there will be no excuse for those
+who know nothing and can do nothing, but pretend to set everybody
+right; for there will be no monopoly of culture to keep them down, and
+all genuine faculty must come to the test of action.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+To-day there are three classes of social swindlers. First, those who
+live on the community without returning it any service. These are the
+people who live idly on inherited money, and the loafers. Against
+these social legislation must be framed. Secondly, those who
+deliberately practise "ca' canny," and therefore live on the surplus
+work of their fellows. These are the champions of the principle: Every
+one according to his need, no one according to his deed; the
+_saboteurs_ of labour. Against these the remedy lies in the spread of
+intelligence and a just system of remuneration. Thirdly, there are
+those who simulate thought and brain-work while they have nothing to
+give but hack phrases uttered with a glib tongue. Against these worst
+of all swindlers, these sinners against the Spirit, the remedy is
+culture.
+
+And this, in the new Order, is open to every one, young or old, who
+can maintain his foothold in the exercise of intellect, when the
+chance is offered him. He who in his test-exercise reaches a normal
+standard of accomplishment can demand that he shall not be sent back
+to manual work, but continue to be employed in the same occupation,
+and be further cultivated in whatever direction he desires. At every
+further stage of development a corresponding sphere of activity is to
+be opened to him, up to the point at which the limits of his capacity
+come into sight.
+
+Let no one object that the rush for intellectual work will become
+uncontrollable. Would that it might! For then the country would be so
+highly developed and its methods of work so perfected that there would
+be quite a new relation between the demand for head-work and for
+hand-work. For a long time to come this rush will be far smaller than
+we imagine; for the immediate future it will suffice if the rising
+forces are set free, and the laggard are tranquillized.
+
+But, the Radicals will cry, what an unsocial principle! Have we at
+last, with difficulty, brought it to the point that the accursed
+one-year examination[33] is abrogated, and now are we again to be
+condemned according to this so-called standard of culture?
+
+Stay! there is a fallacy here. In our transition period which is still
+quite dominated by the monopoly of culture, I have nothing to say
+against the abrogation of every educational test, even though in a few
+years we shall feel the deeply depressing  effects which will arise
+from the domination of the uncultured.
+
+But the transition period will come to an end. Then every one who
+likes will be able to learn and to execute, and every one who is able
+will wish to do so.
+
+"But supposing one does not wish? May not he be the very one who is
+most capable of achievement? We don't want model pupils."
+
+Nor do I want model pupils. The boy who has learnt nothing may make
+his trial as a man when culture is open to all. But if, as a man, he
+does not care to rack his brains he will be thought none the less of;
+he will merely be offered ordinary work according to his choice.
+
+But those who wish to see responsibility and the destiny of the
+country placed in the hands of men who do not care to rack their
+brains, must not entrench themselves behind social principles, but
+plainly admit that they want for all time to establish the rule of
+demagogy and the vulgarization of intellect. It is not for such a one
+to pass judgment on the mission of Germany.
+
+The way to the German mission, to German culture, which is to be no
+more a culture of the classes but of the people, stands open to all by
+means of the Interchange of Labour. The whole land is as it were a
+single ship's crew; the issues are the same for all. The manual worker
+is no longer kept down by over-fatigue, and the brainworker is no
+longer cut off from the rest of the people.
+
+The manual worker no longer regards the territory of culture as a sort
+of inaccessible island, but rather as a district which he can visit
+every day and in which he is quite at home. Every one in future will
+start even in school training, and the degree to which his further
+culture may be carried will not be limited by want of money or of
+time, or, above all, of opportunity. He will continually have
+intercourse with men of culture, and in that intercourse he will at
+once give and receive; the habits of thought, the methods and the
+range of intellectual work which are now only the heritage of a few
+will be his own; and the twofold language of the country, the language
+of conceptions and the language of things, will for him be one.
+
+There will be no permanent system of stratification; the energies of
+the people, rising and falling, will be in constant movement and their
+elements will never lose touch. There may be self-tormenting and
+unhappily constituted natures who will hate their own dispositions and
+the destiny they have shaped for themselves--these aberrations will
+never cease so long as men are men--but there will be no more hatred
+of class for class, any more than there is in any voluntary
+association of artists or of athletes.
+
+And since culture is to be at once the recognized social aim of the
+country and the personal goal and standard of each individual, the
+struggle for possessions and enjoyments, doubly restrained by public
+opinion and by deeper insight, will sink into the background.
+
+But the spirit of the land will not resemble any that we know at
+present. As in the Middle Ages, a spiritual power will rule, but it
+will not be imposed from without or above, it will be a creation from
+within. The competition of all will be like that of the best in the
+time of the Renaissance, but it will not be a competition for
+conventional values but for the furthering of life. The country will
+become, as it was in former days, a generous giver, not, however, from
+the lofty eminence of a class set apart, but out of the whole strength
+of the people.
+
+Again, for the first time, the convinced and conscious will of a
+people will be seen to direct itself to a common and recognized goal.
+This is a fact of immeasurable significance, it implies the exercise
+of forces which we only discern on the rare mountain-peaks of history,
+and of which the last example was the French Revolution.
+
+But those dangers of which we have spoken, that hell of a mechanical
+socialism, of institutions and arrangements without sentiment or
+spirit, are done away with, for production has ceased to be merely
+material and formal, it has acquired absolute value and substance.
+Spirit is the only end that sanctifies all means; and it sanctifies
+not by justifying them but by purifying them.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 31: Vergeistigt werden. It is difficult to render this word
+in the sense in which Rathenau uses it; 'intellectualized' does not
+say enough, and 'spiritualized' says a little too much.]
+
+[Footnote 32: Assuming that the highest output is reached in the
+particular instance which of course will not be the case with every
+worker whether in the mechanical or intellectual sphere. The author
+appears to be referring to amount, not quality, of output, as the
+latter would be covered by the second clause, relating to grade of
+culture (Bildungsstufe).]
+
+[Footnote 33: Referring to the shortening of military service which
+used to be accorded to recruits of a certain educational standard.]
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+
+As the kinsfolk of a dying man comfort themselves in the death-chamber
+with every little droop in the curve of temperature, although they
+know in their hearts that the hour has come, so our critics flatter
+themselves with the idea that in the end all will come right, if not
+by itself at least with trifling exertion. But it is not so: except by
+the greatest exertion nothing will come right. Our lake-city of
+economics and social order is ripe for collapse, for the piles on
+which it is built are decayed. It is true that it still stands, and
+will be standing for an hour or so, and life goes on in it very much
+as in the days when it was sound. We can choose either to leave it
+alone, and await the downfall of the city, among whose ruins life will
+never bloom again, or we can begin the underpinning of the tottering
+edifice, a process which will last for decades, which will allow no
+peace to any of us, which will be toilsome and dangerous, and will end
+almost imperceptibly, when the ancient city has been transformed into
+the new.
+
+Let us have no doubt about it: something tremendous and unprecedented
+has to be accomplished here. Does any thinking man believe that when
+the social order of the world has collapsed, when a country of the
+importance of Germany has lost the very basis of its existence, when
+the development of centuries is broken off, its faculties and its
+traditions emptied of value and repudiated--does any man really
+believe that by means of certain clauses in a Constitution a few
+confiscations, socializations and rises in wages, a nation of sixty
+millions can be endowed with a new historical reason for existence?
+Why is not the negro republic of Liberia ahead of all of us?
+
+Our character is weak on the side of will, and our former lords say
+that we are good for nothing except under strict discipline
+administered by dynasts and hereditary nobles. If that is true, it is
+all over with us; unless some dictator shall take pity on us and give
+us a modest place among the nations with a great past and a small
+future. If we are worthy of our name we must be born again of the
+Spirit. Merely to conceive this is in itself an achievement for a
+people; to carry it out, to embody the conception in a new order of
+society, is at once a test and an achievement.
+
+Our social ethics must take up a new position. Hitherto--stripping off
+the usual rhetorical phrases--it has taken its stand on two effective
+and really driving principles, those of Duty and of Success; two
+side-views of Individualism. All else, including love of one's
+neighbour, sense of solidarity, faith, spiritual cultivation, feeling
+for Nature, was (apart from a few lofty spirits) merely subsidiary;
+means to an end, convention or falsehood. There were few whose
+careers were not influenced by these estimates; the majority of the
+upper classes was wholly under their dominion.
+
+The two goals of our wishes, to have something and to be something,
+were expressed by the whole outward aspect of society. The great
+object was not to be counted as a Tom, Dick or Harry, one who had
+less, or was less, than others. There were grades of being, grades of
+human being: it was possible to be something, to be much, to be
+little, or to be nothing at all. From the white collar to the pearl
+necklace, from the good nursery to the saloon car, from the
+watch-ribbon to the sword-belt, from the place at the ordinary to the
+title of Excellency, everything was a proof of what one had, or was,
+or believed oneself to be. If one did not know a man one must not
+speak to him; if one knew him, one might borrow a hundred marks from
+him, but one must not ask him for a penny. Whoever had wealth
+displayed it in order to be admired; whoever had a social position
+displayed his unapproachability and the weight of his dignity, as, for
+instance, when with an absent look and lost in the burden of his own
+existence he entered a dining-hall. From inferiors one demanded a
+degrading attitude and forms of speech, and presented to them a face
+of stone; towards those in higher position one came to life and
+displayed an attentive civility. It was--or shall we say
+is?--permissible to lavish in an hour the monthly income of a poor
+family. "One had it to spend" and "what business was it of theirs?" In
+the lower ranks there was much of genuine revolt against these abuses
+and also much envy and malice, much open imitation, and much of secret
+admiration. Every silly craze was cheapened in hideous imitations, the
+suburb and the village made a display which in quality, indeed, fell
+below the model, but in quantity not at all.
+
+It may be said that these were excrescences or city fashions; that one
+must not generalize. These are empty phrases. To understand the spirit
+of a society it is not hermits that one must study. And, moreover, let
+any one ask himself whether this society was really based on the idea
+of solidarity and human friendliness or upon unscrupulous personal
+interests and exploitation, on shows and shams, on the demand for
+service and the claim to command. If anything can explain the
+eagerness with which we Germans flung ourselves into a war whose
+origins we did not know and did not want to know, then besides the
+conscious objects, advantage, rehabilitation, and renown, we must also
+take into account the obscure impulse of the national conscience which
+in the midst of evil individualism and of personal and class egoism
+yearned for the sense of solidarity and fusion.
+
+Is it objected that all this lies deeply rooted in human nature, that
+it has been there from time immemorial, and it is impossible to alter
+it at one stroke? Pedantic drivel! Many things lie deep in human
+nature, and it depends on which of these the will chooses to develop.
+And who talked of altering things at one stroke? Our judgment of
+values is to be transformed, and if human nature never changed, much
+that now flaunts itself in the sunshine would be creeping in the
+shade. This transformation of judgment is a matter of recognizing
+things for what they are. When pomp, extravagance, exclusiveness,
+frivolity and fastness, greed, place-hunting and vulgar envy are
+looked on with the same eyes as aberrations in other provinces of
+life, then we shall not indeed have abolished all vice, but the
+atmosphere will be purified. Look at our sturdy Socialists of the
+November days[34] and proselytes of every description: you can see
+that the acquisition of a new judgment of values may be the affair of
+an hour! And for that reason one must not criticize them too
+closely--unless they try to make a profit out of their conversion.
+
+All social judgments presuppose a system of recognized values. The
+values of Christian ethics have never penetrated deeply into the
+collective judgment of mankind; even in the mediæval bloom of
+Christian, or rather of ecclesiastical, culture the moral conceptions
+of Christianity remained the possession of a few chosen spirits and
+communities; society in general accepted the mythical element, did
+homage to the hierarchy, and remained ethically pagan, the upper
+classes being guided by a code of honour resting on the worship of
+courage. The Churches never made any serious effort to shape an
+ethical code; they were preoccupied with the teaching of dogmas of
+faith which carried them ever farther and farther from the groundwork
+of the Gospels, and they devoted whatever surplus energies they had to
+politics, and to accommodations with the ruling powers of the world.
+
+The cult of courage imposed on and exercised by the ruling classes,
+and symbolically imaged in their code of honour, took an effective
+shape in the banning of cowardice and of cowardly crime. So far as
+positive values go, the ethics of nobility degenerated into smartness,
+the claim for "satisfaction" and the exclusiveness of rank; a Prussian
+and Kantian abstraction, the conception of duty, a conception at
+bottom unproved and incapable of generating conviction, became a rule
+of life, made effective by training and control. The ruling powers and
+their controls have given way, and their dry brittleness is revealed.
+
+We have not succeeded in finding a substitute for social ethics in an
+idealized type of national character. The imagination of the Western
+nations, like those of antiquity, has shaped ideal types which they
+believe or would wish themselves to resemble; they know what they mean
+by "esprit gaulois," or "English character," or "American Democracy,"
+while, in accordance with the problematic character of our being, we
+Germans, except for the statuesque heroes of legendary times, or
+certain historic but inimitable figures, have conceived or poetically
+created no character of which we can say that it embodies the
+collective spirit of Germany.
+
+The super-ethical doctrine of the being, the growth and the empire of
+the soul has been laid down by us, but there are as yet few into whose
+consciousness it has penetrated; the transformation of thought and
+feeling which must proceed from it will not lay hold of the masses
+directly, but will filter continually from one social stratum to
+another.
+
+The recognized values of social judgment! It sounds so abstract, so
+remote from practice, that one might well believe we were landed again
+in the cloudland of festal oratory and the emotions of the leading
+article. The voluntary recognition of an invisible authority! And this
+after we have shattered the visible, and are living in the midst of
+intellectual anarchy and moral Nihilism! And yet moral valuations,
+simple, binding, and on the level of social judgment, are near enough
+to be within our grasp.
+
+Are not all the four quarters of the world to-day talking about
+Democracy? Have not we ourselves got tired of this word, forbidden
+till a year ago--tired, even in circles where the modest word
+"Liberal" was never pronounced without a frown? And what does
+Democracy mean? Do we take it in the merely negative sense, that one
+is no longer obliged to put up with things? Or in the meagre sense,
+that responsibility goes by favour, and that the majority must decide?
+Or the dubious sense, that we are yearning to make our way through a
+sham Socialism to the Dollar Republic?
+
+It is not the form of government, it is the form of society, that
+determines the spirit of a land. There is no democratic form of
+society, for democracy can be in league with capitalism, with
+socialism, or even with the class of clubs and castes. The unspoken
+fundamental conception which gives significance and stability both to
+the forms of a democratic constitution and to those of an organic
+society is called Solidarity--that is to say, cohesion and the sense
+of community. Solidarity means that each man does not come first in
+his own eyes, but before God and State and himself each man must stand
+and be answerable for all, and all for each.
+
+In this sense of solidarity the dominion of the majority over the
+minority is not an object to be striven for but an evil to be avoided;
+the true object of a solid democracy is the dominion of a people over
+itself, not by reckoning up the relative strength of its various
+interests, but by virtue of the spirit and of the will which it sets
+free. In this sense of solidarity no society can be based on
+hereditary monopolies either of capital or of cultivation; nor can it
+be delivered over to the terrorism of vocations and unions which,
+under the leaderships of shouters, claim the right whenever they
+please, to strangle indispensable industries; nor can it be based on
+demagogic flattery of excitable mobs. Every born man must from his
+cradle onwards have the same right to existence; he must be sheltered
+and fostered as he grows up, and be free to choose his lot. Every
+occupation must be open to him, except that he must not encroach on
+the sphere of another man's liberty. The standard of his activity is
+not to be fixed by birth or privilege or force or cunning or the glib
+tongue, but again, by spirit and by will.
+
+To-day, while cultivation of the spirit is still a class-monopoly, it
+cannot form any standard of creative capacity. And yet it has been
+demonstrated that so powerful is the passion for culture in a spirit
+which is in any degree qualified for it, that even to-day it is
+capable, by self-education, of surmounting some of the artificial
+barriers. There was not, to my knowledge, any illiterate among the
+Prussian or German Ministers of the new era, and the one of them who
+excused his deficiencies of language with the class-monopoly of
+education was in the wrong, for any man of normal capacity might in
+ten years' practice of popular oratory have learned the elements of
+syntax.
+
+When access to the cultivation of the German spirit has become a
+common right of the whole people, Culture will become, if not the sign
+at least the presupposition of creative activity. The proof of
+capacity will then cease to be settled either between agitators and
+the masses, or in the dimness of privileged chanceries, but in the
+productive competition of men of high intellectual endowment.
+
+Society will not be divided by classes and castes, it will not be
+graded according to pedigree or possessions, it will not be ruled by
+separate interests; by ideas or by the masses; it will be an ordered
+body--ordered by spirit, by will, by service and responsibility.
+
+Any one who does not accept this self-created and self-renewing order,
+and who at the same time rejects the old, is simply working for the
+dominion of force and chance. A society can no more remain permanently
+without order than the staff of a factory or the crew of a ship. Only
+instead of an organic order we may have an accidental and arbitrary,
+an order of the personal type, springing from the dexterity shown in
+some favourable moment, maintaining itself by force, and seeking to
+perpetuate itself in some form of hereditary oligarchy.
+
+An order of the priestly and hierarchical type is no longer thinkable
+to-day, nor can one of the peasant type come into question in a land
+of urban industry. Whoever wishes to see an organic self-determining
+and self-regenerating order of society, has therefore to choose
+between the military order, resting upon disciplined bodily capacity,
+or the mercantile and capitalist order which rests upon business-sense
+and egoistic alertness, or the demagogic order which rests upon the
+rhetorical domination of the masses, and does not last long as it soon
+turns to violence and oligarchy, or finally the order of culture,
+resting upon spirit, character, and education.
+
+This last is not merely the only suitable one for us and the only one
+which is worthy of our past; it will also in time become the general
+order of society prevailing over all the world. In the vision of this
+order we recognize the mission that Prussia neglected, though it lay
+within its grasp for a hundred years; what it neglected and the rock
+on which it foundered.
+
+The greatness of Prussian policy since 1713 lay in its premonition and
+appreciation of the principle of mechanism even before it became
+common to all the world. Organization and improvement, the war machine
+and money, science, practicality and conscientiousness--all this is
+clearly mechanization seen from the political side.
+
+The early application of these principles was a stroke of genius far
+in advance of the then condition of the world. Seen from this
+standpoint, all the rest of the continental world, not yet mechanized,
+and burdened with the relics of mediævalism, Cæsarism and clericalism,
+seemed torpid and lost in illusions: arbitrary, inaccurate and
+slovenly. With short interruptions this Prusso-central point of view
+was maintained until the middle of the World-War; and not quite
+unjustly, for Prussia remained in every respect ahead of other powers
+in the department of mechanization.
+
+For a hundred years the Prussian principles had a monopoly of success;
+elsewhere they were scarcely understood and much less imitated. Then
+came Napoleon.
+
+He took over the mechanistic principle and handled it as never a man
+had done before; he became the mechanizer of the world. At the same
+time he was something mightier than that: he was the heir of the
+French idea of spiritual and popular liberty.
+
+Prussia fell, and would have fallen, even if its mechanism had not
+grown rusty. Its leaders learnt their lessons from France and England,
+they set on foot a liberation of the people by departmental authority
+and a liberation of the spirit by the people; they put new life into
+the mechanism, and they conquered with the help of England as we have
+lately seen France conquer with the help of America.
+
+But here came a parting of the ways. It was possible to pursue either
+the way of mechanization or that of the liberation of the spirit.
+Prussia did neither; it stood still. In the place of the liberation of
+the spirit came the reaction; in the place of mechanization came the
+bureaucracy. On the rest of the Continent, too, the movement for
+political mechanization was stifled, the force that stifled it being
+the uprising economic movement.
+
+Bismarck was aware of the untried forces that lay in the system of
+political mechanization. The world, as we looked at it from our
+Prussian window, seemed as loose and slovenly as ever, and it was so.
+Once again, with a mighty effort, the Prussian mechanism was revived
+and the movement of the bourgeoisie towards liberty and the life of
+the spirit was repressed. This was called "realism" in politics, and
+the estimate was a just one. There was no progress to be made with
+professional Liberalism; but with Krupp and Roon one organized
+victories. As in Frederick's time the slovenly Continent had to give
+way, Prussia mounted to the climax of her fortunes, and won Germany.
+
+And again there was a parting of the ways; but this time there was no
+one to stand for civic and spiritual freedom. People believed they had
+all they wanted of it; democracy was discredited and broken, the
+professors were political realists, success followed the side of
+mechanization, which was rightly supposed to be linked with the
+dynasty, and mechanization in the economic sphere drew to its side the
+hope of gain.
+
+Bismarck died in the midst of anxieties, but to the end he had no
+scruples. The two systems of mechanization were at their zenith, and
+the other countries looked, in political affairs, as slovenly as ever.
+One was wearing itself out in parliamentary conflicts, another had no
+battle-cruisers, another was lacking in cannon, or in recruits, or in
+railways, or in finances; the trains never came in up to time,
+everywhere one found public opinion or the Press interfering in
+process of law or in the administration, everywhere there were
+scandals; in Prussian Germany alone was everything up to the mark.
+
+Only one thing was overlooked. The mechanization of economics had
+become a common possession for everybody. Starting from this and with
+the methods and experiences attached to it, it was possible also for
+other countries, if necessary, to mechanize their politics or, as we
+say now, to militarize them. And this could be done with even more
+life and vigour than in Prussia, whose organization was there
+believed to be inimitable and where the principle of mechanism was, as
+it were, stored up in tins and in some places was obviously getting
+mouldy. In the matter of Freedom, however, the other peoples were
+ahead of us, and to the political isolation of Prussia spiritual
+isolation was now added.
+
+In the encircling fog which prevailed on economic developments there
+was not a single statesman who recognized that Prussian principles had
+ceased to be a monopoly, or an advantage, not to mention a conception
+of genius. This lack of perception was the political cause of the war.
+Instead of renewing ourselves inwardly through freedom and the spirit,
+and carrying on a defensive policy as quietly, discreetly, and
+inconspicuously as possible, we took to arming and hurrahing. Worse
+than any playing of false notes was the mistake we made in key and in
+tempo: D major, _Allegro_, _Marcia_, _Fortissimo_, with cymbals and
+trumpets!
+
+To-day we have no longer a choice before us, only a decision. The
+period of mechanical Prussianization is over for us, the period of the
+mechanical policy of Force is over for all the world, although the
+heliographs of Versailles seem to reflect it high above the horizon.
+It is not a capitalistic Peace of God as imagined by the international
+police which has now begun; it is the social epoch. In this epoch the
+people will live and will range themselves according to the strength
+of the ideas which they stand for.
+
+It is not enough for us to become Germans instead of Prussians; not
+even if, as it were to be desired, we should succeed in rescuing from
+the collapse of Prussia her genuine virtues of practicality, order and
+duty. It is not enough to brew some soulless mixture out of the
+worn-out methods of the Western bourgeoisie and the unripe attempts of
+Eastern revolutionaries. It is not enough--no, it will lead us to
+destruction quicker than any one believes--to blunder along with the
+disgusting bickerings of interests and the complacent narrowness of
+officialism, talking one day of the rate of exchange, another of our
+debts, and the next of the food question, plugging one hole with the
+stopping of another and lying down at night with a sigh of relief:
+Well, something's got done; all will come right.
+
+No, unthinking creatures that you are; nothing will come right until
+you drop your insincere chatter, your haggling, your agitating and
+compromising, and begin to think. Here is a people that has lost the
+basis of its existence, because, in its blind faith in authority, it
+staked that existence on prosperity and power; and both are gone. Do
+you want to stake _our_ existence, on ships, soldiers, mines,
+trade-connexions, which we no longer possess, or upon the soil, of
+which we have not enough, or upon our broken will to work? Are we to
+be the labour-serfs and the serfage stud-farm of the world? Only on
+Thoughts and Ideals can our existence be staked. Where is your
+thought? Where is the thought of Germany?
+
+We can and must live only by becoming what we were designed to be,
+what we were about to be, what we failed to become: a people of the
+Spirit, the Spirit among the peoples of mankind. That is the thought
+of Germany.
+
+This thought is shaping the New Society--the society of the spirit and
+the cultivation of the spirit, the only one which can hold its ground
+in the new epoch, and which fulfils it.
+
+This is why we have been endowed with a character whose will is weak
+in external things and strong in inward responsibility; why depth and
+understanding, practicality and uprightness, many-sidedness and
+individuality, power of work and invention, imagination and aspiration
+have been bestowed upon us, in order that we may fulfil these things.
+For what do these qualities, as a whole, betoken? Not the conqueror,
+not the statesman, not the worldling, and not the man of business; it
+is a narrow and trivial misuse of all faculty for us to pretend to
+represent these types among the nations. They betoken the labourers of
+the spirit; and far as we are from being a nation of thinkers and
+poets, it is nevertheless our right and our high calling to be a
+thinking nation among the nations.
+
+But on what, you may ask with scorn, is this thinking nation to live?
+With all its wisdom, will it not be reduced to beggary and starvation?
+
+No--it will live. That people which amid a century of world-revolution
+is able to form for itself a stable, well-balanced, ordered and highly
+developed form of society will be one that works and produces. All
+around there will be quarrelling and conflict, there will be little
+work and little production. For the next decade the question will be,
+not where is the demand but where is the supply?
+
+The countries are laid waste, as Germany was after the Thirty Years'
+War; only we do not as yet recognize it, so long as the fever lasts we
+do not notice the decline.
+
+Production, thought-out and penetrated with spirit, on the part of a
+highly developed society, and combined with labour-fellowship, is more
+than valuable production or cheap production; it is something
+exemplary and essential. And this applies not only to production
+itself but to the methods of production, to the technique, the
+schooling, the organization, the manner of thinking.
+
+It is a petty thing to say that we were destroyed out of envy. Why did
+not envy destroy America and England? The world regarded us at once
+with admiration and with repulsion; with admiration for our systematic
+and laborious ways, with repulsion for our tradesman-like
+obtrusiveness, the brusque and dangerous character of our leadership
+and the ostentatious servility with which we endured it. If it had
+been possible anywhere outside of our naked, mercantile and national
+egoism to discover a German idea, it would have been respected.
+
+The German idea of cultivation of the spirit will win something for us
+which we have not known for a century, and the scope of which we
+cannot yet measure; people will freely appreciate us, they will
+further us and follow us on our way. We have no idea what it means for
+a people to have these sympathetic forces at its side, as France had
+in its creation of forms, England and America in civilization and
+democracy, Russia in Slavonic orthodoxy and the neutral States in
+their internationalism.
+
+There is no fear: we shall live, and more than live. For the first
+time for centuries we shall again be conscious of a mission, and
+around all our internal oppositions will be twined a bond which will
+be something more than a bond of interest.
+
+The goal of the world-revolution upon which we have now entered means
+in its material aspect the melting of all strata of society into one.
+In its transcendental aspect it means redemption: redemption of the
+lower strata to freedom and to the spirit. No one can redeem himself
+but every one can redeem another. Class for class, man for man: thus
+is a people redeemed. Yet in each case there must be readiness and in
+each there must be good-will.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 34: 1918, when the revolution in Germany broke out at Kiel.]
+
+                                THE END
+
+
+
+
+                         THE EUROPEAN LIBRARY
+
+                       Edited by J. E. SPINGARN
+
+
+This series is intended to introduce foreign authors whose works are
+not accessible in English, and in general to keep Americans in touch
+with the intellectual and spiritual ferment of the continent of
+Europe. No attempt will be made to give what Americans miscall "the
+best books," if by this is meant conformity to some high and illusory
+standard of past greatness; any twentieth-century book which displays
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+
+     "The first organized effort to bring into English a series
+     of the really significant figures in contemporary European
+     literature.... An undertaking as creditable and as ambitious
+     as any of its kind on the other side of the Atlantic."--_New
+     York Evening Post._
+
+THE WORLD'S ILLUSION. By J. WASSERMANN. Translated by Ludwig Lewisohn.
+Two volumes. (Second printing.)
+
+One of the most remarkable creative works of our time, revolving about
+the experiences of a man who sums up the wealth and culture of our age
+yet finds them wanting. The first volume depicts the life of the upper
+classes of European society, the second is a very Inferno of the
+Slums; and the whole mirrors, with extraordinary insight, the beauty
+and sorrow, the power and weakness of our social and spiritual world.
+"A human comedy in the great sense, which no modern can afford not to
+hear."--H. W. Boynton, in the _Weekly Review_.
+
+
+PEOPLE. By PIERRE HAMP. Translated by James Whitall. With an
+Introduction by Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant.
+
+Introducing one of the most significant writers of France, himself a
+working man, who in these stories of the French underworld expresses
+the new self-consciousness of the worker's outlook.
+
+
+THE NEW SOCIETY. By WALTER RATHENAU. Translated by Arthur Windham.
+
+One of Germany's most influential thinkers and men of action presents
+his vision of the new society emerging out of the War.
+
+
+DECADENCE AND OTHER ESSAYS ON THE CULTURE OF IDEAS. By REMY DE
+GOURMONT. Translated by William Aspenwall Bradley.
+
+The first authorized version of the critical work of one of the great
+aesthetic thinkers of France.
+
+
+                           IN PREPARATION
+
+THE PATRIOT. By HEINRICH MANN. Translated by Ernest A. Boyd.
+
+The career of a typical product of militarism, in school, university,
+business, patriotism, and love, told with a biting incisiveness and
+irony.
+
+
+THE REFORM OF EDUCATION. By GIOVANNI GENTILE. With an Introduction by
+BENEDETTO CROCE. Translated by Dino Bigongiari.
+
+A new interpretation of the meaning of education, by one who shares
+with Croce the leadership of Italian thought to-day.
+
+
+A POET'S LOVES: FROM THE UNPUBLISHED MANUSCRIPTS OF VICTOR HUGO. By
+LOUIS BARTHOU. Translated by Daniel Créhange Rosenthal.
+
+A striking, not to say sensational, revelation of the intimate private
+life of a great poet, by an ex-Premier of France.
+
+
+                   HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY
+                   Publishers         New York
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The New Society, by Walther Rathenau
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+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The New Society, by Walther Rathenau
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The New Society
+
+Author: Walther Rathenau
+
+Translator: Arthur Windham
+
+Release Date: March 29, 2007 [EBook #20936]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE NEW SOCIETY ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Markus Brenner, Irma Špehar and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
+file made using scans of public domain works at the
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+</pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+<h2>THE</h2>
+
+<h1>NEW SOCIETY</h1>
+
+<h4>BY</h4>
+
+<h2>WALTHER RATHENAU</h2>
+
+<p class="translation">AUTHORIZED TRANSLATION BY</p>
+<h3> ARTHUR WINDHAM</h3>
+
+<p class="publisher">NEW YORK<br /> HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY<br /> 1921</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_v" id="Page_v">[v]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2><a name="PREFACE" id="PREFACE"></a>PREFACE</h2>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Walther Rathenau</span>, author of <i>Die neue Gesellschaft</i> and other studies
+of economic and social conditions in modern Germany, was born in 1867.
+His father, Emil Rathenau, was one of the most distinguished figures
+in the great era of German industrial development, and his son was
+brought up in the atmosphere of hard work, of enterprise, and of
+public affairs. After his school days at a <i>Gymnasium</i>, or classical
+school, he studied mathematics, physics and chemistry at the
+Universities of Berlin and of Strassburg, taking his degree at the age
+of twenty-two. Certain discoveries made by him in chemistry and
+electrolysis led to the establishment of independent manufacturing works,
+which he controlled with success, and eventually to his connexion with
+the world-famous A.E.G.&mdash;<i>Allgemeine Electrizit&auml;tsgesellschaft</i>&mdash;at
+the head of which he now stands. During the war he scored a very
+remarkable and exceptional success as controller of the organization
+for the supply of raw materials. He is thus not merely a scholar and
+thinker, but one who has lived and more than held his own in the thick
+of commercial and industrial life, and who knows by actual experience
+the subject-matter with which he deals.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_vi" id="Page_vi">[vi]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The present study, with its wide outlook and its resolute
+determination to see facts as they are, should have much value for all
+students of latter-day politics and economics in Europe; for though
+Rathenau is mainly concerned with conditions in his own land the same
+conditions affect all countries to a greater or less degree, and he
+deals with general principles of human psychology and of economic law
+which prevail everywhere in the world. It is not too much to say that
+"The New Society" constitutes a landmark in the history of economic
+and social thought, and contains matter for discussion, for sifting,
+for experiment and for propaganda which should occupy serious thinkers
+and reformers for many a day to come. His suggestions and conclusions
+may not be all accepted, or all acceptable, but few will deny that
+they constitute a distinct advance in the effort to bring serious and
+disinterested thought to the solution of our social problems, and in
+this conviction we offer the present complete and authorized
+translation to English readers.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2><a name="THE_NEW_SOCIETY" id="THE_NEW_SOCIETY"></a>THE NEW SOCIETY<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[7]</a></span></h2>
+
+
+<h2>I</h2>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Is</span> there any sign or criterion by which we can tell that a human
+society has been completely socialized?</p>
+
+<p>There is one and one only: it is when no one can have an income
+without working for it.</p>
+
+<p>That is the sign of Socialism; but it is not the goal. In itself it is
+not decisive. If every one had enough to live on, it would not matter
+for what he received money or goods, or even whether he got them for
+nothing. And relics of the system of income which is not worked for
+will always remain&mdash;for instance, provision for old age.</p>
+
+<p>The goal is not any kind of division of income or allotment of
+property. Nor is it equality, reduction of toil, or increase of the
+enjoyment of life. It is the abolition of the proletarian condition;
+abolition of the lifelong hereditary serfage, the nameless hereditary
+servitude, of one of the two peoples who are called by the same name;
+the annulment of the hereditary twofold stratification of society, the
+abolition of the scandalous enslavement of brother by brother, of that
+Western abuse which is the basis of our civilization as<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[8]</a></span> slavery was
+of the antique, and which vitiates all our deeds, all our creations,
+all our joys.</p>
+
+<p>Nor is even this the final goal&mdash;no economy, no society can talk of a
+final goal&mdash;the only full and final object of all endeavour upon earth
+is the development of the human soul. A final goal, however, points
+out the direction, though not the path, of politics.</p>
+
+<p>The political object which I have described as the abolition of the
+proletarian condition may, as I have shown in <i>Things that are to
+Come</i>,<a name="FNanchor_1_1" id="FNanchor_1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a> be closely approached by a suitable policy in regard to
+property and education; above all, by a limitation of the right of
+inheritance. Of socialization in the strict sense there is, for this
+purpose, no need. Yet a far-reaching policy of socialization&mdash;and I do
+not here refer to a mere mechanical nationalization of the means of
+production but to a radical economic and social resettlement&mdash;is
+necessary and urgent, because it awakens and trains responsibilities,
+and because it withdraws from the sluggish hands of the governing
+classes the determination of time and of method, and places it in the
+hands that have a better title, those of the whole commonalty, which,
+at present, stands helpless through sheer democracy. For only in the
+hands of a political people does democracy mean the rule of the
+people; in those of an untrained and unpolitical people it becomes
+merely an affair of debating societies and philistine chatter at the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[9]</a></span>inn ordinary. The symbol of German bourgeois democracy is the tavern;
+thence enlightenment is spread and there judgments are formed; it is
+the meeting place of political associations, the forum of their
+orators, the polling-booth for elections.</p>
+
+<p>But the sign that this far-reaching socialization has been actually
+carried out is the cessation of all income without work. I say the
+sign, but not the sole postulate; for we must postulate a complete and
+genuine democratization of the State and public economy, and a system
+of education equally accessible to all: only then can we say that the
+monopoly of class and culture has been smashed. But the cessation of
+the workless income will show the downfall of the last of
+class-monopolies, that of the Plutocracy.</p>
+
+<p>It is not very easy to imagine what society will be like when these
+objects have been realised, at least if we are thinking not of a brief
+period like the present Russian r&eacute;gime, or a passing phase as in
+Hungary, but an enduring and stationary condition. A dictatorial
+oligarchy, like that of the Bolshevists, does not come into
+consideration here, and the well-meaning Utopias of social romances
+crumble to nothing. They rest, one and all, on the blissfully ignorant
+assumption of a state of popular well-being exaggerated tenfold beyond
+all possibility.</p>
+
+<p>The knowledge of the sort of social condition towards which at present
+we Germans, and then Europe, and finally the other nations are tending
+in this vertical Migration of the Peoples, will not only<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[10]</a></span> decide for
+each of us his attitude towards the great social question, but our
+whole political position as well. It is quite in keeping with German
+traditions that in fixing our aims and forming our resolves we should
+be guided not by positive but by negative impulses&mdash;not by the effort
+to get something but to get away from it. To this effort, which is
+really a flight, we give the positive name of Socialism, without
+troubling ourselves in the least how things will look&mdash;not in the
+sense of popular watchwords but in actual fact&mdash;when we have got what
+we are seeking.</p>
+
+<p>This is not merely a case of lack of imagination; it is that we
+Germans have, properly speaking, no understanding of political
+tendencies. We are more or less educated in business, in science, in
+thought, but in politics we are about on the same level as the East
+Slavonic peasantry. At best we know&mdash;and even that not always&mdash;what
+oppresses, vexes and tortures us; we know our grievances, and think we
+have conceived an aim when we simply turn them upside down. Such
+processes of thought as "the police are to blame, the war-conditions
+are to blame, the Prussians are to blame, the Jews are to blame, the
+English are to blame, the priests are to blame, the capitalists are to
+blame"&mdash;all these we quite understand. Just as with the Slavs, if our
+good-nature and two centuries of the love of order did not forbid it,
+our primitive political instincts would find expression in a pogrom in
+the shape of a peasant-war, of a religious war, of witch-trials, or
+Jew-baiting.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[11]</a></span> Our blatant patriotism bore the plainest signs of such a
+temper; half nationalism, half aggression against some bugbear or
+other; never a proud calm, an earnest self-dedication, a struggle for
+a political ideal.</p>
+
+<p>We have now a Republic in Germany: no one seriously desired it. We
+have at last established Parliamentarianism: no one wanted it. We have
+set up a kind of Socialism: no one believed in it. We used to say:
+"The people will live and die for their princes; our last drop of
+blood for the Hohenzollerns"&mdash;no one denied it. "The people mean to be
+ruled by their hereditary lords; they will go through fire for their
+officers; rather death than yield a foot of German soil to the foe."
+Was all this a delusion? By no means; it was sincere enough, only it
+did not go deep. It was the kind of sincerity which depends on not
+knowing enough of the alternative possibilities.</p>
+
+<p>When the alternatives revealed themselves as possible and actual, then
+we all turned republican, even to the cottagers in Pomerania. When the
+military strike had broken down discipline, the officers were
+mishandled; when the war was lost, the fleet disgraced, and the
+homeland defiled, then we began to play and dance.</p>
+
+<p>But was this frivolity? Not at all; it was a childish want of
+political imagination. The Poles, a people not remotely comparable to
+the German in depth of soul and the capacity for training talent, have
+for a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[12]</a></span> century cherished no other thought than that of national unity,
+while we passively resign our territories. No Englishman or Japanese
+or American will ever understand us when we tell him that this
+military discipline of ours, this war-lust, did not represent a
+passion for dominion and aggression, but was merely the docility of a
+childish people which wants nothing, and can imagine nothing, but that
+things should go on as they happen, at the moment, to be.</p>
+
+<p>We Germans know but little of the laws which govern the formation of
+national character. The capacity of a people for profundity is not
+profundity, either of the individual or of the community. It may
+express itself in the masses as mere plasticity and softness of
+spirit. The capacity for collective sagacity and strength of will
+demands from the individual merely a dry intelligence in human
+affairs, and egoism. It would be too much to say that our political
+weakness may be merely the expression of spiritual power, for the
+latter has not proved an obstacle to success in business. Indolence
+and belief in authority have their share in it.</p>
+
+<p>But have we not been the classic land of social democracy, and have we
+not become that of Radicalism? Well, we have been, indeed, and are,
+with our submissiveness to authority and our capacity for discipline,
+the classic land of organized grumbling; and the classic land, too, of
+anti-semitism which deprived us of the very forces we stood most in
+need of&mdash;productive scepticism and the imagination for<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[13]</a></span> concrete
+things. Organized grumbling is not the same thing as political
+creation. A Socialism and Radicalism poorer in ideas than the
+post-Marxian German Socialism has never existed. Half of it was merely
+clerical work, and the other half was agitators' Utopianism of the
+cheapest variety.</p>
+
+<p>Nothing was more significant than the fact that the mighty event of
+the German Revolution was not the result of affection but of
+disaffection. It is not we who liberated ourselves, it was the enemy;
+it was our destruction that set us free. On the day before we asked
+for the armistice, perhaps even on the day before the flight of the
+Kaiser, a pl&eacute;biscite would have yielded an overwhelming majority for
+the monarchy and against Socialism. What I so often said before the
+war came true: "He who trains his children with the rod learns only
+through the rod."</p>
+
+<p>And to-day, when everything is seething and fermenting&mdash;no thanks to
+Socialism for that&mdash;all intellectual work has to be done outside of
+the ranks of social-democracy, which stumbles along on its two
+crutches of "Socialization" and "Soviets."<a name="FNanchor_2_2" id="FNanchor_2_2"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_2" class="fnanchor">[2]</a> Orthodox Socialism is
+still a case of the "lesser evil," what the French call a <i>pis aller</i>.
+"Things are so bad that any change must be for the better." What is to
+make them better we are told in the socialist catechism; but <i>how</i> it
+is to do so, how and what anything is to become, this, the only
+question that matters, is regarded as irrelevant. It is answered by
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[14]</a></span>some halting and insincere stammer about "surplus value" which is to
+make everybody well off&mdash;and which would yield all round, as I have
+elsewhere shown, just twenty-five marks a head. Fifteen millions of
+grown men are pressing forward into a Promised Land revealed through
+the fog of political assemblies and in the thunder of parrot-phrases&mdash;a
+land from which no one will ever bring back a bunch of grapes.</p>
+
+<p>If one would interrogate not the agitators, but their hearers, and
+find out what they instinctively conceive this land to look like, we
+should get the answer, timid and na&iuml;ve but at the same time the
+deepest and shrewdest that it is possible to give&mdash;that it is a land
+where there are no longer any rich.</p>
+
+<p>A most true and truthful reply! And yet a profound error silently
+lurks in it. You imagine, do you not, that in a land where there are
+no more rich people there will also be no more poor? "Why, of course
+not! How can there be poor people when there are no more rich?" And
+yet there will be. In the land where there are no more rich there will
+be <i>only</i> poor, only very poor, people.</p>
+
+<p>Whoever does not know this and is a Socialist, that man is merely one
+of the herd or he is a dupe. He who knows it and conceals it is a
+deceiver. He who knows it, and in spite of that, nay, on account of
+that, is a Socialist, is a man of the future.</p>
+
+<p>Though the crowd be satisfied with some dim feeling that this, anyhow,
+is the tendency of the times and that with this stream one must swim;
+though the more<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[15]</a></span> thoughtful contemplate the evils of the time and
+decide to put up with the <i>pis aller</i>; the responsible thinker is
+under the obligation of investigating the land into which the people
+are being led. We must know what it looks like, where there are no
+rich people and where no one can have an income without working for
+it, we must understand what we call the "new society" so as to be able
+to shape it aright.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[16]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_1" id="Footnote_1_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_1"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> <i>Von Kommenden Dingen</i>, by Walther Rathenau. Berlin. S.
+Fischer.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2_2" id="Footnote_2_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_2"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> Workers' and Soldiers' Councils.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2><a name="II" id="II"></a>II</h2>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The</span> question is not very urgent.</p>
+
+<p>As surely as the hundred years' course of the social World-Revolution
+cannot be arrested, so surely can we prophesy that the process cannot
+maintain all along the line the rapid movement of its beginning. The
+victorious and the defeated countries will have to work out to the end
+the changes and interchanges of their various phases, for in the
+historical developments which we witness to-day, we find mingled
+together the phenomena of organic growth and of disease; already we
+see that the Socialism of the healthy nations is different from that
+of the sick ones. It is in vain that those who are sick with the
+Bolshevist disease dream that they can infect the world.</p>
+
+<p>The small daily and yearly movements in our realm of Central Europe
+cannot be determined beforehand, because they depend upon small,
+accidental, local, and external forces. The great and necessary issues
+of events can be predicted, but it would be folly to discuss their
+accidental flux and reflux. When an unguarded house is filled with
+explosives from the cellar to the roof, then we know that it will one
+day be blown up; but whether this<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[17]</a></span> will happen on a Sunday or a
+Monday, in the morning or in the evening, or whether the left door
+post will be left standing or no, it would be idle to inquire.</p>
+
+<p>From the historical point of view it is of no consequence whether
+Radicalism may make an inroad here and there, or whether here and
+there the forces of reaction and restoration may collect themselves
+for a transitory triumph. The great movement of history, as we always
+find when a catastrophe has worked itself out, grows slower, and this
+retardation in itself looks like reaction. We, who are not accustomed
+to catastrophes, and who did not produce this first one, but rather
+suffered it, we, who easily get sea-sick after every rapid
+movement&mdash;think, for instance, of the former Reichstag&mdash;we shall
+certainly experience, as the first deep wave of the Revolution sinks
+into us, an aristocratic, dynastic, and plutocratic Romanticism, a
+yearning for the colour and glitter of the time of glory, a revolt
+against the spiritless, mechanical philanthrophy of unemployed orators
+of about fourth-form standard intellectually; against the monotonous
+and insincere tirades of paid agitators and their restless disciples;
+against laziness; ignorance, greed, and exaggeration masquerading as
+popular scientific economy; and against the brutal and extortionate
+upthrust from below. And so we shall arrive at the reverse kind of
+folly, an admiration and bad imitation of foreign pride and pomp, an
+arrogant individualism and a hardening of our human feeling. The
+intellectual war profiteers, who are<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[18]</a></span> all for radicalism to-day, will
+soon be wearing cornflowers<a name="FNanchor_3_3" id="FNanchor_3_3"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_3" class="fnanchor">[3]</a> in their button-holes.</p>
+
+<p>For the third time we shall see an illustration of the na&iuml;ve
+shamelessness of the turn-coat. The spiritual process of conversion is
+worth noticing; Paul was converted to be a converter. But the
+scurrying of the intellectual speculator from the position which has
+failed into the position which has won, with the full intention of
+scurrying back again if necessary, and always with the claim to
+instruct other people, is an expression of the alarming fact that life
+has become not an affair of inward conviction, but of getting the
+right tip.</p>
+
+<p>The turn-coat movement began when a shortsighted crowd, incapable of
+judgment, and with their minds clouded with a few cheap phrases,
+expected from a quick and victorious war the strengthening of all the
+elements of Force, and feared to be left stranded. Even the most
+threadbare kind of liberalism appeared to be compromising, they
+clamoured for "shining armour." The most wretched victims in soul and
+body, who were obliged to flee forwards because they could not flee in
+any other direction, were called heroes, and the manliest word in our
+language, a word of which only the freest and the greatest are worthy,
+was degraded. One who has experienced the hate and fury of the
+turn-coats who poured contempt upon every word against the war and the
+"great days," is unable to understand how <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[19]</a></span>a whole people can throw
+its errors overboard without shame and sorrow&mdash;or he understands it
+only too well. At this day we are being mocked and preached at by the
+turn-coats of the second transformation, and to-morrow we shall be
+smiled at by those of the third.</p>
+
+<p>But it does not matter. The moving forces of our epoch do not come
+from business offices nor from the street, the rostrum, the pulpit, or
+the professorial chair. The noisy rush of yesterday, to-day and
+to-morrow is only the furious motion of the outermost circle, the
+centre moves upon its way, quietly as the stars.</p>
+
+<p>We have in our survey to leap over several periods of forward and
+backward movement and we shall earn the thanks of none of them. What
+is too conservative for one will be too revolutionary for another, and
+the &aelig;sthete will scornfully tell us that we have no fibre. When we
+show that what awaits us is no fools' paradise, but the danger of a
+temporary reverse of humanity and culture, then the facile Utopianist
+will shout us down with his two parrot-phrases,<a name="FNanchor_4_4" id="FNanchor_4_4"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_4" class="fnanchor">[4]</a> and when we, out of
+a sense of duty, of harmony with the course of the world and
+confidence in justice at the soul of things, tread the path of danger,
+precipitous though it be, then we shall be scorned by all the
+worshippers of Force and despisers of mankind.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[20]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>But we for our part shall not pander either to the force-worshippers
+or to the masses. We serve no powers that be. Our love goes out to the
+People; but the People are not a crowd at a meeting, nor a sum-total
+of interests, nor are they the newspapers or debating-clubs. The
+People are the waking or sleeping, the leaking, frozen, choked, or
+gushing well of the German spirit. It is with that spirit, in the
+present and in the future, as it runs its course into the sea of
+humanity, that we have here to do.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[21]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_3_3" id="Footnote_3_3"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_3"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> The emblem of the Hohenzollerns.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_4_4" id="Footnote_4_4"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_4"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> The reference, apparently, is to the argument that any
+change must be for the better, and to the reliance on surplus value.
+See pp. 13, 14.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2><a name="III" id="III"></a>III</h2>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The</span> criterion which we have indicated for the socialized society of
+the future is a material one. But is the spiritual condition of an
+epoch to be determined by material arrangements? Is this not a
+confession of faith in materialism?</p>
+
+<p>We are speaking of a criterion, not of a prime moving force. I have no
+desire, however, to avoid going into the material, or rather we should
+say mechanical, interpretation of history. I have done it more than
+once in my larger works, and for the sake of coherence I may repeat it
+in outline here.</p>
+
+<p>The laws which determine individual destinies are reproduced in the
+history of collective movements. A man's career is not prescribed by
+his bodily form, his expression, or his environment; but there is in
+these things a certain connexion and parallelism, for the same laws
+which determine the course of his intellectual and spiritual life
+reflect themselves in bodily and practical shape. Every instant of our
+experience, all circumstances in which we find ourselves, every limb
+that we grow, every accident that happens to us, is an expression or
+product of our character. We are indeed subject to human limitations;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[22]</a></span>
+we are not at liberty to live under water or in another planet; but
+within these wide boundaries each of us can shape his own life. To
+observe a man, his work, his fate, his body and expression, his
+connexions and his marriage, his belongings and his associations, is
+to know the man.</p>
+
+<p>From this point of view all social, economic and political schemes
+become futile, for if man is so sovereign a being there is no need to
+look after him. But these schemes re-acquire a relative importance
+when we consider the average level of man's will-power, as we meet it
+in human experience&mdash;a power which, as a rule, shows itself unable to
+make head against a certain maximum of pressure from external
+circumstances. And again, these schemes are really a part of the
+expression of human will, for through them collective humanity battles
+with its surroundings, its contemporary world, and freely shapes its
+own destinies.</p>
+
+<p>The inner laws of the community harmonize with those of the
+individuals who compose it. The fact that certain national traits of
+will and character are conditioned or even enforced by poverty or
+wealth, soil and climate, an inland or maritime position, tends to
+obscure the fact that these external conditions are not really laid on
+the people but have been willed by themselves. A people <i>wills</i> to
+have a nomadic life, or wills to have a sea-coast, or wills
+agriculture, or war; and has the power, if its will be strong enough,
+to obtain its desire, or failing that to break up and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[23]</a></span> perish. It is
+the same will and character which decides for well-being and culture,
+or indolence and dependence, or labour and spiritual development. The
+Venetians did not have architecture and painting bestowed upon them
+because they happened to have become rich, nor the English sea-power
+because they happened to live on an island: no, the Venetians willed
+freedom, power and art, and the Anglo-Saxons willed the sea.</p>
+
+<p>There is a grain of truth in the popular political belief that war
+embodies a judgment of God. At any rate character is judged by it; not
+indeed in the sense of popular politics, that one can "hold out" in a
+hopeless position, but because all the history that went before the
+war, the capacity or incapacity of politics and leadership is a
+question of character&mdash;and with us it was a question of indolence, of
+political apathy, of class-rule, philistinish conceit and greed of
+gain. Nowhere was this conception of the judgment of God so
+blasphemously exaggerated as with us Germans, when the lord of our
+armed hosts, at the demand of the barracks greedy for power, of the
+tavern-benches, the state-bureaus and the debating societies was
+summoned, and charged with the duty, forsooth, of chastising
+England&mdash;England, which they only knew out of newspaper reports!
+To-day this exaggeration is being paid for in humiliation, for God did
+not prove controllable, and His na&iuml;ve blasphemers must silently and
+with grinding teeth admit that their foes are in the right when they,
+in their turn, appeal<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[24]</a></span> to the same judgment to justify, without limit,
+everything they desire to do.</p>
+
+<p>After these brief observations on the psycho-physical complex, Spirit
+and Destiny, we hope we shall not be misunderstood when for the sake
+of brevity we speak as if the spirit of the new order were determined
+by its material construction, while in reality it incorporates itself
+therein. The structure is the easier to survey, and we therefore make
+it the starting-point of our discussion.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[25]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2><a name="IV" id="IV"></a>IV</h2>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">All</span> civilisations known to us have sprung from peoples which were
+numerous, wealthy and divided into two social strata. They reached
+their climax at the moment when the two strata began to melt into one.</p>
+
+<p>It is not enough, therefore, that a people should be numerous and
+wealthy; it must, with all its wealth and its power, contain a large
+proportion of poor and even oppressed and enslaved subjects. If it has
+not got these, it must master and make use of other foreign cultures
+as a substitute. That is what Rome did; it is what America is doing.</p>
+
+<p>It is terrible, but comprehensible. For up to this point the
+unconscious processes of Nature, the law of mutual strife, has
+prevailed. So far, collective organizations have been beasts of prey;
+only now are they about to cross the boundaries of the human order.</p>
+
+<p>Comprehensible and explicable. For all creations of culture hold
+together; one cannot pursue the cheaper varieties while renouncing the
+more costly. There is no cheap culture. In their totality they demand
+outlay, the most tremendous outlay known<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[26]</a></span> to history, the only outlay
+by which human toil is recompensed, over and above the supply of
+absolute necessaries.</p>
+
+<p>The creations of civilisation, like all things living and dead, follow
+on each other&mdash;plants, men, beasts and utensils have their sequence
+generation after generation. Men must paint and look at pictures for
+ten thousand years before a new picture comes into existence. Our
+poetry and our research are the fruit of thousands of years. This is
+no disparagement to genius in work and thought, genius is at once new,
+ancient and eternal, even as the blossom is a new thing on the old
+stem, and belongs to an eternal type. When we hear that a native in
+Central Africa or New Zealand has produced an oil-painting we know
+that somehow or other he must have got to Paris. When a European
+artist writes or paints in Tahiti, what he produces is not a work of
+Tahitian culture. When civilisation has withered away on some
+sterilized soil, it can only be revived by new soil and foreign seed.</p>
+
+<p>The continuity of culture, even in civilized times, can only, however,
+be maintained by constant outlay, just as in arid districts a
+luxuriant vegetation needs continuous irrigation. The flood of
+Oriental wealth had to pour itself into Italy in order to bring forth
+the bloom of Renaissance art. Thousands of patricians, hundreds of
+temporal and spiritual princes, had to found and to adorn temples and
+palaces, gardens, monuments, pageants, games and household goods in
+order that art and science, schooling, mastership,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[27]</a></span> discipleship and
+tradition might grow up. The worship of foreign culture which
+characterized Germany in the seventeenth and half of the eighteenth
+centuries only meant that our soil was grown too poor to yield a crop
+of its own. The culture of the Middle Ages remained international only
+so long as the population of Europe was too sparse and the
+opportunities of work too scanty to occupy local energies; even in the
+thinly populated, Homeric middle-ages of Greece, the builder and the
+poet were not settled in one place, they were wandering artists. If
+to-day the Republic of Guatemala or Honduras should want a
+senate-house or a railway-station they will probably send to London or
+Paris for an architect.</p>
+
+<p>Even technique in handicraft and industry, that typical art of
+civilization, cannot dispense with a great and continuous outlay on
+training, commissioning and marketing in order to maintain itself.
+Although it has not happened yet, there is no reason why a Serb or a
+Slovak should not make some important discovery if he has been trained
+at a European University and learnt the technical tradition. That will
+not, however, give rise to an independent and enduring Serbian or
+Slovakian technique, even though the costliest Universities and
+laboratories should be established in the country and foreign teachers
+called to teach in them. After all that, one must have a market in the
+country itself; expert purchasers, manufacturers, middle-men, a
+trained army of engineers, craftsmen, masters, workmen and a foreign<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[28]</a></span>
+market as well&mdash;in short, the technical atmosphere&mdash;in order to keep
+up the standard of manufacture and production.</p>
+
+<p>A poor country cannot turn out products of high value for a rich one;
+it has not had the education arising from demand. In products relating
+to sport and to comfort, for instance, England was a model, but in
+France these products were ridiculously misunderstood and imitated
+with silly adornments, while on the other hand French products of
+luxury and art-industry were sought for by all countries. German wares
+were considered to be cheap and nasty, until the land grew rich, and
+brought about the co-operation of its forces of science and technique,
+production and marketing, auxiliary industries and remote profits,
+finance and commerce, education and training, judgment and criticism,
+habits of life and a sense of comparative values.</p>
+
+<p>But human forces need the same nurture, the same outlay and the same
+high training, as institutions and material products. Delicate work
+demands sensitive hands and a sheltered way of life; discovery and
+invention demand leisure and freedom; taste demands training and
+tradition, scientific thinking and artistic conception demand an
+environment with an unbroken continuity of cultivation, thought and
+intelligence. A dying civilisation can live for a while on the
+existing humus of culture, on the existing atmosphere of thought, but
+to create anew these elements of life is beyond its powers.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[29]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Do not let us deceive ourselves, but look the facts in the face! All
+these excellent Canadians, with or without an academic degree, who
+innocently pride themselves on a proletarian absence of prejudice, are
+adoptive children of a plutocratic and aristocratic cultivation. It is
+all the same even if they lay aside their stiff collars and
+eye-glasses; their every word and argument, their forms of thought,
+their range of knowledge, their strongly emphasized intellectuality
+and taste for art and science, their whole handiwork and industry, are
+an inheritance from what they supposed they had cast off and a tribute
+to what they pretend to despise. Genuine radicalism is only to be
+respected when it understands the connexion of things and is not
+afraid of consequences. It must understand&mdash;and I shall make it
+clear&mdash;that its rapid advance will kill culture; and the proper
+conclusion is that it ought to despise culture, not to sponge on it.
+The early Christians abolished all the heathen rubbish and
+abominations, the early Radicals would have hurried, in the first
+instance, to pick out the plums.</p>
+
+<p>Culture and civilization, as we see, demand a continuous and enormous
+outlay; an outlay in leisure, an outlay in working power, an outlay in
+wealth. They need patronage and a market, they need the school, they
+need models, tradition, comparison, judgment, intelligence,
+cultivation, disposition, the right kind of nursery&mdash;an atmosphere.
+One who stands outside it can serve it, often more powerfully<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[30]</a></span> with
+his virgin strength than one who is accustomed to it&mdash;but he must be
+carried along and animated by the breath of the same atmosphere.
+Culture and civilization require a rich soil.</p>
+
+<p>But the richness of the soil is not sufficient; culture must be based
+upon, and increased by, contrast. Wealth must have at its disposal
+great numbers of men who are poor and dependent. How otherwise shall
+the outlay of culture be met? One man must have many at his disposal;
+but how can he, if they are all his equals? The outlay will be large,
+but it must be feasible; how can it, if the labour of thousands is not
+cheap? The few, the exalted, must develop power and splendour, they
+must offer types for imitation: how can they do that without a
+retinue, without spectators, without the herd? A land of well-being,
+that is to say, of equally distributed well-being, remains petty and
+provincial. When a State and its authorities, councils of solid and
+thrifty members of societies for this or that, take over the office of
+a M&aelig;cenas or a Medici, with their proposals, their calculations, their
+objections, their control, then we get things that look like
+war-memorials, waiting-rooms, newspaper-kiosks and drinking-saloons.
+It was not always so? No; but even in the most penurious times it was
+kings who were the patrons.</p>
+
+<p>But if culture is such a poison-flower, if it flourishes only in the
+swamp of poverty and under the sun of riches, it must and ought to be
+destroyed. Our<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[31]</a></span> sentiment will no longer endure the happiness and
+brilliance of the few growing out of the misery of the many; the days
+of the senses are over, and the day of conscience is beginning to
+dawn.</p>
+
+<p>And now a timid and troubled puritanism makes itself heard: Is there
+no middle way? Will not half-measures suffice? No, it will not do; let
+this be said once for all as plainly as possible, you champions of the
+supply of "bare necessities" who talk about "daily bread" and want to
+butter it with the "noblest pleasures of art." It will not do!</p>
+
+<p>No, half-measures will not do, nor quarter-measures. They might, if
+the whole world, the sick, the healthy and the bloated all together
+were of the same mind as ourselves. In Moscow it is said that people
+are expecting the world-revolution every hour, but the world declines
+to oblige. Therefore, if culture and civilization are to remain what
+they were, is there nothing for it but with one wrench to tear the
+poisoned garment from our body? Or&mdash;is there then an "or"? Let us see.
+We have a long way before us. First of all we must know how rich or
+how poor we and the world are going to be, on the day when there will
+be no income without working for it and no rich people any more.</p>
+
+<p>If our economic system made us self-supporting we might arrange
+matters on the model of the Boer Republic which had all it needed, and
+now and then traded a load of ostrich feathers for coffee and hymn
+books. But we, alas! in order to find nourishment<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[32]</a></span> for twenty
+millions<a name="FNanchor_5_5" id="FNanchor_5_5"></a><a href="#Footnote_5_5" class="fnanchor">[5]</a> have to export blood and brains. And if, in order to buy
+phosphates, we offer cotton stockings and night-caps as the highest
+products of our artistic energies, and declare that they are all the
+soundest hand-work&mdash;for in our "daily bread" economy we shall have
+long forgotten how to work such devil's tools as the modern
+knitting-machine&mdash;then people will reply to us: in the first place we
+don't want night-caps, and if we did we can supply them for one-tenth
+of the cost; and our cotton goods will be sent back to us as
+unsaleable.</p>
+
+<p>A world-trade, even of modest dimensions, can only be carried on upon
+the basis of high technical accomplishment, but this height of
+accomplishment cannot be attained on the basis of any penny-wise
+economy. Whoever wills the part must also will the whole, but to this
+whole belongs not merely the conception of a technique, but of a
+civilization, and indeed of a culture. One might as well demand of a
+music-hall orchestra which plays ragtime all the year round that once
+in the year, and once only, on Good Friday, it should pull itself
+together to give an adequate performance of the Passion Music of Bach.</p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[33]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_5_5" id="Footnote_5_5"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5_5"><span class="label">[5]</span></a> By this figure the author seems to be referring to the
+population of the impoverished Germany of the future if the course of
+Socialism proceeds on wrong lines.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2><a name="V" id="V"></a>V</h2>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">For</span> some decades Germany will be one of the poorest of countries. How
+poor she will be does not depend on herself alone, but on the power
+and the will for mischief of others&mdash;who hate us.</p>
+
+<p>However, poverty and wealth are relative terms; Germans are still
+richer on the average than their forefathers; richer than the Romans
+or Greeks. The standard of well-being is set by the best-off of the
+competitors, for he it is who determines the current standard of
+technique and industry, the methods of production, the minimum of
+labour and skill. We cannot, as we have already seen, keep aloof from
+world-competition, for Germany needs cheap goods. We must therefore
+try to keep step so far as we can.</p>
+
+<p>Even if we shut our eyes and take no more account of our debt to
+foreign lands than we do of the war-tribute, we must admit that the
+average standard of well-being in America far surpasses the German.
+Goods are not so dear as with us, and the wages of the skilled worker
+amounts to between seven and ten dollars a day&mdash;more than 100 marks in
+our money; and many artisans drive to their workshops in their own
+automobiles.</p>
+
+<p>If, now, we ask our Radicals how they envisage<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[34]</a></span> the problem of
+competition with such a country, which in one generation will be
+twenty-or thirty-fold as rich as we are, they will blurt out a few
+sentences in which we shall catch the word "Soviet system," "surplus
+value,"<a name="FNanchor_6_6" id="FNanchor_6_6"></a><a href="#Footnote_6_6" class="fnanchor">[6]</a> "world revolution." But in truth the question will never
+occur to them&mdash;it is not ventilated at public meetings.</p>
+
+<p>Among themselves they talk, albeit without much conviction, about
+"surplus value"&mdash;which has nothing whatever to do with the present
+question, and in regard to which it has been proved to them often
+enough that so far as it can be made use of at all, it only means
+about a pound of butter extra per head of the population.</p>
+
+<p>The economic superiority of the Western powers, however, goes on
+growing, inasmuch as to all appearance they are getting to work
+seriously to establish the new economy (which we have buried) in the
+form of State Socialism. A healthy, or what is to-day the same thing,
+a victorious economy, does not leap over any of its stages; it will
+work gradually through the apparently longer, but constant, movement
+from Capitalism to State Socialism and thence to full Socialism; while
+we, it seems, want to take a shortcut, and to miss out the intervening
+stage. And we lose so much time and energy in restless fluctuations
+forward and backward, hither and thither, that this leap in advance
+may fall short.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[35]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>If anything could be more stupid and calamitous than the war itself it
+was the time when it broke out. There was one thing which the big
+capitalism of the world was formed to supply, which it was able to
+supply, and, in fact, was supplying: the thing which not only
+justified capitalism, but showed it to be an absolutely necessary
+stage in the development of a denser population. This was the
+enrichment of the peoples, the rapid, and even anticipatory
+restoration of equilibrium between the growing population and the
+indispensable increase in the means of production; in other words,
+general well-being. The unbroken progress of America, and the almost
+unbroken progress of England will demonstrate that in one, or at most
+two, generations the power of work and the output of mechanism would
+have risen to such a pitch that we could have done anything we liked
+in the direction of lightening human labour and reconciling social
+antagonisms.</p>
+
+<p>Alas, it was in vain! The rapid advance to prosperity of the people of
+Central Europe, who had been accustomed to thrift and economy, went to
+their heads; they fell victims to the poison of capitalism and of
+mechanism; they were unable, like America in its youthful strength, to
+make their new circumstances deepen their sense of responsibility; in
+their greedy desire to store as much as possible of the heavenly manna
+in their private barns they abandoned their destinies to a
+superannuated, outworn feudal class and to aspiring magnates of the
+bourgeoisie;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[36]</a></span> they would not be taught by political catastrophes, and
+at last, in the catastrophe of the war, they lost at once their
+imaginary hopes, their traditional power and the economic basis of
+their existence.</p>
+
+<p>Those who are now pursuing a policy of desperation are unconsciously
+building their hopes on the breakdown which brought them to the top:
+they are avowedly making the hoped-for revolution in the West the
+central point of their system. If the West holds out, they will be
+false prophets; but it will not only hold out, it will in the
+beginning at all events, witness a great and passionate uprising of
+imperialistic and capitalistic tendencies. If there is any one who did
+not understand that a policy based on hopes of other peoples'
+bankruptcy is the most flimsy and frivolous of all policies, he might
+well have learned it from the war.</p>
+
+<p>Germany must forge her own destinies for herself, without side-glances
+at the good or ill fortune of others. Had time only been given us to
+pass naturally from the stage of a prolonged and corrupted childhood
+into that of a manly responsibility, our ultimate recovery would be
+assured. But we have to accomplish in months what ought to be the
+evolution of decades; our national training has left us without
+convictions, we have no eye for the true boundaries of rights, claims
+and responsibilities, and we hesitate as to how far we must or ought
+to go. Unprepared, weakened, impoverished and sick, we are required,
+at the most unlucky moment, to work out a new<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[37]</a></span> and unprecedented order
+of life. Before even the educated classes are capable of forming a
+judgment on the question, the most incapable masses of the rawest
+youth, of the lowest classes of society, are let loose, and sit upon
+the judgment-seat.</p>
+
+<p>It is not only that we have been rich and have become very poor, but
+we were always politically immature, and are so still. If the order of
+Society is to be that of root-and-branch Socialism, it will mean the
+proletarian condition for all of us, and for a long time to come.
+There is no use in flattering ourselves and painting the future better
+than it is; the truth must be spoken with all plainness. If we work
+hard, and under capable guidance, each of us will at most have an
+effective income of 500 marks in pre-war values, or, say, 2000 marks
+for the family. This average will be higher if we proceed on the
+principles of the New Economy,<a name="FNanchor_7_7" id="FNanchor_7_7"></a><a href="#Footnote_7_7" class="fnanchor">[7]</a> but again will be reduced by the
+necessity for allowing extra pay for work of higher value. If to-day
+the average income available is markedly higher than the above, the
+reason is that we are living on our capital; we are living on the
+products of work which ought to be reserved for the maintenance and
+renewal of the means of production; in other words we are exhausting
+the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[38]</a></span>soil and slaughtering our stock. We are also consuming what
+foreign countries give us on credit; in other words, we are living on
+borrowed money.</p>
+
+<p>It is childish lying and deception to act on the tacit assumption that
+thoroughgoing Socialism means something like a garden-city idyll, with
+play-houses, open-air theatres, excursions, picturesque raiment and
+fire-side art. This in itself quite decent ideal of the average
+architect, art-craftsman and art-reformer if expressed in dry figures
+would, "at the lowest estimate" as they say, demand about fivefold the
+capacity for production attainable by the utmost exertions and with a
+ten hours' day <i>before the war</i>&mdash;before the downfall of our economy
+and our exploitation by the enemy.</p>
+
+<p>To place one-third of our working-class in decent, freehold dwellings
+would alone, if the material and means of production sufficed, require
+the whole working-capacity of the country for two years. Even after
+the last manufacturer's villa-residence, the last palace-hotel, have
+long been turned into tenements, the solution of the most urgent part
+of the housing-question will still be an affair of decades. For the
+sake of the last remnant of our self-respect we must finally tear
+asunder that web of economic falsehood, woven out of ignorance, mental
+lethargy, concealment and illusion, which has taken the place of the
+political. Let us see any one attempt to prove that Germany can carry
+on, I do not say a well-off, but even a petty tradesman's kind of
+existence, unless our<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[39]</a></span> means of production can by some stroke of magic
+be multiplied tenfold&mdash;on paper it can be done with ease&mdash;or unless
+the production value (not turnover), which an adult working-man can
+with the utmost exertion bring into being in the course of a year does
+not many times exceed the average value of 2000 marks.</p>
+
+<p>No doubt the young folk of our big cities promise themselves a merry
+time for six weeks when they have got power, the shops, the wardrobes
+and the wine-cellars into their hands. For the leaders, it may last a
+little longer than for the rank-and-file. And then, for those of the
+former who have any sense of honesty, will come a question of
+conscience, which may be delayed by printing paper-money, but cannot
+be solved by any appeal to the people.</p>
+
+<p>If Bolshevism were the contrary to what it is&mdash;if it were a success, a
+thing not absolutely impossible in a peasant-State, we might
+understand the self-assurance of those who, in opposition to our
+forecast, expect everything from the will of the people, the Soviet
+system and the inspirations of the future. We do understand it in the
+case of the drawing-room communists, and the profiteer-extremists who
+are out not for the cause, but for power, and perhaps only for
+material objects.</p>
+
+<p>I know that by these observations I am favouring the cause of those
+sorry dignitaries of a day, the Majority Socialists, but I cannot help
+that. The truth is not false because it favours one party, nor is
+falsehood truth because it harms the other. The<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[40]</a></span> Socialism now in
+power is doing the right thing, although it is doing it out of
+ignorance and helplessness&mdash;it is waiting, and getting steam up. It is
+better to do the right thing out of error than to do the wrong thing
+out of wisdom. Out of error: for besides omitting to do what ought not
+to be done it also omits the things it ought to do&mdash;among others, the
+introduction of the New Economy.<a name="FNanchor_8_8" id="FNanchor_8_8"></a><a href="#Footnote_8_8" class="fnanchor">[8]</a> It is like mankind before the
+Fall; it does not know good from evil, what is useful and what is
+noxious, what can be done and what cannot. Well&mdash;let it take its time;
+it shall have time enough.</p>
+
+<p>This time must be turned to good account. When we have come to the end
+of these observations we shall understand what a huge task lies
+between us and the realization of the new social order. In this case
+the longest way round is the shortest way home. And even if Germany
+should choose the mountain road with its broad loops and windings, we
+shall stray often enough, and go backward now and then; while if, in
+impatient revolt, we try to climb straight up, we shall slip down
+lower than where we started. Let us never forget how mysteriously our
+social and political immaturity seems to be bound up with our once
+lofty and even now remarkable intellectuality and morality.<a name="FNanchor_9_9" id="FNanchor_9_9"></a><a href="#Footnote_9_9" class="fnanchor">[9]</a> We have
+not<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[41]</a></span> won our liberties, they have fallen into our laps; it was by the
+general breakdown, by a strike, by a flight, that Germany and her
+former rulers have parted company. These liberties, social and
+political, are not rooted in the soil, they can hardly be said to be
+prized among the treasures of life, it is not their ideal, but their
+material side which attracts us. Those who used to shout Hurrah! now
+cry "All power to the Soviets!" and the day will come when they will
+again shout Hurrah! Then we shall witness a real sundering of our
+different visions of the world, visions now buried under a mass of
+interests and speculations.</p>
+
+<p>In any case, whether the change is to be catastrophic or evolutionary,
+the journey will be a long one, and every attempt to hurry it will
+only prolong it further; it will throw us back for years, or it may be
+decades. Above all things, we must know whither we are going. In order
+to adapt ourselves to a new form of society we must know what it <i>may</i>
+look like, what it <i>ought</i> to look like, and what it <i>will</i> look like.
+We shall find that Germany is not going to be landed in an earthly
+Paradise, but in a world of toil, and one which for a long period will
+be a world of poverty, of a penurious civilization and of a
+deeply-endangered culture. The unproved, parrot-phrases of a cheap
+Utopianism will grow dumb&mdash;those phrases which offer us entrance into
+the usual Garden of Eden with its square-cut, machine-made culture and
+gaudy, standardized enjoyments&mdash;phrases which assure us<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[42]</a></span> that when we
+have introduced the six-hours' working day and abolished private
+property, the cinema horrors will be replaced by classical concerts,
+the gin-shops by popular reading-rooms, the gaming-hells by edifying
+lectures, highway robberies by gymnastic exercises, detective novels
+by Gottfried Keller, bazaar-trifles and comic vulgarities by works of
+refined handicraft; and that out of boxing contests, racecourse
+betting, bomb exercises, and profiteering in butter, we shall see the
+rise of an era of humility and philanthropy.</p>
+
+<p>In the Promised Land as we conceive it, the classes which are now the
+bearers of German culture will lose almost everything, while the gain
+of the proletariat will be scarcely visible. And yet for the sake of
+this scarcely visible gain we must tread the stony path that lies
+before us. Willingly and joyfully shall we tread it; for out of this,
+at first, dubious conquest of equal rights for all men will grow the
+might of justice, of human dignity, of human solidarity and unity.</p>
+
+<p>That is truly work for a century, and yet for that very reason the
+hard path will lead to its reward. We must learn to know it, and to
+understand that it is a path of sacrifice. We must not accept the
+invitation of fools to a Christmas party&mdash;fools who will make the
+welkin ring with their outcries when they find out their
+self-deception. Let us tread our path of suffering with a pride which
+disdains to be consoled by illusions.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[43]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_6_6" id="Footnote_6_6"></a><a href="#FNanchor_6_6"><span class="label">[6]</span></a> By surplus-value (<i>Mehrwert</i>) the author means all that
+is produced above and beyond the bare necessities of life.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_7_7" id="Footnote_7_7"></a><a href="#FNanchor_7_7"><span class="label">[7]</span></a> <i>Die Neue Wirtschaft</i>, by Walther Rathenau (S. Fischer).
+In this brief study, Rathenau urges (1) the unification and
+standardization of the whole of German industry and commerce in one
+great Trust, working under a State charter, and armed with very
+extensive powers; and (2) a great intensification of the application
+of science and mechanism to production.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_8_8" id="Footnote_8_8"></a><a href="#FNanchor_8_8"><span class="label">[8]</span></a> See p. 37, <i>note</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_9_9" id="Footnote_9_9"></a><a href="#FNanchor_9_9"><span class="label">[9]</span></a> Morality, <i>Sittlichkeit</i>, a word of broader meaning than
+"morality," for it comprehends not only matters of ethical right and
+wrong, but the general temper and habit of mind of a people as
+expressed in social life.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2><a name="VI" id="VI"></a>VI</h2>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">In</span> order to throw some light into the obscurity of that social
+dreamland which no one seriously discusses because no one honestly
+believes in it, let us, as it were, cut out and examine a section from
+the fully socialized Germany of the future. Let us suppose that
+certain economic and social conditions have lasted for a generation or
+so, and have therefore become more or less stabilized. At a normal
+rate of progress this state of things should be reached about the end
+of this century.</p>
+
+<p>To begin with, let us make two very optimistic assumptions&mdash;first,
+that technical progress in Germany shall have developed to a point at
+which we are no longer impossibly outclassed and distanced by foreign
+nations, and, secondly, that by a timely and far-reaching reform of
+education and culture (the lowest cost of which must be set down at
+about three milliards of marks) the complete breakdown of civilisation
+may be averted. This reform is one which must be taken in hand very
+early, for <i>after</i> the event its adoption is improbable. A third, less
+optimistic but on that account more probable assumption may be added
+to this&mdash;namely, that the Western countries shall have progressed
+towards Socialism more steadily<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[44]</a></span> and therefore more slowly, and that
+at the period of our comparison America shall find itself at the stage
+of State-Socialism, not of full socialization. We know that in making
+this assumption we are smoothing the way for attack to our
+professional opponents, uncritical and self-interested, who with one
+blast of the fanfare of world-revolution can scatter our further
+observations to the winds.</p>
+
+<p>Full Socialism is characterized, as we have seen, by the abolition of
+all incomes that are not worked for, and the fact that there are no
+more rich. But this criterion must be limited in its application, for
+it can never be fully realized.</p>
+
+<p>According to the theory and the laws every one must hold some
+appointment and be paid for his work, or for not working. What he is
+paid, however, he can at will utilize, or waste, or hoard up, or give,
+or gamble away, or destroy. He cannot invest it, or get interest on it
+or turn into capital, because these private undertakings or means of
+production will no longer exist.</p>
+
+<p>Now each of these assumptions is so shaky that not only must trifling
+divergences and shortcomings be winked at, but the meshes of the
+system are so wide that only a rough approximation to the ideal is
+possible.</p>
+
+<p>It is true that every one can be made to hold some appointment and be
+paid for some minimum of work, but no one can be prevented from
+devoting his leisure hours to some work of rare quality and turning it
+into value for his own purposes. He can make himself<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[45]</a></span> useful by
+subsidiary employment of an artistic, scientific or technical
+character, by rendering services or assistance of various kinds, by
+advising, or entertaining, or acting as a guide to strangers, or going
+on employment abroad, and no law can prevent him from turning his
+services into income even if he was merely paid in kind. Gaming and
+betting will flourish and many will grow rich by them. A man who has
+lost his money and who has exhausted his rights to an advance from the
+public institutions for that object will have recourse to lenders who
+will supply him with bread and meat and clothes, and who will make
+money by it. Similarly with people who are tempted to make
+acquisitions beyond their standard remuneration. On every side we
+shall see private stores of goods of all kinds, which will take the
+place of property as formerly understood.</p>
+
+<p>There will be an enormous temptation to smuggling and profiteering
+which will reach a height far surpassing all scandals of the war and
+revolution periods. Foreigners and their agents, who look after the
+export trade "from Government to Government," will help hoarders and
+savers to turn their goods to account. Suppose citizens are attacked
+because their senseless expenditure is a mockery of their legal
+remuneration, they will say: I got this from friends&mdash;that I got by
+exchange&mdash;this came from abroad&mdash;my relatives in America sent me that.
+Law, control, terrorism, are effective just so long as there is not a
+blade of grass in the land&mdash;once remove the fear of hunger and they<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[46]</a></span>
+are useless. Great properties will arise, drawing interest both abroad
+and at home, and they will grow by evasions and bribery. The
+profiteer, the true child of the "great days," will not perish from
+the land, on the contrary, he will grow tougher the more he is
+persecuted, he will be the rich man of the future, and he will form a
+constant political danger if he and his fellows combine.</p>
+
+<p>So long as we have not acquired an entirely new mentality, one which
+detaches men from possessions, which points them towards the Law,
+which binds the passions, and sharpens the conscience, so long will
+the principle of "No rich people and no workless income" have to be
+contracted into the formula, "There ought to be none."</p>
+
+<p>Without this profound alteration of mentality, even the legally
+prescribed incomes will exhibit quite grotesque variations, and will
+adapt themselves to the rarity-value of special gifts, to
+indispensable qualities, to favouritism, with a crudity quite unknown
+to-day. A scarcity of Ministers, a Professor's nourishment, and
+soldiers' supplies, will then as now be met according to the law of
+supply and demand. Consider what ten years' practice in the war for
+wages and strike-management, with the public in it as partisans, will
+bring with it in the way of favouritisms, celebrities, and
+indispensabilities. Popular jockeys, successful surgeons, managers of
+sports' clubs, tenors, demimondaines, farce-writers and champion
+athletes could, even to-day, if they were class-conscious and joined<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[47]</a></span>
+together to exploit their opportunities, demand any income they liked.
+Even as a matter of practical political economy, the cinema-star (or
+whatever may succeed her) will be able to prescribe to the Government
+what amount of adornments, drawn from Nature or Art, are necessary for
+her calling, and what standard of life she must maintain in order to
+keep herself in the proper mood.</p>
+
+<p>Organizers, popular leaders, authors and artists will announce and
+enforce their demands to the full limit of their rarity-value. At a
+considerable distance below these come the acquired and more or less
+transferable powers and talents. The Russians for the first few months
+believed in a three-fold order of allowances, rising within a limit of
+about one to two. If the ideas now prevailing have not undergone a
+radical change, then we may, in the society of the future, look for
+divergences of income in the limit of one to a thousand.</p>
+
+<p>Therefore the principle that there shall be no more rich people must
+again be substantially limited. We must say, "There will be people
+receiving extraordinary incomes in kind to which must be added the
+claims to personal service which these favoured persons will lay down
+as conditions of their work."</p>
+
+<p>In its external, arithmetical structure, the fabric of life and its
+requirements in the new order will resemble that of to-day far more
+closely than most of us imagine&mdash;on the other hand, the inward and
+personal constitution of man will be far more<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[48]</a></span> different. Already we
+can observe the direction of the movement.</p>
+
+<p>Extravagance and luxury will continue to exist, and those who practise
+it will be, as they are to-day, and more than to-day, the profiteers,
+the lucky ones, and the adventurers. Excessive wealth will be more
+repulsive than it is now; whether it will be less valued depends upon
+the state of public ethics, a topic which we shall have to consider
+later. It is probable that in defiance of all legislation wealth will
+turn itself into expenditure and enjoyment more rapidly and more
+recklessly than to-day.</p>
+
+<p>But the relics of middle-class well-being will by that time have been
+consumed; the families which for generations have visibly incorporated
+the German spirit will less than others contrive to secure special
+advantages by profiteering and evading the laws; as soon as their
+modest possessions are taxed away or consumed they will melt into the
+general mass of needy people who will form the economic average of the
+future.</p>
+
+<p>The luxury which will exhibit itself in streets and houses will have a
+dubious air; every one will know that there is something wrong with
+it, people will spy and denounce, and find to their disgust that
+nothing can be proved; the well-off will be partly despised, partly
+envied; the question how to suppress evasions of the law will take up
+a good half of all public discussions, just as that of capitalism does
+now. The hateful sight of others' prosperity cannot, even at<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[49]</a></span> home,
+not to mention foreign countries, be withdrawn from the eyes of the
+needy masses; capitalism will have merely acquired another name and
+other representatives.</p>
+
+<p>The fact that the average of more or less cultivated and responsible
+folk are plunged in poverty will not be accepted as the consequence of
+an unalterable natural law, nor as a case of personal misfortune; it
+will be set down to bad government, and the rising revolutionary
+forces of the fifth, sixth and seventh classes will nourish the
+prevailing discontent in favour of a new revolt. For the greater
+uniformity of the average way of life and its general neediness will
+not in itself abolish the division of classes. I have already often
+enough pointed out that no mechanical arrangements can avail us here.</p>
+
+<p>At first there will be three, or more probably four classes who, in
+spite of poverty, will not dissolve in the masses, and who, through
+their coherence and their intellectual heritage are by no means
+without power. The Bolshevist plan of simply killing them out will not
+be possible in Germany, they are relatively too numerous; persecution
+will weld them closer together, and their traditional experiences,
+habits of mind, and capacity, will make it necessary to have recourse
+to them and employ them again and again.</p>
+
+<p>The first of these classes is that of the feudal nobility. Their
+ancient names cannot be rooted out of the history of Germany, and even
+in their poverty the bearers of these names will be respected&mdash;all
+the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[50]</a></span> more if, as we may certainly assume, they maintain the effects of
+their bodily discipline, and the visible tradition of certain forms of
+life and thought. They will be strengthened by their mutual
+association, their relationship with foreign nobility will give them
+important functions in diplomacy; these are two elements which they
+have in common with Catholicism and Judaism. They will retain their
+inclination and aptitude for the calling of arms and for
+administration; their reactionary sentiments will lead now to success,
+now to failure, and by both the inner coherence of the class will be
+fortified. Finally, the inevitable reversion to an appreciation of the
+romantic values of life will make a connexion with names of ancient
+lineage desirable to the leading classes, and especially to the
+aristocracy of officialism.</p>
+
+<p>This aristocracy of officialism forms the second of the new strata
+which will come to light. The first office-bearers of the new era, be
+their achievements great or small, are not to be forgotten. Their
+descendants are respected as the bearers of well-known names; in their
+families the practice of politics, the knowledge of persons and
+connexions are perpetuated; fathers, in their lifetime, look after the
+interests of sons and daughters and launch them on the same path. From
+these, and from the first stratum, the representatives of Germany in
+foreign lands are chosen, and in this way a certain familiarity with
+international life and society will be maintained. They will have the
+provision necessary for their<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[51]</a></span> position abroad, and will also find
+ways and means to keep up a higher standard of life at home. Persons
+in possession of irregular means of well-being will offer a great deal
+to establish connexions with these circles, which control so many
+levers in the machine of State.</p>
+
+<p>The third group consists of the descendants of what was once the
+leading class in culture and in economics. Here we find a spirit
+similar to that of the refugees, <i>&eacute;migr&eacute;s</i> and Huguenots of the past.
+The lower they sink in external power, the more tenaciously they hold
+to their memories. Every family knows every other and cherishes the
+lustre of its name, a lustre augmented by legendary recollections, all
+the more when the achievements of their class are ostentatiously
+ignored in the new social order. People spare and save to the last
+extremity in order to preserve and hand down some heirloom&mdash;a musical
+instrument, a library, a manuscript, a picture or two. A puritanical
+thrift is exercised in order, as far as possible, to maintain
+education, culture and intellectuality on the old level; to this class
+culture, refinement of life as an end in itself, the practice of
+religion, classical music, and artistic feeling will fly for refuge.
+No other class understands this one; it holds itself aloof, it looks
+different from the rest in its occupations, its habits, its garb and
+its forms of life. It supplies the new order with its scholars, its
+clergy, its higher teaching power, its representatives of the most
+disinterested and intellectual callings. Like the monasteries of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[52]</a></span>
+Middle Ages, it forms an island of the past. Its influence rises and
+falls periodically, according to the current ideas of the time, but
+its position is assured by its voluntary sacrifices, by its knowledge
+and by the purity of its motives.</p>
+
+<p>A fourth inexpugnable and influential stratum will in all probability
+be formed by the middle-class landowners and the substantial peasants.
+Even though the socialization of the land should be radically carried
+through&mdash;which is not likely to be the case&mdash;it will remain on paper.
+A class of what may be called State-tenants, estate-managers, or
+leaders of co-operative organizations will very much resemble a
+landowning class. Its traditional experience and the ties that bind it
+to the soil make it a closed and well-defined body, self-conscious and
+masterful through the importance of its calling, its indispensability
+and its individualism. It suffers no dictation as regards its manner
+of life. Here we shall see the conservative traditions of the country
+strongly mustered for defence, incapable of being eliminated as a
+political force, and forming a counterpoise to the radical democracy
+of the towns.</p>
+
+<p>Everywhere we find a state of strain and of cleavage. The
+single-stratum condition of society cannot be reached without a
+profound inward change; politics are still stirred and shaken by
+conflicts, and society by the strife of classes. A very different
+picture from the promised Utopian Paradise of a common feeding-ground
+for lions and sheep!<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[53]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>We are all aggrieved by the illegal opulence of the profiteers, but we
+are all liable to the infection. The feudalistic Fronde awaits its
+opportunity. The aristocracy of office endeavours to monopolize the
+State-machine. The <i>&eacute;migr&eacute;s</i> of culture find themselves looked askance
+at, on suspicion of intellectual arrogance, and they insist that the
+country cannot get on without them. The agriculturalists are feared,
+when they show a tendency to revolt against the towns. The ruling
+class, that is to say the more or less educated masses of the
+city-democracy, looks in impatient discontent for the state of general
+well-being which refuses to be realized, lays the blame alternately on
+the four powerful strata and on the profiteers, and fights now this
+group now that, for better conditions of living.</p>
+
+<p>But the conditions of living do not improve&mdash;they get worse. The level
+of the nation's output has been sinking from the first day of the
+Revolution onwards. The absolute productivity of work, the relative
+efficacy and the quality of the product, have all deteriorated. With a
+smaller turnover we have witnessed a falling-off in the excellence of
+the goods, in research-work, and in finish. Industrial plant has been
+worked to death and has not yet recovered. Auxiliary industries,
+accessories and raw materials have fallen back. High-quality
+workmanship has suffered from defective schooling, youthful
+indiscipline and the loss of manual dexterity. The new social order
+has lost a generation of leaders in technique, scholarship and
+economics.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[54]</a></span> Universities, with all institutions of research and
+education, have suffered from this blank. Technical leadership is
+gone, and the deterioration in quality has reacted detrimentally on
+output. We can now turn out nothing except what is cheap and easy, and
+what can be produced without traditional skill of hand, without
+serious calculation and research. For all innovations, all work of
+superior quality, Germany is dependent on the foreigner. The
+atmosphere of technique has vanished, and the stamp of cheap hireling
+labour is on the whole output of the country.</p>
+
+<p>In the weeks of the Revolution street orators used to tell us that
+five hundred Russian professors had signed a statement that the level
+of culture had never been so high as under Bolshevism. And Berlin
+believed them! To educate Russia it would take, to begin with, a
+million elementary schools with a yearly budget of several dozen
+milliards of roubles, and a corresponding number of higher schools and
+universities: if every educated Russian for the next twenty years were
+to become a teacher, there would not be enough of them&mdash;not to speak
+of the requirements of transport, of raw materials and of agriculture.
+The fabric of a civilization and a culture cannot be annihilated at
+one blow, nor can it grow up save in decades and centuries. The
+maintenance of the structure demands unceasing toil and unbroken
+tradition; the breach that has been made in it in Germany can only be
+healed by the application in manifold<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[55]</a></span> forms of work, intellect and
+will; and this hope we cannot entertain.<a name="FNanchor_10_10" id="FNanchor_10_10"></a><a href="#Footnote_10_10" class="fnanchor">[10]</a></p>
+
+<p>But we have not yet done with the question of social strata and inward
+cleavage. Revolutionary threats are causing strife every day.
+Revolution against revolution&mdash;how is this possible? We are not
+speaking of a reactionary revolution but of the "activist."</p>
+
+<p>In an earlier work I discussed the theory of continuous
+revolution.<a name="FNanchor_11_11" id="FNanchor_11_11"></a><a href="#Footnote_11_11" class="fnanchor">[11]</a> Behind every successful revolutionary movement there
+stands another, representing one negation more than its predecessor.
+Behind the revolt of the aristocracy stood that of the bourgeoisie,
+behind that of the bourgeoisie stood Socialism. Behind the now ruling
+fourth class<a name="FNanchor_12_12" id="FNanchor_12_12"></a><a href="#Footnote_12_12" class="fnanchor">[12]</a> rises the fifth, and a sixth is coming into sight. If
+a ninth should represent pure Anarchism, we may see an eleventh
+proclaiming a dictatorship, and a twelfth standing for absolute
+monarchy.</p>
+
+<p>To-day the Majority Socialists are in power, that is to say the Right
+section of the fourth class. This is composed of the older, trained
+and work-willing Trade Unionists, who are amazed at the Revolution,
+who do not regard it as quite legitimate, but who <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[56]</a></span>are determined to defend
+the <i>status quo</i> in so far as a certain degree of self-determination
+and elbow-room in the material conditions of life still remain to them.</p>
+
+<p>The Left section consists of youths and of persons disgusted with
+militarism, ignorant of affairs but cherishing a certain independence
+of judgment; still ready for work but equally so for politics. To
+these, as a "forward" party, the doctrinaire theorists have allied
+themselves. The designation of the party "The Independents" is
+characteristic; its goal, "All power to the Soviets," is a catchword
+from Russia.</p>
+
+<p>A fifth class is now emerging&mdash;the work-shy. The others call them the
+tramp-proletariat, the disgruntled, the declassed, who set their hopes
+on disorder. Their goal is still undetermined&mdash;their favourite
+expression is "bloodhound," when those in power, or Government troops,
+are referred to.</p>
+
+<p>Then comes the sixth class, still partly identified with the Left of
+the fourth and embryonically attached to the fifth. These are the
+indomitable loafers and shirkers, physically and mentally unsound,
+aliens in the social order, excluded by their sufferings, their
+punishments, their vices and passions; self-excluded, repudiators of
+law and morality, born of the cruelty of the city, pitiable beings,
+not so much cast out of society as cast up against it, as a living
+reproach to its mechanical organization. If these ever come into the
+light in politics, they will demand a kind of syndicalistic
+communism.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[57]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>That is as far as we can see at present into the as yet unopened germs
+of continuous revolutionary movement. In these are contained the
+infinite series of all principles that can conceivably be supported;
+and it would be wholly false to see in this series merely so many
+successive steps in moral degeneration, even though the earlier stages
+should proceed on a flat denial of ethical principles. Later on will
+come revivals and restorations, political, ethical and religious, and
+each time we shall see the rising stratum attaching to itself strays
+and converts, above all, the disappointed and ambitious, from those
+that went before.</p>
+
+<p>But the number of revolutions will grow till we lose count of them,
+and each, however strenuously it may profess its horror of bloodshed,
+will have only one hope and possibility: that of defending itself by
+armed force against its successor. The game is a grotesquely dishonest
+one, because every aspirant movement will cast against its forerunner
+the charge of ruling by bloodshed, while it itself is already
+preparing its armed forces for the conflict.</p>
+
+<p>It is therefore wholly vain to hope that an advanced social
+organization implies stability, that a brotherhood mechanically
+decreed will exclude further revolutions, and will establish eternally
+an empire of righteousness and justice according to any preconceived
+pattern.</p>
+
+<p>The fiercest hatred will prevail amongst those who are most closely
+associated&mdash;for instance, between<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[58]</a></span> handworkers and brainworkers,
+between leaders and followers; and this hate will be all the more
+inappeasable when it is open to every one to rise in the world, and
+none can cherish the excuse that he is the victim of a social system
+of overwhelming power. To-day this hatred is masked by the general
+class-hatred&mdash;hatred of the monopolists of culture, of position and of
+capital.</p>
+
+<p>At the bottom of it, however, lies even to-day the more universal
+hatred of the defeated for the victor, and when those three monopolies
+have fallen, it will emerge in its original Cain-like form. It cannot
+be appeased by any mechanical device. Human inequality can never be
+abolished, human accomplishment and work will always vary, and the
+human passion for success will always assert itself.</p>
+
+<p>We have discussed the material foundation and the stratification of
+the German people when full socialization has been realized. Let us
+now forecast the manner of their existence.</p>
+
+<p>The future community is poor; the individual is poor. The average
+standard of well-being corresponds, at best, to what in peace-time one
+would expect from an income of 3000 marks.<a name="FNanchor_13_13" id="FNanchor_13_13"></a><a href="#Footnote_13_13" class="fnanchor">[13]</a> But the requirements of
+the population are not medi&aelig;vally simplified&mdash;they could not be, in
+view of the density of the population and the complexity of industrial
+and professional <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[59]</a></span> vocations. They are manifold and diverse, and they
+are moreover intensified by the spectacle of extravagance offered by
+the profiteering class and the licence of social life. The traditional
+garden-city idyll of architects and art-craftsmen is a Utopia about as
+much like reality as the pastoral Arcadianism of Marie Antoinette.</p>
+
+<p>All things of common use are standardized into typical forms. It must
+not be supposed, however, that they are based on pure designs and
+models. The taste of the artist will clash with that of the crowd, and
+since the former has no authority to back him he will have to
+compromise. The compromise, however, consists in cheap imitation of
+foreign models, for in foreign countries art-industry will exist, and
+no legislation can prevent its products from finding their way (in
+reproductions or actual examples) into Germany and being admired
+there. Our half or wholly imitative products are turned out as cheaply
+as possible, in substitute-materials, and are made as well or as ill
+as the relics of our craftsmanship permit, or as our existing
+machinery for the purpose is capable of. Cheapness and ease of
+manufacture are the principles aimed at, for even with narrow means no
+one will want to do without certain things; fashions still prevail,
+and will have to be satisfied with things that do not last, but can be
+constantly changed.</p>
+
+<p>How far will a new system of education tend to simplify the needs of
+men and women and to purify their taste? Probably very little, for
+good models<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[60]</a></span> will be lacking, poverty is not fastidious, and the taste
+of the populace is the sovereign arbiter. But on this taste it depends
+whether vulgar ornaments and gewgaws, frivolities and bazaar-horrors,
+are to satisfy the desires of the soul.</p>
+
+<p>Objects of earlier art and industry have been alienated through need
+of money or destroyed by negligence. Here and there one may find an
+old cup or an engraving, as we do to-day in plundered territories, but
+these things are disconnected specimens; all they can do is
+occasionally to interest an artist. Whoever wants to procure some
+object or to get something done which has not been standardized in the
+common range of approved requirements must gain it by a tedious course
+of pinching and saving. Personal possessions in the way of books,
+musical instruments, works of art, as well as travel outside the
+prescribed routes are rarities; a tree of one's own, a horse of one's
+own are legendary things.</p>
+
+<p>Thus luxury in its better aspect has gone to ruin quicker than in the
+bad. All outlay devoted to culture, to beauty, to invigoration has
+dried up; all that survives is what stimulates, what depraves and
+befouls; frivolities, substitutes and swindles. What we have arrived
+at is not the four-square simplicity of the peasant-homestead, but a
+ramshackle city suburb. To some of us it is not easy, and to many it
+is not agreeable to picture to themselves the aspect of a thoroughly
+proletarianized country, and the difficulty lies in the fact that the
+popular mind has,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[61]</a></span> as it were by universal agreement, resolved to
+conceive the future on a basis of domestic prosperity about tenfold as
+great as it can possibly be. The leaders and office-holders of the
+proletariat have an easy task in convincing themselves and others that
+what they approve and are struggling for is the so-called middle-class
+existence with all the refinement and claims of historic culture.
+Tacitly, as a matter of course, they accept what plutocracy has to
+give them, and imagine that the loans they take up from the
+civilization and culture of the past can be redeemed from the social
+gains of the future.</p>
+
+<p>The stages at which a nation arrives year by year, can be estimated by
+its building. In the new order, little is being built. Apart from
+certain perfunctory garden-cities, which are being erected for the
+principle of the thing, to meet the needs of a few thousand favoured
+households, and which perhaps will never be finished, we will for
+decades have to content ourselves with new subdivisions and
+exploitation of the old buildings; old palaces packed to the roof with
+families, will stand in the midst of vegetable gardens and will
+alternate with empty warehouses in the midst of decayed cities. In the
+streets of the suburbs the avenues of trees will be felled, and in the
+cities grass will grow through the cracks of the pavement.</p>
+
+<p>For a long time it used to be believed that the passion of the
+landscape painters of the seventeenth century for introducing ruins
+with hovels nestling among them arose from a feeling for romance.
+This<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[62]</a></span> is not so&mdash;they only painted what they saw around them after the
+ravages of the Thirty Years' War. It must not be supposed, however,
+that the forecast in these pages is based on the consequences of the
+war; these no doubt must darken our picture of the future; but the
+shadows, which I have put in as sparingly as I could, are essentially
+the expression of a greatly reduced economic efficiency, combined with
+the uniformity produced by the general proletarianization of life with
+the absence of any correcting factor in individual effort of a
+rational character and of the influence of higher types.</p>
+
+<p>A brighter trait in the material conditions of life will be formed by
+effort of a collective character, such as even the most penurious
+community may be able to undertake. The more severely the domestic
+household has to pinch, and the more unattractive it thereby becomes,
+the more completely will life be forced into publicity. Private claims
+and aspirations, which cannot be satisfied, will be turned over to the
+public. Men will gather in the streets and places of public resort,
+and have more mutual intercourse than before, since every transaction
+of life, even the most insignificant, will have to be a subject of
+discussion, agreement and understanding. In all the arrangements of
+social life, <i>e.g.</i> for news, communications, supplies, discussion and
+entertainment, and demands will be made and complied with for greater
+convenience and comprehensiveness, for popular &aelig;sthetics and popular
+representation. In these<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[63]</a></span> arrangements and in these alone Art will
+have to find its functions and its home. Public buildings, gardens,
+sanatoriums, means of transit and exhibitions will be established at
+great cost. All the demands of the spirit and of the senses will seek
+their satisfaction in public. There will be no lack of popular
+performances, excursions, tours and conducted visits to collections;
+of clubs, libraries, athletic meetings and displays. The aspect of
+this tendency from the point of view of culture and ethics we have
+still to consider; in its social aspect (apart from the fact that it
+causes a vacuum in the home and forces young people to the surface of
+life, and in spite of its mechanical effect) it will act as a
+comforting reminiscence of the civic commonalty and solidarity of
+medi&aelig;val times.</p>
+
+<p>In considering the spiritual and cultural life of a fully socialized
+society, we have to start with the assumption that any one man's
+opinion and decision are as good as another's. Authority, even in
+matters of the highest intellectual or spiritual character, only
+exists in so far as it is established, acknowledged and confirmed
+either by direct action of the people's will, or indirectly through
+their representatives. Every one's education and way of life are much
+the same; there are no secrecies, no vague authority attaching to
+special vocations; no one permits himself to feel impressed by any
+person or thing. Every one votes, whether it be for an office, a
+memorial, a law, or a drama, or does it through delegates or the
+delegates<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[64]</a></span> of delegates. Every one is determined to know the how and
+where and why of everything&mdash;just as to-day in America&mdash;and demands a
+plausible reason for it. The reply, "This is a matter you don't
+understand," is impossible.</p>
+
+<p>Everything is referred to one's own conscience, one's own
+intelligence, one's own taste, and no one admits any innate or
+acquired superiority in others. In debate, the boundaries between the
+ideal and the practicable are obliterated; for on the one hand every
+one is too much preoccupied with material needs, and on the other, too
+confident, too unaccustomed to submit himself to what in former days
+was called a deeper insight, too loosely brought up to let himself be
+taught. We never, therefore, hear such judgments as: This, although it
+is difficult, is a book to be read; this drama ought to have been
+produced although it is not sensational; I don't myself care for this
+memorial, but it must remain because a great artist made it; this is a
+necessary branch of study, although it has no practical application; I
+will vote for this man on account of his character and ability,
+although he has made no election-promises. On the other hand, the
+following kind of argument will have weight: This historic building
+must be demolished, for it interferes with traffic; this collection
+must be sold, for we need money; we need no chair of philosophy, but
+we do need one for cinema-technique; these ornamental grounds are the
+very place for a merry-go-round; tragedies are depressing, they must<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[65]</a></span>
+not be performed in the State theatres. Let us recall certain oversea
+legislation&mdash;carried out, be it noted in countries still swayed by the
+traditional influence of culture&mdash;and these examples will not seem
+exaggerated.</p>
+
+<p>Where there is no appeal to authority, where none need fear
+disapproval or ridicule, where convenience is prized and thrift rules
+supreme, there thought and decision will be short-breathed, and will
+never look beyond the needs of the day. Who will then care for far-off
+deductions, for wide arcs of thought? Calculation comes to the front,
+everything unpractical is despised; opinions are formed by discussion,
+everyday reading and propaganda. Men demand proofs, success, visible
+returns. The fewer the aims, the stronger will be their attraction.
+People are tolerant, for they are used to hearing the most varied
+opinions, and all opinions have followers, from the water-cure to
+T&acirc;oism; but the only opinion of any influence is that whose followers
+are many.</p>
+
+<p>Public opinion settles everything. The champions of absolute values
+have to accommodate themselves to the law of competition. Religious
+teaching has to seek the favour of the times by the same methods as a
+new system of physical culture. A work of art must compete for votes.
+Only by popularity-hunting can anything come to life; there will be no
+doing without much talking. As in the later days of Greece, rhetoric
+and dialectic are the most powerful of the arts.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[66]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>And since manual labour cherishes silently or openly a bitter grudge
+against intellectual labour, the latter has to protect itself by a
+pretence of sturdy simplicity; when two teachers are competing for the
+head-mastership of a classical school each tries to prove that he has
+the hornier hand.</p>
+
+<p>Most things in this new order are decided by weight of numbers.
+Advertisement and propaganda are banished from socialized industry and
+commerce; instead, they compete in the service of personal and ideal
+aims&mdash;in elections, theatres, systems of medicine, superstitions,
+arts, appointments, professorships, churches.</p>
+
+<p>Art has for the third time changed its master&mdash;after the princes,
+M&aelig;cenas, the middle-class market; after M&aelig;cenas, the plebs, and export
+trade. Whether by means of representation through gilds, by
+compulsion, by patronage, or by favour, Art has become dependent; it
+must explain, exhort, contend; it can no longer rest proudly on
+itself. It must aim at getting a majority on its side, and this it can
+only do by sensationalism. Like all other features of intellectual
+life, it must march with the times. Like all technique, research,
+learning and handicraft it suffers through the loss, for several
+generations, of tradition and hereditary skill, but together with this
+drop there is also a drop in the character of the demand; quality has
+given way to actuality.<a name="FNanchor_14_14" id="FNanchor_14_14"></a><a href="#Footnote_14_14" class="fnanchor">[14]</a></p>
+
+<p>Certain reactions based on practical experience are <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[67]</a></span> not excluded;
+the constant comparison with the past and with foreign countries will
+show the value of the cultivation of a science, of an art which has no
+fixed prepossessions and serves no immediate aims. Measures are taken,
+though without much conviction, by free Academies or the like, to win
+back something of this; but the atmosphere is not favourable to such
+attempts, and an artificial and sterile discipline is all that can
+result.</p>
+
+<p>The general tone is that of an excitable, loquacious generation, bent
+on actualities and matters of practical calculation, fonder of debate
+than of work, not impressed by any authority, prizing success,
+watching all that goes on abroad, taking refuge in public from the
+sordidness of private life, and passionately hostile to all
+superiority. Through the constant secession of elements to which this
+tone is antipathetic a kind of natural selection is constantly taking
+place, and the political defencelessness of the transition period
+favours disintegrating tendencies of foreign origin. The carving away
+of ancient German territories works in the same direction. Apart from
+the varying influence of the four strata already referred to, the
+general tone will be set by the half-Slavonic lower classes of Middle
+and North Germany, who have brought about and who control the existing
+conditions, and by the other elements which have been assimilated to
+these.</p>
+
+<p>In place of German culture and German intellectuality we have a state
+of things of which a foretaste<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[68]</a></span> already exists in parts of America and
+of Eastern Europe. The fully socialized order, repelling all tutelage
+through those strata which possess a special tradition, outlook and
+mentality, has created its own form of civilization.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[69]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_10_10" id="Footnote_10_10"></a><a href="#FNanchor_10_10"><span class="label">[10]</span></a> Rathenau means that it cannot be entertained except on
+the hypothesis of the profound <i>inward</i> change, which is to be
+discussed later on.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_11_11" id="Footnote_11_11"></a><a href="#FNanchor_11_11"><span class="label">[11]</span></a> <i>Kritik der dreifachen Revolution.</i> S. Fischer.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_12_12" id="Footnote_12_12"></a><a href="#FNanchor_12_12"><span class="label">[12]</span></a> The classes referred to are (1) the old aristocracy, (2)
+the aristocracy of officialism, (3) that of traditional middle-class
+culture; (4) the mass of what is called Socialism.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_13_13" id="Footnote_13_13"></a><a href="#FNanchor_13_13"><span class="label">[13]</span></a> &pound;150 in pre-war values. By thrift, by co-operation, and
+by the cheapness of the public services generally, a surprisingly high
+standard of life could be maintained on this kind of income in pre-war
+Germany.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_14_14" id="Footnote_14_14"></a><a href="#FNanchor_14_14"><span class="label">[14]</span></a> Aktualit&auml;t; as, for instance, reference to current
+topics.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2><a name="VII" id="VII"></a>VII</h2>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Thoughtful</span> and competent judges to whom I have submitted the foregoing
+section of my work have said to me: This is Hell. That is perhaps
+going too far, since those who will live in that generation and who
+have themselves helped it into being will have become more or less
+adapted to their circumstances.</p>
+
+<p>A large part of the proletariat of to-day will certainly not be
+daunted by the prospect, but will regard it as a distinct improvement
+on their present situation. That is the terrible fact, a fact for
+which we are responsible and for which we must atone, with what ruin
+to German culture remains to be seen.</p>
+
+<p>Who, in this Age of Mechanism, who on the side of the bourgeoisie, who
+of our statesmen, our professors, our captains of industry, above all
+who of our clergy, has pitied the lot of the working-man? The
+statesmen, for peace' sake, worked out the Insurance Laws; the
+professors, with their emphatic dislike to the world of finance and
+their unemphasized devotion to the monopoly of their own stipends,
+preached a doctrinaire socialism; the clergy lauded the
+divinely-appointed principle of subordination;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[70]</a></span> the great
+industrialists, wallowing in their own greed for power, money, favour,
+titles and connexions, scolded the workers for wanting anything. The
+silent subjugation of our brothers was assured through the laws of
+inheritance, our leaders put the socialistic legislation in fetters,
+freedom of combination was thwarted, electoral reform in Prussia was
+scornfully denied, demands for better conditions of living, conditions
+which to-day we think ridiculously low, were suppressed by force. And
+all the time, the cost of a single year of war, a tiny fraction of the
+war-reparations, would have sufficed to banish want for ever from the
+land. At last the millions of the defenceless and disappointed were
+driven into that war of the dynasties and the bourgeois, which was
+unloosed by the folly of years, the dazzlement of weeks, the
+helplessness of hours.</p>
+
+<p>If the state of things I have foreseen is hell, then we have earned
+hell. And it ill becomes us to wrap ourselves in the superiority of
+our culture, to rebuke the masses for their want of intellect, their
+want of character, their greed, and to keep insisting on the
+unchangeability of human character, on the virtues of rulership and
+leadership, on the spiritual unselfishness and intellectual priesthood
+of the classes born to freedom. Where was this heaven-nurtured
+priestly virtue sleeping when Wrong straddled the land and the great
+crime was wrought? It was composing feeble anthologies and pompous
+theories, cooking its culture-soup, confusing, with true professorial
+want<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[71]</a></span> of instinct, 1913 with 1813<a name="FNanchor_15_15" id="FNanchor_15_15"></a><a href="#Footnote_15_15" class="fnanchor">[15]</a>&mdash;and putting itself at the
+disposition of the Press Bureau. <i>That</i> was the hour in which to fight
+for the supremacy of the spirit. Now romance comes, as it always does,
+too late.</p>
+
+<p>What is romance in history? It is sterility. It is incapacity to
+imagine, still less to shape, the yet unknown. It is an inordinate
+capacity for flinging oneself with feminine adaptability into anything
+that is historically presented and accomplished&mdash;from Michael Angelo
+to working samplers. Fearing the ugly present and the anxious future,
+the romantic takes refuge with the dear good dead people, and spins
+out further what it has learned from them. But every big man was a
+shaper of his own time, a respecter of antiquity and conscious of his
+inheritance as a grown and capable man may be; not a youth in
+sheltered tutelage, but a master of the living world, and a herald of
+the future. "Modernity" is foolish, but antiquarianism is rubbish;
+life in its vigour is neither new nor antique, but young.</p>
+
+<p>True it is indeed that we love the old, many-coloured, concrete,
+pre-mechanistic world; we cannot take an antique thing in our hands or
+read an antique word without feeling its enchantment. It is a joy to
+the heart, and one prohibited to no man, to dream at times romantic
+dreams, to live in the past, and to forget, as we do it, that this
+very dreaming, this <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[72]</a></span> very life, owes its charm to the fact that we
+are of another age. It is a magic like that of childhood&mdash;but to want
+to go back to it is not only childish, but a deliberate fraud and
+self-deception. We should realize, as I have shown years ago, that the
+difference of our age from that age is the ever-present fact of the
+density of our population. Any one who wants to go back, really wants
+that forty million Germans should die, while he survives. It is
+ignorant, it is insincere, to put on a frown of offended virtue and to
+say: For shame, what are you thronging into the towns for? Go back to
+the land; plough, spin, weave, ply the blacksmith's hammer, as did our
+forefathers, who were the proper sort of people. And leave the people
+like us, who think and write poetry and brood and dream for you, a
+house embowered in vines&mdash;there will be room enough for that!&mdash;Ah, you
+thinkers and brooders, what would you say if men answered you: No! Go
+yourself and spin in a factory, for you have shown clearly enough that
+your thinking and brooding are futile. All your fine phrases amount to
+nothing but the one dread monosyllable&mdash;Die! Are you so wicked as
+that, and know it? or so stupid, and know it not?</p>
+
+<p>Thought is the most responsible of all functions. He who thinks for
+others must look after them, and if they live he may not slay them. It
+is therefore a mischievous piece of romantic folly to point us to the
+past. We must all pass through the dark gateway, and the sage has no
+right to growl: Leave me out<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[73]</a></span>&mdash;I am the salt of the earth! The first
+thing we have to do is to save humanity; not a selected pair in the
+Ark but the whole race, criminals and harlots, fools, beggars and
+cripples. We ourselves have cast down Authority, and there will be a
+crush, and many things will look very different from what the sages
+would wish and what the romantics dream. And if it is going to be hell
+for people like you and me, we must only accept it in the name of
+justice, and think of Dante's terrible inscription: "I was made by the
+Might of God, by the supreme Wisdom and by the primal Love."<a name="FNanchor_16_16" id="FNanchor_16_16"></a><a href="#Footnote_16_16" class="fnanchor">[16]</a></p>
+
+<p>But is it hell? That depends on ourselves.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[74]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_15_15" id="Footnote_15_15"></a><a href="#FNanchor_15_15"><span class="label">[15]</span></a> In 1913 all Germany was celebrating with great pomp and
+warlike display the centenary of the liberation of the country from
+Napoleon, and also paying a huge property tax for the coming war.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><a name="Footnote_16_16" id="Footnote_16_16"></a><a href="#FNanchor_16_16"><span class="label">[16]</span></a>
+<p style="margin-left: 3em">
+<i>Fecemi la divina Potestate<br />
+La somma Sapienza e il primo Amore.</i></p>
+<p>
+This is part of the inscription over the gates of Hell in the
+<i>Inferno</i>, Canto III.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2><a name="VIII" id="VIII"></a>VIII</h2>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Our</span> description of the future order of society was tacitly based on
+the assumption that our mentality, our ethics, our spiritual outlook,
+would remain as they are at present.</p>
+
+<p>This assumption is a probable one, but it is not irrevocably certain.
+What we have endeavoured to demonstrate is simply the obvious
+fact&mdash;the fact which our once so rigid but, since November, 1918,
+uprooted and flaccid intellectualism has forgotten&mdash;that our salvation
+is not to be found in any kind of mechanical apparatus or
+institutions. Institutions do not mean evolution. If institutions run
+too far ahead of evolution there will be reaction. When evolution runs
+too far, there is revolution.</p>
+
+<p>At this point both groups of our opponents will start up against us.</p>
+
+<p>The Radicals cry: Ha! only give us food, give "all power to the
+Soviets," let us have free-thought lectures, and mentality, insight,
+experience and culture will come of themselves.</p>
+
+<p>The Reactionaries smile: Ho! this man has never learned that there is
+no such thing as evolution; that human character never changes.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[75]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>I shall not answer either of these. They know, both of them, that they
+are saying what is not true.</p>
+
+<p>Something of unprecedented greatness can and must take place;
+something that in the life of a people corresponds to the awakening of
+manhood in the individual.</p>
+
+<p>In every conscious existence there comes a moment when the living
+being is no longer determined but begins to determine himself; when he
+takes over responsibility from the surrounding Powers, in order to
+shoulder it for himself; when he no longer accepts the forces that
+guide him, but creates them; when he no longer receives but freely
+chooses the values, ideals, aims and authorities whose validity he
+will admit; when he begets out of his own being the relations with the
+divine which he means to serve. For the German people this moment,
+this opportunity, has now arrived&mdash;or is for ever lost.</p>
+
+<p>We have made a clear sweep of all authorities. The inherited
+influences which we accepted unconsciously have dropped away from
+us&mdash;persons, classes, dogmas. The persons are done with for the
+present. The classes, even though they may still keep up the struggle,
+are broken to pieces together with all the best that they contained:
+mentality, sense of honour, devotion, training, tradition. We can
+never reanimate them and never supply their place. Ideas and dogmas
+have long ago lost their cogency; the power they wielded through
+police and school, the power which we tried to prop up by a
+blasphemous degradation<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[76]</a></span> of religion and by developing the church as a
+kind of factory, is gone, and it would be a piece of mechanical
+presumption to suppose that we can breed them again for the sake of
+the objects they fulfilled. If we live and thrive, ideas and faiths
+will grow up of themselves.</p>
+
+<p>We must of our own free choice lay upon ourselves a certain
+life-potency or faculty which we shall freely obey, and which shall be
+so broad and so buoyant that thought and creation can grow out of it.
+A deed without precedent only in its voluntary, conscious
+self-determination: for other peoples in earlier days also accepted
+these faculties, not indeed out of conscious choice, but from the
+hands of prophets, rulers and classes. Thus theocracy was laid upon
+Israel; the caste-system on the Indians; the idea of the city on the
+Greeks; empire on the Romans; the Church on the Middle Ages; commerce,
+plutocracy, colonial dominion, on the modern world; militarism on
+Germany. For these imposed forces men lived and died; they had only a
+mythical conception of where they came from, and they believed and
+some still believe them to be everlasting.</p>
+
+<p>A thunder-stroke of destiny has at once stripped us bare and has
+opened our eyes. The tremendous choice is before us. Are we to reject
+it, and, blinded anew, to resign ourselves to the casual and
+mechanical laws of action and reaction, of needs and interests, and
+the competition of forces? Are we to recover ourselves, and enter into
+the intellectual arena of the nations, to begin a new and enduring
+life with no<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[77]</a></span> other guiding thought than that of self-preservation and
+the division of property? In the harbour of the nations is our ship to
+drift aimlessly while every other knows its course, whether to a near
+or distant port? Is that penurious Paradise which we have described,
+the goal of Germany's hopes and struggles?</p>
+
+<p>Compared with us, the French movement of the eighteenth century had an
+easy task. All it had to do was to deny and demolish. When it had
+cleared away the wreckage of feudalism, at once a strong new class,
+the bourgeoisie, sprang up from the soil, more vigorous than its
+aristocratic forerunner, and it was able to take care of itself. And
+the bourgeoisie was also a class of defined boundaries, and already
+trained for its task; it had long ago taken over French culture, it
+alone had for a century been the champion of French ideas, it had
+acquired enthusiasm for the nation, for freedom, for militarism and
+for money; the aspirations for equality and fraternity were not indeed
+fulfilled, but the first mechanized and plutocratic state of the
+Continent came into being.</p>
+
+<p>Germany, as we have seen, is not in the same position. When we are
+stripped we find no new stratum of culture growing up below the
+surface; society is simply dissolved, and in its place we find the
+masses, of which the most hopeful thing we can say is that they are an
+ordered body. Tradition has been torn in two. No&mdash;we have to build
+from the foundations up. But whether we shall build according to the
+changing needs of the seasons,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[78]</a></span> according to the casual balance of
+forces, or according to an idea and a symbol&mdash;that is the question!</p>
+
+<p>Our current Socialism has no qualms about bringing new nations to
+birth with the aid of a few simple apparatus and radical eliminations;
+it believes that the right spirit will soon enter in if only
+institutions are provided for it. It would be too severe to describe
+this way of thinking solely as contempt for or want of understanding
+of a spiritual mission. Socialism in its prevailing form arises indeed
+simply from material or so-called "scientific" conceptions (as if
+there could be a science of ideal aims and values): but it has, though
+only as a secondary object, annexed to itself the values of a
+spiritual faith&mdash;the latter are, as the language of the market has it,
+"thrown in." We have seen to what the material domination of
+institutions and apparatus is leading us. To national dignity, or to
+any mission for humanity, it does not lead.</p>
+
+<p>What is unprecedented in our problem is not, as we have said, that a
+people should beget out of itself its own idea and mission. From the
+Jewish theocracy to the French rationalism, from the Chinese
+ancestor-worship to the pioneer-freedom of America, all the cultured
+peoples have brought this creative act to pass, although in formative
+epochs leading classes and leading men have born the responsibility
+and made it easy for their countrymen to become aware of their own
+unconscious spirit, and through this awareness and consciousness to
+isolate and intensify it.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[79]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>What is unprecedented is just this: that the process should take place
+as a deliberate act of will, in democratic freedom, without pressure
+and compulsion of authority, in the consciousness of its necessity, on
+our own responsibility. Germany is not at present growing leaders and
+prophets, we are not in a formative stage, all authority has been
+scattered to the winds. It is true that we have one stratum of society
+which is capable of understanding the meaning of the task, but it is
+deeply cloven, the hatreds and interests of its parties make them more
+each other's enemies than the people's.</p>
+
+<p>And yet it is this very class&mdash;not as possessor of means but as
+possessor of the tradition, which is capable, which is indispensable,
+and which is summoned to take in hand the transformation of the German
+spirit, to free it from the bonds of mechanism, of capitalism, of
+militarism, and to lead it to its true destinies. It cannot do this
+for itself alone, amid the blind bitterness of the war of classes; it
+cannot do it as a sovran leader relying on its deeper insight, for its
+and every other prestige has gone by the board; it can only do it by
+the way of service and sacrifice&mdash;it can only do it if the service and
+the sacrifice are approved and accepted.</p>
+
+<p>The masses will not understand this sacrifice of service; but the more
+responsible of their leaders will. Not to-day, indeed, nor to-morrow;
+but on the day when experience has shown them that I am telling the
+truth. At first they will do as in Russia;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[80]</a></span> when want becomes acute,
+they will seek to buy experience and tradition at a high price from
+individuals. But mentality and spirit cannot be bought&mdash;only labour
+and dexterity. Then gradually men will come to understand that the
+highest things are not marketable commodities, they are only given
+away. And at last the responsible leaders, those who rule in order to
+serve, will separate themselves from those of the Cataline type, who
+serve in order to rule.</p>
+
+<p>So long has the narrow, parsonical, cynical contempt for the
+understanding of the lower classes prevailed&mdash;through our fault&mdash;a
+reversal to blind worship of the masses, of the immature and the
+unsuccessful, is not inexcusable. We are here to love mankind&mdash;all
+mankind, the outcast as well as the weak&mdash;every man and all men. But
+the masses are not quite the same thing as mankind. The masses who
+congregate in the streets and at public meetings are not communities
+consisting of whole men, but assemblages in which each man takes a
+part and is present, indeed, with his whole body, but by no means with
+his whole being. The masses are absent-minded; and presence of mind
+only comes to them when through the lips of some true prophet the
+Spirit descends upon them. But when that happens, they take no
+decisions; they do not get beside themselves; rather, they sink into
+themselves. Before the distortions of a mob orator, with his
+extravagant promises, the masses become merely a driven crowd eager
+for gain, not human souls. They are the concave reflector of passions<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[81]</a></span>
+and greeds that rage in the focal point of the speaker's rostrum; they
+return in concentrated form the rays that dazzle them. He who puts the
+masses in the judgment-seat, who looks for counsel and decision at
+their hands, has neither reverence nor love for man. Sooner or later
+the truth of this will be realized by all honourable men among their
+leaders.</p>
+
+<p>The day is also far when the upper classes will come to their senses.
+They have never understood what the world is, nor what Germany is, nor
+what has happened to themselves. They see houses and fields, streets
+and trees very much as they were; they think, if they only play the
+game a little craftily at the beginning, everything will remain as it
+used to be, and they will come out all right in the end. It is just as
+when some merchant goes bankrupt for a million; for the first
+fortnight the servants wait at table as usual and the family eat off
+silver plate; the ruin is still on paper. But in a year's time
+everything is dispersed to the winds, and men have changed along with
+their utensils. When one sees for what trivialities people are
+fighting to-day one begins to understand how callously and shamelessly
+they gave up a thousand times over that which they had sworn to defend
+with the last drop of their blood; then none of them know what has
+really happened. In a few years' time they will know; and then they
+will fight no more for things that no longer exist; they will be
+meditating a general sacrifice to save what can still be saved, and
+what is worth saving.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[82]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2><a name="IX" id="IX"></a>IX</h2>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Germany</span> is a land without power, without poise, with its prosperity
+shattered, its authorities and its external aims annihilated, its
+intellect and its ethics at a low ebb. In such a condition, if we wish
+to understand the only kind of life-faculty which can save us from
+intellectual and spiritual death, give us force and inspiration to
+shape for ourselves and for the world the new social order of freedom,
+spirituality<a name="FNanchor_17_17" id="FNanchor_17_17"></a><a href="#Footnote_17_17" class="fnanchor">[17]</a> and justice, and in the true sense to "save" us, we
+must look ourselves and the German character in the face&mdash;this
+unknown, problematic character, which for a century in contradiction
+to its own inmost being, has been flattering and lulling itself with
+hackneyed and complacent phrases and unproved judgments. For we can
+undertake nothing and claim nothing which has not its prototype in our
+own soul and is not founded in our own past, our own traditions.</p>
+
+<p>There is no people, not even the French, which in recent decades has
+administered to itself and digested so much praise as we have. We
+never <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[83]</a></span> discussed ourselves but at once the stereotyped toasts began.
+The more German culture declined, the more disgusting became our
+babble about it.</p>
+
+<p>The persons through whose mouths we let ourselves be lauded were
+school-teachers without comparative knowledge, professional
+banquet-orators, nationalists who praised in the service of some
+interested hatred, and scholars with appointments who were simply
+commissioned to demonstrate that the Hohenzollern system was the last
+word of creation. No one dreamed of distinguishing this glorification
+of the German people from the apotheosis of the dynasties&mdash;to which we
+had vowed our heart's blood&mdash;and the profound insincerity of these
+declamations was shown by the indifference with which the dynasties,
+the main feature in the programme, were afterwards got rid of, and the
+affair of the heart's blood shelved.</p>
+
+<p>We know the stereotyped phrases. German faith, French knavery. The
+world is to find healing in the German soul. We are the heroes&mdash;the
+others are hucksters.<a name="FNanchor_18_18" id="FNanchor_18_18"></a><a href="#Footnote_18_18" class="fnanchor">[18]</a> To be German means to do a thing for its own
+sake. We are a "race of thinkers and poets." We have Culture, the
+others merely Civilization.<a name="FNanchor_19_19" id="FNanchor_19_19"></a><a href="#Footnote_19_19" class="fnanchor">[19]</a> We alone are free&mdash;the others are
+merely undisciplined (or, as the case may be, enslaved). All this we
+owe to the favour of God and our education <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[84]</a></span>under the (here fill in
+Prussian, Bavarian or Saxon) reigning House, which all the world
+envies us. Clearly therefore we are destined for world-dominion; we
+have only to fall-to.</p>
+
+<p>In one of these phrases, about doing things for their own sake,<a name="FNanchor_20_20" id="FNanchor_20_20"></a><a href="#Footnote_20_20" class="fnanchor">[20]</a>
+there is truth. All the more was it for us in particular a vice and a
+sign of degradation to let ourselves be dazzled by the shadowless
+transparency-picture of glorification that was offered to us. There
+were interests concealed in the game, and much lack of moral fibre,
+all of which we passed over in silence; it was out of place in our
+festal oratory.</p>
+
+<p>It would be an equal or even a greater vice, only reversed, if we were
+now to despair of ourselves. Moderation was what we needed then; what
+we need now is vigorous and conscious self-possession. To-day it is no
+easy and attractive business to bring our strong qualities to the
+surface; it implies an amount of conviction which it is hard to
+attain, and self-depreciation means a pitiful faint-heartedness. But
+all sham goods offered by babblers, by selfish interests, prophets of
+hate and commercial travellers must go overboard.</p>
+
+<p>We have never been a "race of thinkers and poets," any more than the
+Jews were a race of prophets, the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[85]</a></span> French and Dutch a race of
+painters, or K&ouml;nigsberg a city of Pure Reason.<a name="FNanchor_21_21" id="FNanchor_21_21"></a><a href="#Footnote_21_21" class="fnanchor">[21]</a> The old German
+upper classes have, in three well-defined epochs, had force enough to
+throw up individuals of mighty endowments for music, poetry and
+philosophy; the former lower-classes, whose blood runs in nine-tenths
+of our present population, have scarcely contributed anything to these
+glories. They have in recent years shown themselves thoroughly
+industrious, plastic, apt for discipline, order-loving, intelligent,
+practical, honourable, trustworthy, warm-hearted, prudent and helpful,
+and adapted beyond all expectation to the mechanization of life and
+industry; of their power to produce talent we know little, except
+perhaps in the domain of research and technique, which are less a test
+of creative energy than of applied knowledge and methodical assiduity.</p>
+
+<p>The important question as to what relations exist between the number,
+quality and greatness of individual endowments and genius on the one
+side, and the character of a people on the other, is still unexplored
+and very obscure, although we possess a science which calls itself by
+the quite unjustified name of national psychology.</p>
+
+<p>While on one side we have rarely made any serious study of national
+characteristics, but have confused them with achievements of culture
+and habits of life that mostly proceeded from a thin upper stratum<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[86]</a></span>
+alone, on the other we have as a rule tacitly set down individual
+endowment (with a strong emphasis on our own) as illustrations of
+national character. In this respect, too, we showed that laxity in
+proving what we wanted to prove which abounds everywhere from the
+point where calculation with things weighable and measurable leaves
+off, and judgment begins. We think it an established fact&mdash;in
+accordance with just this arbitrary test of genius&mdash;that genius
+belongs <i>par excellence</i> to the so-called blonde blue-eyed races of
+the earth. The fact that among the score or two of geniuses of all
+ages who have been determining forces in the world it is hardly
+possible to find a single example of this blue-blonde race, but they
+can be proved to have been almost all dark, did not affect the
+question. On the other hand the English, whose influence on culture
+has been surpassed by none, had their genius-forming power, in which
+they are actually deficient, seriously over-estimated. It was the
+reverse with the Jews. The fact that in spite of their small numbers
+they have produced more of world-moving genius than all other nations
+put together, and that from them has proceeded the whole
+transcendental ethics of the Western world, has not prevented their
+being pronounced wholly incapable of creative endowment.</p>
+
+<p>We shall put aside all this rubbish and for the present decline to go
+into theoretic questions. Great individual endowments are related to
+national character&mdash;to the character of the mind, not that of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[87]</a></span>
+will, which must be considered apart&mdash;as the blossom to the plant or
+the crystal to the mother-solution; to determine the one from the
+other needs something more than a mechanical generalization. There is
+no such thing as a "race of thinkers and poets." This, however, we can
+say: that a people which begets great musicians, poets and
+philosophers is one which devotes itself to moods and to visions,
+while another, as for instance the Latin group, which creates forms
+and standards, is one that at the cost of mood and vision, incarnates
+its sense of will.</p>
+
+<p>Devotion, receptivity, the feeling for Nature, comprehension, the
+passion for truth, meditative depth, spiritual love, are the fairest
+gifts that can be granted to any people, and to us they have been
+granted. But they exclude other gifts, which stand to-day in high
+repute, and which we affect in vain. They exclude the capacity for
+shaping forms and standards, the aptitude for rule, if not even for
+self-government; in any case the qualities which go to the creation of
+nationalities and civilizations.</p>
+
+<p>It is no mere accident that in not one of the hundredfold provinces of
+life, from art to military organization, from State-craft to
+jointstock-companies, from saintliness to table-utensils, have we
+Germans discovered a single essential and enduring form. And again,
+there is scarcely one of these forms which we have not filled with a
+richer and more living content than those who first discovered it.</p>
+
+<p>For whoever bears the All within himself can be<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[88]</a></span> satisfied with no
+form; he finds in himself at once vision and reality, thesis and
+antithesis. He seeks for a synthesis, but all form is one-sided. He
+conceives, chooses, comprehends, fulfils, breaks in pieces and throws
+away. He remains a unity in constant change, like the year as it
+proceeds day by day, hour by hour, and no two of them alike. He does
+not force things&mdash;out of respect for creation.</p>
+
+<p>But he who makes forms must use force. He makes himself the standard
+and comprehends himself only. Everything else, everything that is
+extra-normal, unconformable, unintelligible and not understood remains
+for him something alien, trivial, inferior, or negligible. The maker
+of forms can rule, even by compulsion, without being a tyrant, for he
+is convinced of the value of what he brings and knows no doubts. He is
+ruthless, yet only up to a certain limit, which is determined by his
+sense of the inferiority of the other. The man who rejects forms,
+however, cannot rule; the very penetration into the domain of another
+seems to him a wrong to his own, the basis of which is recognition and
+allowance. If he is forced to penetrate, he loses all balance, for in
+wrong-doing he understands no gradations. Similarly he is incapable of
+civilizing, for he cannot take forms seriously; he violates them
+himself&mdash;how can he impose them upon others? In his inmost soul he is
+na&iuml;ve, for creation is seething in him; but in execution he is
+conscious, critical, eclectic and methodical, in order that he may be
+completely<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[89]</a></span> master of the one-sided element into which he has forced
+himself. The man of forms, however, is, in his soul, rigid and
+conscious, but in action na&iuml;ve, because he does not know the meaning
+of doubt.</p>
+
+<p>Forms grow up like natural products in the course of centuries. They
+assume the existence of uniformity in individuals, fathers reproduced
+in sons with scarcely a variation. Egypt, Rome, and that modern land
+of antiquity, France, are examples. For generations France has been
+content with three architectural styles, which are really one and the
+same style. The changes in the language are hardly perceptible. The
+principal domestic utensils are almost the same as they were a hundred
+years ago, fashion is merely a vibration. Foreign living languages are
+little studied, their spirit is not understood, the pronunciation
+remains French. Foreign countries are looked on as a kind of
+menagerie; everything is measured by the native standard. Every one is
+a judge of everything, for he holds fast to the norm. Within the norm
+the French are keenly sensitive, their feeling for relations is very
+sure; the slightest deviation is observed. To doubt the validity of
+the norm is out of question; one might as well criticize the sun and
+moon as the style of Louis Quatorze.</p>
+
+<p>The final judgment of the British in the affairs of life is "this is
+English," "that is not English." Foreign lands are a subject of
+geographical and ethnological study. The whole mighty will of a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[90]</a></span>
+nation is here concentrated in the form of civilizing political
+energy. Every private inclination is a fad, and even fads have their
+fixed forms. An offence against table-manners is banned like an attack
+on the Church. Nature is mastered with consideration and intelligence,
+whether the problem is the breeding of sheep or the ruling of India.</p>
+
+<p>The assurance, self-command and art of ruling which spring from forms
+are lacking in Germany. Our strongest spirits are formless; they are
+eclectic or titanic, whether they despise forms or choose forms or
+burst forms. We have three homes between which we hover&mdash;Germany, the
+earth, and heaven. We comprehend and honour everything&mdash;every land,
+every man, every art and every language; and we are fertilized by what
+is foreign; on the lower level we enjoy it and imitate it, on the
+higher it spurs us to creation. We are docile, and do not hate what
+rules and determines us, only what contracts us and makes us
+one-sided; an autocratic government may be tolerated, even venerated,
+if it knows how to be national and popular and does not interfere with
+our elbow-room.</p>
+
+<p>We have already touched on the volitional character<a name="FNanchor_22_22" id="FNanchor_22_22"></a><a href="#Footnote_22_22" class="fnanchor">[22]</a> of the German
+people, a character which has been gravely altered by the subsidence
+of the ancient upper stratum of society, and by long privations and
+miseries. The Germans of Tacitus were a freedom-loving <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[91]</a></span> and turbulent
+people; of this not a trace is left. Any one who did not recognize
+under the autocracy that we care little for self-determination and
+self-responsibility may do so under the revolution, which merely
+arises out of an alteration in external conditions. We are not even
+yet a nation, but an association of interests and oppositions; a
+German <i>Irredenta</i>, as it has been and unfortunately will be shown, is
+an impossible conception. And since we are not a nation and represent
+no national idea, but only an association of households, it follows
+that our influence abroad can only be commercial, and not civilizing
+or propagandist.</p>
+
+<p>From this side we are able to understand the German history of the
+past two centuries. Prussia, an extra-German Power, grown up in
+colonized territory, organized itself into a bureaucratic, feudal and
+military State. It succeeded in mastering half Germany and in loosely
+linking up the remainder. By rigid organization, by its federated
+Princes and by the strongest army in the world, it supplied the place
+of the national character and will which were wanting. Mechanism was
+pressed into the service, and bore the colossus into a period of
+blooming prosperity. The system looked like a nation; in reality it
+was an autocratic association of economic interests bristling with
+arms. It was incapable of developing national forces and ideas, not
+even in relation to its settlers in other lands; it was confined to
+commercial competition; weak alliances were<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[92]</a></span> relied on to secure the
+position externally; self-government was not granted, because the
+military organization was the pivot of the whole system; the
+drill-sergeant tone at home had its counterpart in the brusqueness of
+our foreign policy; enmities grew and organized themselves, and the
+catastrophe came.</p>
+
+<p>For character of will we had substituted discipline. But discipline is
+not nationality; it is an external instrument, and when it breaks it
+leaves&mdash;nothing. Now since the Prussian system which called itself by
+the medi&aelig;val title of the German Empire was, in spite of the
+professors, no popular, national fabric, but a dynastic, military and
+compulsory association, with a constitutional fa&ccedil;ade, the interested
+nationalist elements took on the repulsive and dishonourable forms
+that we all know. The most deeply interested parties, cool and
+conscious of their strength, the Prussian representatives of the
+military and official nobility, avoided all declamation and only
+interfered when their interests were endangered. The greater
+industrialists sold themselves. A higher stratum of the middle-classes
+composed of certain circles of higher teachers and subaltern officials
+took the business seriously, and in order to escape from their drab
+existence created that atmosphere of hatred of Socialists, telegrams
+of homage, and megalomania, which made us intellectually and morally
+impossible before the world. Instead of the Germany of thought and
+spirit one saw suddenly a brutal, stupid community of interested
+persons, greedy for power, who gave<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[93]</a></span> themselves out as that Germany
+whose very opposite they were; who, unable to point to any
+achievements, any thought of their own, prided themselves on an
+imaginary race-unity which their very appearance contradicted; who had
+no ideas beyond rancour; the slaverings of league-oratory and
+subordination, and who with these properties, which they were pleased
+to call <i>Kultur</i>, undertook to bring blessing to the world.</p>
+
+<p>It was no wonder; for our slavonicized association of interests, bent
+on subordination and on gain, does not produce ideas; its possessions
+were power, mechanism and money; whoever was impressed by these things
+believed they must impress others too, and so the conclusion was
+arrived at that all the great spirits of the past had lived only to
+make this triple combination supreme. Wagner had formed the bridge
+between the old Germany and the new&mdash;armoured cruisers and giant guns
+appeared as a free development from Kant and Hegel, and the word
+<i>Kultur</i>, a word which Germany ought to prohibit by law for thirty
+years to come, masked the confusion of thought.</p>
+
+<p>To discover now, after our downfall, that Germany ought never to have
+carried on a continental let alone a world policy, would be a pitiful
+example of <i>esprit d'escalier</i>. It is true that it was our right, and
+even our duty, by our intellect, our ethics and our greatness, to
+carry it on; but the weakness of our character on the side of Will was
+the cause of its failure.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[94]</a></span> Bismarck, a born realist in politics, grown
+up in the Prussian tradition, trained in the diplomatic tradition by
+Gortschakov, made the calamitous choice. He made us safe for certain
+decades; but it was only an intuitive policy in the manner of
+Stein<a name="FNanchor_23_23" id="FNanchor_23_23"></a><a href="#Footnote_23_23" class="fnanchor">[23]</a> that could have saved us for centuries.</p>
+
+<p>In the midst of self-administered and self-determining nations the
+German people, from lack of self-consciousness, indolence of will and
+innate servility remained under a patriarchal system of government, a
+minor under tutelage of divinely-appointed dynasties and ruling
+classes. In the childish movement of the educated bourgeoisie of 1848
+Bismarck saw only the helpless and Utopian, but not the symbolic side,
+which Marx might have shown him. His practical spirit judged with a
+smile that a handful of peasantry and grenadiers would suffice to
+bring to reason this dynastically-minded people. It was only too true;
+although the bulk of this people had not for thirty years been formed
+by the peasant class, and although he himself had learned how to make
+use of the power of the modern industrial State in peasant disguise.
+And so he refused to allow his countrymen to come of age; broke, with
+the superiority of genius, and with the weapons of success and
+authority, the incompetent forces that resisted him; created, by <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[95]</a></span> the
+magical mechanism of his Constitution, the German Empire as a mere
+continuation of the Prussian bureaucratic State reinforced, by the
+self-glorifying dynasties, with the whole volume of the still existing
+and justly appreciated habit of obedience; and annihilated for a
+generation every aspiration for freedom by branding it with the stain
+of moral and social depravity. Our political worthlessness and
+immaturity came to its climax in the race of office-climbers in 1880,
+which in 1900 gave place to the battle-fleet patriotism of the great
+capitalists.</p>
+
+<p>A self-administered and a self-determining nation&mdash;such as the nations
+of the world, except ourselves, Austria and Russia, were, on the
+whole, at the turn of the century&mdash;would have been able to carry on a
+sound and steadfast policy in economics and public affairs, and to
+enjoy the confidence of the world, as little begrudged as America. On
+the other hand, a dangerous warship, armed upon an unexampled scale,
+given to backward movements and commanded by an uncontrollable sovran
+dilettante, could only expect sooner or later to be expelled from the
+harbour of the nations. History is apt to overdo it, especially when
+corruption has gone on too long; with every year that passed the doom
+became more certain; instead of being expelled, we were annihilated.</p>
+
+<p>That four years of hunger, a lost war and a military revolt at last
+set us free, does not betoken any change of character; and when to-day
+a servile and facile Press lauds our wretched and idealess
+Constitution<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[96]</a></span> as the finest in the world, that gives us no assurance
+of its power to endure. Understanding is no substitute for character,
+but it is at any rate a step towards the goal; and if it is once
+understood that other measures are possible, and if, out of this
+period, certain writings and thoughts shall survive&mdash;and survive they
+will&mdash;then at any rate we may still be weak, but we shall be no longer
+blind.</p>
+
+<p>It might be possible at the outset of our journey towards strength of
+will that we should grope our way slowly&mdash;very slowly&mdash;back to the old
+problems of power. It does not matter if we do. Before we get there,
+the world will be changed, and will be pregnant with new thoughts. Let
+us fulfil the duties for which Germany was made what it is. Let us go
+in quest of the idea and the faculty that are laid upon us; let us do
+this in order to live, to recover our health, to shape ourselves anew,
+to remain a People, to become a Nation, to create a future and to
+serve the world.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[97]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_17_17" id="Footnote_17_17"></a><a href="#FNanchor_17_17"><span class="label">[17]</span></a> Geistigkeit. This is a difficult word to translate. It
+sometimes means merely intellectuality, sometimes in addition (as
+here) all that is implied in the phrase, "Ye know not what manner of
+spirit (&#959;&#953;&#959;&#965; &#960;&#957;&#949;&#965;&#956;&#945;&#964;&#959;&#962;
+) ye are of."</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_18_18" id="Footnote_18_18"></a><a href="#FNanchor_18_18"><span class="label">[18]</span></a> Referring to Werner Sombart's war-book, <i>H&auml;ndler und
+Helden</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_19_19" id="Footnote_19_19"></a><a href="#FNanchor_19_19"><span class="label">[19]</span></a> <i>Cf.</i> Thomas Mann's remarkable book on the real
+significance of the war: <i>Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen</i> (1918).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_20_20" id="Footnote_20_20"></a><a href="#FNanchor_20_20"><span class="label">[20]</span></a> Sachlichkeit. Rathenau seems to have in mind the German
+feeling for disinterested study and research as illustrated, for
+instance, by the fact that when the German Government heard of the
+genius of Einstein they brought him to Berlin with a salary of nearly
+&pound;1000 a year and no duties except to think. Modern bigotry has
+expelled him.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_21_21" id="Footnote_21_21"></a><a href="#FNanchor_21_21"><span class="label">[21]</span></a> Where Kant lived and taught, and published his <i>Kritik
+der reinen Vernunft</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_22_22" id="Footnote_22_22"></a><a href="#FNanchor_22_22"><span class="label">[22]</span></a> As opposed to the inward, intellectual and spiritual
+character.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_23_23" id="Footnote_23_23"></a><a href="#FNanchor_23_23"><span class="label">[23]</span></a> Stein was the chief leader of Prussia from the
+Frederician into the modern era. His ministry of reform by which a
+peasant-proprietary was established, and municipal institutions
+created, lasted only from September 1807 to November 1808.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2><a name="X" id="X"></a>X</h2>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">On</span> balance it seems that the endowments of the German people work out
+as follows:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>High qualities of intellect and heart. Ethics and mentality normal.
+Originative will-power and independent activity, weak.</p>
+
+<p>We give our devotion freely, and the heart rules in action. Our
+feelings are genuine and powerful. We have courage and endurance. Led
+by sentiment rather than by inspiration. We create no forms, are
+self-forgetful, seek no responsibility, obey rather than rule. In
+obedience we know no limit, and never question what is imposed upon
+us.</p>
+
+<p>Of its own accord the German people would never have adopted an ideal
+of force. It was imposed on us by the idolaters of the great
+war-machine and those who gained by it; even Bismarck did not share
+it.</p>
+
+<p>We are not competent to form an ideal of civilization, for the sense
+of unity, will to leadership, and formative energy are lacking to us.
+We have no political mission for the arrangement of other people's
+affairs, for we cannot arrange our own; we do not lead a full life,
+and are politically unripe.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[98]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>We are endowed as no other people is for a mission of the spirit. Such
+a mission was ours till a century ago; we renounced it, because
+through political slackness of will-power we fell out of step; we did
+not keep pace with the other nations in internal political
+development, and, instead, devoted ourselves to the most far-reaching
+developments of mechanism and to their counterpart in bids for power.
+It was Faust, lured away from his true path, cast off by the
+Earth-Spirit, astray among witches, brawlers and alchemists.</p>
+
+<p>But the Faust-soul of Germany is not dead. Of all peoples on the earth
+we alone have never ceased to struggle with ourselves. And not with
+ourselves alone, but with our d&aelig;mon, our God. We still hear within
+ourselves the All, we still expand in every breath of creation. We
+understand the language of things, of men and of peoples. We measure
+everything by itself, not by us; we do not seek our own will, but the
+truth. We are all alike and yet all different; each of us is a
+wanderer, a brooder, a seeker. Things of the spirit are taken
+seriously with us; we do not make them serve our lives, we serve them
+with ours.</p>
+
+<p>"And you dare to say this, in the face of all the brutalizing and
+bemiring that we experience&mdash;the profiteering and gormandizing, the
+abject submissiveness, the shameless desertions, the apathy, the
+insincerity, the heartlessness and mindlessness of our day?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[99]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Yes, I dare to say it, for I believe it and I know it. The soul of the
+German people lies still in the convulsions and hallucinations of its
+slow recovery. It is recovery not alone from the war, but from
+something worse, its hundred-years' alienation from itself. The
+much-ridiculed choice of our old romantic unheraldic colours, black,
+red and gold, instead of the bodiless and soulless colours under which
+we waged the war,<a name="FNanchor_24_24" id="FNanchor_24_24"></a><a href="#Footnote_24_24" class="fnanchor">[24]</a> was, among the whirling follies of the time, a
+faint symbolic movement of our better mind. We must reunite ourselves
+with the days before we ceased to be Germans and became Berliners.</p>
+
+<p>What we need is Spirit. The whole world needs it, no more and no less
+than we do, but will never create it. History knows why it decided for
+Versailles and the Hall of Mirrors. Not mechanism alone, with its
+retinue of nationalism and imperialism, is now again and for the last
+time to be glorified; no, the whole Franco-British policy of
+acquisition mounts up even to the throne of the Sun-king, and it is
+seriously believed that it will govern the destinies of the world for
+centuries to come. An inconceivable, and, in its monstrous irony,
+unsurpassable drama, which is put forward as the introduction to the
+great era. The bourgeois conscience of the West <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[100]</a></span> has no inkling of
+what it means. To this conscience, the war was a huge violation of
+decency, contrived by bandits; its victory is the final triumph of a
+capitalist, rationalistic civilization; the torch lit in the East
+means murder and incendiarism, and the upward migration of the people
+from the depths is to it invisible.</p>
+
+<p>No; it is not here that the spirit of the future is being formed. One
+may discover further ingenious devices, lightning-conductors to
+mitigate the stroke; but gently or violently a natural force will have
+its way, and the new earth which it is preparing needs new seed.</p>
+
+<p>That we have been given the faculty to shape a new spirit does not
+imply that we are at liberty to choose whether we shall do it or not.
+Even if it were not for our life's sake&mdash;even if it were against our
+life&mdash;still we must obey. But it <i>is</i> for our life's sake, as we have
+seen, and as it is indeed obvious, for every organism can live only by
+fulfilling the purpose of its being.</p>
+
+<p>And now we have got to a very dangerous place&mdash;a place where the usual
+moral peroration lies in wait for us&mdash;that German peroration which
+announces universal redemption, and immediately, on that lofty note,
+closes the discussion. Fatherland, Morality, Humanity, Labour,
+Courage, Confidence&mdash;we all know how it goes, the writer has written
+something fine, the reader has read something fine; emotion on both
+sides, little conviction on either.</p>
+
+<p>It appears, then, that I have just been writing<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[101]</a></span> something extremely
+suspect. Has the reader followed me through five-and-thirty of these
+difficult folios in order to arrive in the end at that very everyday
+term, Spirit?<a name="FNanchor_25_25" id="FNanchor_25_25"></a><a href="#Footnote_25_25" class="fnanchor">[25]</a> Is there any term in commoner use, and what are we
+to think about it? Softly&mdash;there is worse to come! The next word is
+still more dubious, philistinishly so, in fact&mdash;the word Culture.<a name="FNanchor_26_26" id="FNanchor_26_26"></a><a href="#Footnote_26_26" class="fnanchor">[26]</a>
+I cannot help it&mdash;we must pass on by way of these everyday
+conceptions. We must get through the crowd, where hack-phrases elbow
+us. Any journey you may take, though it were to Tibet, must begin at
+the Berlin Central Railway Station. What is wrong with these popular
+phrases is not that they start from an everyday conception, but that
+they remain content with it, and do not think it out to the end.</p>
+
+<p>Our task, therefore, stated in the most general terms, is to make
+actually spiritual a people which is capable of spirituality. And
+since spirituality cannot be propped up by any external thrust, by
+sermons, newspaper articles, leagues, or propaganda, but must be
+associated with life and developed out of life, so the organic process
+and the condition of life to which it leads is called Culture.</p>
+
+<p>It is only with deep reluctance and after long search that I have
+written down this beautiful word, a word now worn almost beyond
+recognition. Can <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[102]</a></span>we find our way back to its application and
+significance? Even when it is not drawn out with a futile prefix<a name="FNanchor_27_27" id="FNanchor_27_27"></a><a href="#Footnote_27_27" class="fnanchor">[27]</a>
+one can hardly detect its pure meaning by reason of the many
+overtones. The school, if possible the university, some French and
+English, the rules about I and Me, visiting-cards, shirt-cuffs,
+foreign phrases, top-hats, table-manners: these are some of the
+overtones that make themselves heard when we talk of a cultured man,
+or rather as they have it a cultured gentleman. A hundred years ago,
+as the word implies, we understood by culture the unfolding and the
+full possession of innate bodily, spiritual and moral forces. In this
+sense Goethe showed us the two fraternal figures formed after his own
+image: Faust the richer, and the poorer Wilhelm Meister, striving for
+culture.</p>
+
+<p>The ideal which hovers before us is not one of education, not even one
+of knowledge, although both education and knowledge enter into it; it
+is an ideal of the Will. It will not be easy to convey the breadth and
+the boundless range which we are to attach to this conception. That it
+is not an airy figment is clear from the fact that for centuries the
+Greeks, with full consciousness, adopted as their highest law (though
+directed to a somewhat different end) that impulse of the will which
+they called <i>Kalokagathia</i>.<a name="FNanchor_28_28" id="FNanchor_28_28"></a><a href="#Footnote_28_28" class="fnanchor">[28]</a></p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[103]</a></span></p><p>From one who has introduced the conception of mechanism into German
+thought, who has rescued the conception of the soul from the hands of
+the psychologists and brought it back to its primal meaning, who has
+written so much about soulless intellectualism, and has put forward
+the empire of the soul as the goal of humanity, it is not to be
+expected that he should preach any mechanical kind of culture, or
+indeed any that it is possible to acquire by learning.</p>
+
+<p>How culture is to be produced we shall see; the first thing necessary
+is that it should be willed.</p>
+
+<p>Willed it must be, in a sense and with a strength of purpose and a
+force of appreciation of which we to-day, when the ages of faith, of
+the Reformation, of the German classics, and the wars of liberation,
+lie so far behind us, have no idea at all.</p>
+
+<p>When the current conception of intellectual culture so much prized in
+family, society and business life, and tricked out with criticisms of
+style, with historical data and incidents of travel is justly
+ridiculed, then the will to complete cultivation of the body, the
+intellect and the soul of the people must be so strong that all
+questions of convenience, of enjoyment, of prestige and of material
+interests must sink far into the background. This word must sound so
+that all who hear it can look in each other's eyes with a full mutual
+understanding and without the slightest sense of ambiguity; just as
+they do in Japan when the name of the common head of all families, the
+Mikado,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[104]</a></span> is named. There must be one thing in Germany and it must be
+this thing, which is altogether out of reach of the yawning, blinking
+and grinning scepticism of the coffee-house, and of the belching and
+growling of the tavern. Any man who puts this thing aside in favour of
+his class-ideas, or his speculations in lard, or his dividends, or the
+demands of his Union, must understand that he is doing something as
+offensive as if he went out in public without washing himself.</p>
+
+<p>The conception of Culture as our true and unique faculty must be so
+profoundly grasped that in public life and legislation it must have
+the first word and the last. Though we become as poor as church-mice
+we must stake our last penny on this, and tune up our education and
+instruction, our models and outlook, our motives and claims, our
+achievement and our atmosphere, to so high a point that any one coming
+into Germany shall feel that he is entering into a new age.</p>
+
+<p>Society must be penetrated by this conception. Those classes which
+already possess something resembling it&mdash;such as training, education,
+experience, tradition, outlook, good breeding&mdash;must pour out with both
+hands what they have to dispense; not in the way of endowments,
+conventicles, lectures and patronizing visits, but in quiet,
+self-sacrificing, personal service.</p>
+
+<p>All this, of course, cannot be done without the free response of the
+other side. The devoted attempts<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[105]</a></span> which have been made, especially in
+England, and for some years with us too, to win this response by long
+and unselfish solicitation were destined to remain merely the mission
+of individual lives, for they were not supported by the will of the
+community as a whole; it rather ran counter to them. A Peace of God
+must be proclaimed, not as between the Haves and the Have-nots, not
+between the proletariat and the capitalists, not between the so-called
+cultured classes and the uncultured, but between those who are ready
+for a mutual exchange of experience, a give-and-take of their
+tradition on both sides. Not an exchange on business principles, such
+as propaganda in satisfaction of demands, or curiosity on one side for
+a new pastime on the other, but a covenant. This, however, is only
+practicable if the class-war, as an end in itself, is put a stop to.</p>
+
+<p>The great change itself cannot be come by so cheaply; it demands other
+assumptions, of which we shall have something to say later. But the
+attitude and temper, the recognition of the task, could not be better
+introduced than through the mutual service of the two social strata.</p>
+
+<p>We have still at our disposal, handed on from the past, certain
+organized methods of investigation and administration. We now need
+chairs and institutes of research, not for the trivial business of
+popular enlightenment and lectures, but for the study and
+investigation of the needs of national culture, the idea which must
+now take the place of national<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[106]</a></span> defence. We shall have need of central
+authorities, not, like the late Ministries of Culture skimping the
+scanty endowment of the Board Schools, but doing the work of German
+education, progress, and interchange of labour.<a name="FNanchor_29_29" id="FNanchor_29_29"></a><a href="#Footnote_29_29" class="fnanchor">[29]</a></p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[107]</a></span></h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_24_24" id="Footnote_24_24"></a><a href="#FNanchor_24_24"><span class="label">[24]</span></a> Black, red and gold were originally the colours of a
+students' Corps in Frankfort. They were adopted as the colours of the
+abortive German Federation of 1848, apparently under a mistaken idea
+that they represented the colours of the ancient Germanic Empire. The
+colours of the Empire of 1870 were the Prussian black and white, with
+the addition of red.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_25_25" id="Footnote_25_25"></a><a href="#FNanchor_25_25"><span class="label">[25]</span></a> Geist.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_26_26" id="Footnote_26_26"></a><a href="#FNanchor_26_26"><span class="label">[26]</span></a> Bildung. It is as difficult in English as it is in
+German to render in one word exactly what the author is thinking of.
+In its literal sense Bildung implies a shaping and formative action.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_27_27" id="Footnote_27_27"></a><a href="#FNanchor_27_27"><span class="label">[27]</span></a> Ausbildung.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_28_28" id="Footnote_28_28"></a><a href="#FNanchor_28_28"><span class="label">[28]</span></a> A harmony of character, compounded of beauty and
+goodness.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_29_29" id="Footnote_29_29"></a><a href="#FNanchor_29_29"><span class="label">[29]</span></a> Arbeitsausgleich. The meaning of this will be apparent
+later.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2><a name="XI" id="XI"></a>XI</h2>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Some</span> decades ago the conscience of middle-class society in England was
+stirred. The result was Toynbee Hall and the Settlements-movement,
+which afterwards found praiseworthy counterparts in Germany. Society
+had begun to understand the wrong which it had done to its brothers,
+the proletariat, whom it had robbed of mind, and offered them instead
+soul-destroying, mechanical labour. Then choice spirits arose who
+dedicated their whole lives to the service of their brothers. This
+great and noble work did much to soften pain and hatred, and here and
+there many a soul was saved by it; but it could not act as it was
+intended to act, because it could not become what it imagined itself
+to be.</p>
+
+<p>It ought to have been, and believed itself to be, a simple and obvious
+piece of love-service, a pure interchange of spiritual possessions
+between class and class, no condescending pity or educative mission.
+It was a noble and a splendid error; the movement retained the form of
+sacrifice and benefaction. On both sides social feeling was
+indifferent to it, or even hostile. What one hand gave, a thousand
+others took back; what one hand received,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[108]</a></span> a thousand others rejected.
+The collective conscience of a class had never been stirred, it was
+merely that the conscience of certain members of upper-class society
+had sent out envoys; it had not moved as a body. Individuals were
+ready to sacrifice themselves, but the conditions of labour remained
+unchanged.</p>
+
+<p>So long as a general wrong is allowed to stand, it gives the lie to
+every individual effort. The wrong becomes even more bitter because it
+loses its unconsciousness&mdash;men know it for wrong, and do not amend it.
+For this reason a second movement of importance, that of the People's
+High Schools, which has created in Denmark the most advanced
+peasant-class in existence, can achieve no social reform in lands
+cloven by proletarianism. If in addition to this the High School
+movement should depart from its original conception, that of a
+temporary community of life between the teachers and the taught, and
+should, instead of this, resolve itself into a lecture-institution,
+then the danger arises that what is offered will be disconnected
+matter, intended for entertainment, and without any basis of real
+knowledge, something commonly called half-culture which is worse than
+unculture, and is more properly described as misculture.</p>
+
+<p>No work of the charitable type can bring about the reconciliation of
+classes or be a substitute for popular education. The reconciliation
+of classes, however, even if it were attainable, is by no means<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[109]</a></span> our
+goal, but rather the abolition of classes, and our ultimate object is
+not popular education but popular culture. We do not intend to give
+with one hand and take back with the other, we shall not condemn a
+brother-people to dullness and quicken a few chosen individuals; no,
+we mean to go to the root of the evil, to break down the monopoly of
+culture, and to create a new people, united and cultured throughout.</p>
+
+<p>But the root of the trouble lies in the conditions of labour. It is an
+idle dream to imagine that out of that soulless subdivision of labour
+which governs our mechanical methods of production, the old
+handicrafts can ever be developed again. Short of some catastrophic
+depopulation which shall restore the medi&aelig;val relation between the
+area of the soil and the numbers that occupy it, the subdivision of
+labour will have to stand, and so long as it stands no man will
+complete his job from start to finish&mdash;he will only do a section of
+it; at best, and assuming the highest mechanical development, it will
+be a work of supervision. But mindless and soulless work no man can do
+with any joy. The terrible fact about the mechanization of industry is
+that productive work, the elementary condition of life, the very form
+of existence, which fills more than half of each man's waking day, is
+by it made hated and hateful. It degrades the industrious man,
+thrilling with energy, into a work-shy slacker&mdash;for what else does it
+mean that all social conflicts culminate in the demand for<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[110]</a></span> a
+shortening of the hours of work? For the peasant, the research-worker,
+the artist, the working day is never long enough; for the artisan, who
+calls himself <i>par excellence</i> a "worker," it can never be too short.</p>
+
+<p>The advance of technical invention will make it possible in the end to
+transform all mechanical work into supervision. But the process will
+be long and partial, we cannot wait till it is completed, especially
+as times will come when technical knowledge will stand still, or even,
+it may be, go back. Any one who knows in his own flesh what mechanical
+work is like, who knows the feeling of hanging with one's whole soul
+on the creeping movement of the minute-hand, the horror that seizes
+him when a glance at the watch shows that the eternity which has
+passed has lasted only ten minutes, who has had to measure the day's
+task by the sound of a bell, who kills his lifetime, hour after hour,
+with the one longing that it might die more quickly&mdash;he knows how the
+shortening of the working day, whatever may be put in its place, has
+become for the factory artisan a goal of existence.</p>
+
+<p>But he knows something else as well. He knows the deadliest of all
+wearinesses&mdash;the weariness of the soul. Not the rest when one breathes
+again after wholesome bodily exertion, not the need for relaxation and
+distraction after a great effort of intellect, but an empty stupor of
+exhaustion, like the revulsion after unnatural excess. It is the
+shallowest kind of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[111]</a></span> tea-table chatter to talk about good music,
+edifying and instructive lectures, a cheerful walk in God's free
+Nature, a quiet hour of reading by the lamp, and so on, as a remedy
+for this. Drink, cards, agitation, the cinemas, and dissipation can
+alone flog up the mishandled nerves and muscles, until they wilt again
+under the next day's toil.</p>
+
+<p>The worker has no means of comparison. He does not know what wholesome
+labour feels like. He will never find his way back to work on the
+land, for there he cannot get the counter-poisons which he thinks
+indispensable, and he lacks the organic, ordering mind which
+mechanical employment has destroyed. Even if some did get back, it
+would be in vain, for though agriculture is hungering for thousands of
+hands it cannot absorb millions. The worker has no means of
+comparison; hence his bottomless contempt for intellectual work, the
+results of which he recognizes, but which, in regard to the labour it
+costs, he puts on a level with the idling of the folk whom he sees
+strolling or driving about with their lapdogs in the fashionable
+streets.</p>
+
+<p>The middle-class conscience, and even that of the men of science,
+turns away its face in shameful cowardice from the horror of
+mechanized labour. Apart from the well-meaning &aelig;sthetes who live in
+rural elegance surrounded by all the appliances which mechanism can
+supply, who wrinkle their brows when the electric light goes out, and
+who write pamphlets asking with pained surprise why people cannot
+return<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[112]</a></span> to the old land-work and handicraft, most of us take
+mechanical labour as an unalterable condition of life, and merely
+congratulate ourselves that it is not we who have to do it.</p>
+
+<p>The Utopianist agitators who knowingly or unknowingly suppress the
+essential truth that their world of equality will be a world of the
+bitterest poverty, treat the situation just as lightly. Before them,
+in the future State, hovers the vision of some exceptional literary or
+political appointment. The others may console themselves with the
+thought that in spite of a still deeper degree of poverty, towards
+which they are sinking by their own inactivity, the hell of mechanical
+work, by no means abolished, will probably be a little reduced, so far
+as regards the time they spend in it. The notion that mechanical work
+will be made acceptable and reconciled with intellectual, if only it
+is short enough and properly paid, has never been thought out; it is a
+still-born child of mental lethargy, like all those visions of the
+future that are being held up to our eyes. Try notions like this on
+any other ill&mdash;toothache, for instance! All our rhetoric about
+mechanical work being no ill at all, is ignorant or fraudulent, and if
+nothing further be done than to reduce it to four hours, all our
+social struggles will immediately be concentrated on bringing it down
+to two. The goal of Socialism, so far as it relates to this <i>pons
+asinorum</i> of shortening hours, is simply the right to loaf.</p>
+
+<p>Let us look facts in the face. Mechanical work is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[113]</a></span> an evil in itself,
+and it is one which we never can get rid of by any conceivable
+economic or social transformation. Neither Karl Marx nor Lenin has
+succeeded here, and on this reef will be wrecked every future State
+that may be set up on the basis of current Socialistic ideas. In this
+point lies the central problem of Socialism; undisturbed, as was till
+lately that legendary conception of surplus-value, and bedded, like
+that conception, in a rats'-nest of rhetorical phrases, repeated from
+mouth to mouth and never tested by examination.</p>
+
+<p>The bringing of Mind into the masses, the cultured State,<a name="FNanchor_30_30" id="FNanchor_30_30"></a><a href="#Footnote_30_30" class="fnanchor">[30]</a> which is
+the only possible foundation of a society worthy of humanity, must
+remain unattainable until everything conceivable has been thought out
+and done to alleviate the mischievous operation of this evil, which
+dulls and stupefies the human spirit and which, in itself, is
+ineradicable. No Soviet-policy, no socialization, no property-policy,
+no popular education, nor any other of the catchwords which form <i>ad
+nauseam</i> the monotonous staple of our current discussion of affairs,
+can go to the heart of the problem. Instead we must establish and put
+into practice the principle which I have called that of the
+Interchange of Labour, and which I must now, in broad outline,
+endeavour to explain.</p>
+
+<p>The object of this principle is to bring mind into labour. It
+demands&mdash;since mind cannot be brought into mechanical work beyond a
+certain degree fixed <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[114]</a></span> by technical conditions&mdash;that the day's work as
+a whole shall have a share of it, by means of the exchange and
+association of mental and mechanical employment. Until this principle
+shall have been carried into effect, all true culture of the people
+remains impossible. So long as there is no culture of the people, so
+long must culture remain a monopoly of the classes, and of escapes
+from the masses; so long must society be wanting in equilibrium, a
+union open to breach from every side, and one which, however highly
+its social institutions may be developed, holds down the people to
+forced labour, and destroys culture.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[115]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_30_30" id="Footnote_30_30"></a><a href="#FNanchor_30_30"><span class="label">[30]</span></a> Bildungsstaat.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2><a name="XII" id="XII"></a>XII</h2>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">There</span> is a way by which the day's work can be ennobled, and even have
+mind brought into it,<a name="FNanchor_31_31" id="FNanchor_31_31"></a><a href="#Footnote_31_31" class="fnanchor">[31]</a> on capitalistic lines. Before the War we
+were just about to enter on this path&mdash;America is treading it now. Its
+fundamental condition is a huge increase in general well-being.</p>
+
+<p>The daily wages of the American working-man have risen, as we have
+already remarked, to seven or even ten dollars, corresponding to a
+purchasing power of over a hundred marks. This amounts to so radical a
+removal of all restrictions in domestic economy that one can no longer
+speak of the proletarian condition as existing in the United States. A
+man who drives to his work in his own automobile can satisfy all his
+reasonable needs in the way of recreation and of extending his
+education, he looks at his sectional job (as has not seldom been the
+case in America even in earlier days) with a critical eye, he forms
+his own judgment of its place in the whole, he improves the processes,
+and amuses himself by <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[116]</a></span> being both workman and engineer. (Consider in
+the light of this fact the value of the prophecy that America is
+standing on the brink of Bolshevism!)</p>
+
+<p>In a country whose wealth at this moment&mdash;in consequence of
+war-profits and depreciation of money&mdash;is almost equal to that of the
+rest of the world put together, the process of abolishing
+proletarianism can go forward on capitalistic lines. But we Germans,
+since it is decreed that we shall be among the poorest of the peoples,
+and must begin afresh, and live for the future&mdash;we shall renounce
+without envy the broad path of the old way of thought, the way of
+riches, in order to clear with hard work the new path on which, one
+day, all will have to follow us. The way of Culture is the way to
+which we are pointed, and we have described Interchange of Labour as
+the fundamental condition which enables us to travel it. It is now
+clear that the conception of popular culture is not, after all,
+represented by any of the five-and-twenty idealizing catchwords with
+which we are wont to console ourselves in our elegiac orations, but
+that by it is meant a clearly defined political procedure.</p>
+
+<p>By the principle of Interchange of Labour it is required that every
+employee engaged in mechanical work can claim to do a portion of his
+day's work in intellectual employment; and that every brainworker
+shall be obliged to devote a portion of his day to physical labour.</p>
+
+<p>There are, of course, fixed limits to the application<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[117]</a></span> of this
+principle, on the one side in intellectual, on the other in bodily
+incapacity, as well as in those rare cases where it is recognized that
+the interrupted hours of intellectual work cannot be made good.</p>
+
+<p>We would also establish a year of Labour-Service, to be devoted by the
+whole youth of Germany, of both sexes, to bodily training and work.</p>
+
+<p>The tests of capacity and of the claim to be reckoned as "cultured" is
+not to consist in examinations but in proof of work. Any one who can
+offer some show of claim can demand to be tested, and, if the result
+is favourable, to receive further culture. Thus we shall be taking
+seriously the question of the ascent to higher grades, which, so long
+as it depends on a particular age, or on school certificates, must
+remain on paper.</p>
+
+<p>Let no one say that this testing system is a mere mechanical method,
+that it degrades Culture from its intellectual dignity, and is
+equivalent to the Chinese literary tests for office. True culture is
+distinguished from mere sybaritic &aelig;stheticism in that in some sense or
+other it makes for production. Where there is no talent for art or for
+creative thought, then there remain to be developed the educational
+forces of judgment, or a faculty for the conduct of life, which must
+have their influence.</p>
+
+<p>Different categories of Culture will arise of themselves; not ranks or
+castes or classes, but grades of society, each of which may be
+attained by any one. No one must be able to say that any monopoly of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[118]</a></span>
+culture has barred his way, or that training and testing have been
+denied him. If the culture be genuine it will never look down in
+intellectual arrogance on the stages below it; if it have duties
+associated with it, then he who has rejected the path of ascent, or
+has failed in it, cannot claim to fulfil those duties. Any one who has
+no faculty but that of a glib tongue will find in the multiplicity of
+callings some field for his activity; but the rule of the talker,
+backed by force or not, will at any rate be spared us.</p>
+
+<p>At this point we may hear a voice from the average heart of Socialism
+exclaim: "How is this? Do you call that having no castes? We have just
+begun to shake off the yoke of the capitalists and now are we expected
+to put the cultured in command? This is pure reaction!"</p>
+
+<p>Softly! If this is a case of misunderstanding, we shall clear it up.
+If any scruples still remain, we shall consider them further.</p>
+
+<p>Let us take the misunderstanding first. It is apparently forgotten
+that capitalism ruled by hereditary power. Any one who belonged to
+that circle ruled along with it, whether he were competent to rule or
+not. But culture is not a heritable possession; no one can win it save
+by virtue of a higher spirit and will. He who has this spirit and this
+will, can and will win it. He who wins it is fit for higher
+responsibilities. Is the voice from the average heart answered?</p>
+
+<p>No. It replies: "Heritable or not, what do we<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[119]</a></span> care? We are out for
+equality. Distinctions in culture are a kind of aristocracy."</p>
+
+<p>Now, good heart, you have revealed yourself. What was the meaning of
+your everlasting talk about the ladder for the rise of capacity? I
+shall tell you. The capable man is to toil, and to rise just so far as
+you permit him, namely, till you can possess yourselves of the fruits
+of his labour: then he is to be thrust down, and the loudest mouth is
+to rule. You are not pleased with this interpretation? Neither am I,
+so we are quits.</p>
+
+<p>For of the folly of imagining a society of equals I do not intend to
+speak. The average man, who cannot understand equality of human
+dignity, equality before God, thinks nothing of demanding equality in
+externals, equality in responsibility and vocation. But this sham
+equality is the enemy of the true, for it does not fit man's burden to
+his strength, it creates overburdened, misused natures, driving the
+one to scamped work and hypocrisy, and the other to cynicism. Every
+accidental and inherited advantage must indeed be done away with. But
+if there is any one who, among men equal in external conditions, in
+duties and in claims, demands that they should also be equal in mind,
+in will and in heart&mdash;let him begin by altering Nature!</p>
+
+<p>In remuneration also, that is to say, in the apportionment of
+conditions of work, a mechanical equality would be tantamount to an
+unjust and intolerable inequality in the actual distribution or
+remission of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[120]</a></span> work. Work of the highest class, creative and
+intellectual work&mdash;the most self-sacrificing that is known to man
+because it draws to itself and swallows up a man's whole life,
+including his hours of leisure and recreation&mdash;this work demands
+extreme consideration, in the form of solitude, freedom from
+disturbance, from trivial and distracting cares or occupations, and
+contact with Nature. This kind of consideration is, from the economic
+point of view, an outlay which mechanical work does not require. If
+mechanical and intellectual work are to be placed under the same
+specific conditions, under which the highest standard of output is to
+be maintained and the producers are as far as possible to bear an
+equal burden, then the scale of remuneration must be different.
+Starting from a subsistence minimum it must for intellectual work be
+graded two stages upward, one for the output,<a name="FNanchor_32_32" id="FNanchor_32_32"></a><a href="#Footnote_32_32" class="fnanchor">[32]</a> and one for the
+grade of culture implied.</p>
+
+<p>Women will also be subject to this system of grading whether they
+exercise any vocation outside their homes or not, for society has a
+deep interest in the culture of its mothers, and in external
+incentives to culture women must share equally with men.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[121]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>An intimate sense of association will grow up within each grade of
+culture. This, however, will not impair the general solidarity of the
+people, since no hereditary family egoism can arise. This sense of
+association, renewed with elements that vary from generation to
+generation, and corresponding very much to the relations between
+contemporary artists who spring from different classes or territories,
+will dissolve the relics of the old hereditary sentiment and absorb
+into itself whatever traditional values the latter may possess.</p>
+
+<p>Between the separate grades there will not only be the connexion
+afforded by the living possibilities of free ascent from one to the
+other, but the system of ever-renewed co-operation in rank-and-file at
+the same work will in itself promote culture, tradition, and the
+consciousness of union. We need only recall the old gilds and military
+associations in order to realize what a high degree of manly civic
+consciousness can arise from the visible community of duty and
+achievement. The mechanical worker will become the instructor of his
+temporary comrade and guest, and the latter will in turn widen the
+other's outlook, and emulate him in the development of the processes
+of production. The manual worker will bring to the desk and the
+board-room his freedom from prepossessions and the practical
+experience of his calling; he will learn how to deal with abstractions
+and general ideas; he will gain a respect for intellectual work, and
+will feel the impulse to win<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[122]</a></span> new knowledge and faculty, or to make
+good what he has neglected.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>Two objections remain to be considered and confuted.</p>
+
+<p>First: there are far more places to be filled in mechanical than in
+intellectual employment. Is it possible so to organize the interchange
+of work that every one who desires intellectual employment can find
+it? The answer is: that, whether we like it or not, all work tends
+more and more to take on an administrative character. Just as in
+industry there is ever more talk and less production, so our economic
+life is working itself out through thousands upon thousands of new
+organizations. Industrial Councils, Councils of Workers,
+Gild-Councils, are forming themselves in among the existing agencies
+of administration; and the immediate consequence of this is a
+tremendous drop in production, to be followed later by a more highly
+articulated and more remunerative system of work. It is as if a marble
+statue came to life, and then had to be internally equipped with
+bones, muscles, veins and nerves. Or it resembles the transformation
+of a shabby piece of suburban building-ground: it has to be dug up,
+drained, paved, fenced; and until traffic has poured into it, it
+remains a comfortless and dismal waste.</p>
+
+<p>But the administrative side of our future economic and national life
+demands the creation of so many posts of intellectual work that at
+present there is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[123]</a></span> not the trained <i>personnel</i> to fill it. If the Year
+of Labour-Service is introduced, there will be still more defections
+and gaps to be filled. The rush for intellectual work is more likely
+to be too small than too great.</p>
+
+<p>Let us come to the second objection. Will not confusion be worse
+confounded if there are many who have to fill two jobs, if, in these
+jobs constant exchanges are taking place, if the periods of work are
+brief and subject to untimely interruptions, if time and work are lost
+through never-ending rearrangement?</p>
+
+<p>Assuredly. And any one who starts with the idea of the old high-strung
+work done, as it were, under military discipline, any one who
+cherishes the remotest idea that this system can ever return, in spite
+of the fact that its clamps and springs have been dashed to pieces,
+may well lament these unsettlements. One who starts from the
+fluctuating conditions of our present-day, make-believe labour will
+take organic unsettlements as part of the price to be paid, if they
+only lead in the end to systematic production. But one who weighs the
+fact that the make-believe life of our present economy has not even
+yet reached its final form, will discern in every new transition-form,
+however tedious, the final redemption; in so far, at least, as any
+equilibrium is capable of being restored at all.</p>
+
+<p>The essence of the interchange of labour will, therefore, consist in
+this, that while the distinction<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[124]</a></span> between physical and intellectual
+work will still exist, there will be no distinction between a physical
+and intellectual calling. Until advanced age may forbid, it will be
+open to every man not merely to acquire some ornamental branches of
+knowledge but seriously and with both feet to take his footing in the
+opposite calling to his own.</p>
+
+<p>The different callings will learn to know and respect each other, and
+to understand their respective difficulties. This applies particularly
+to those who call themselves the operative workers.</p>
+
+<p>As soon as hereditary idleness has come to an end and loafing has been
+trampled out, then many a one, who now thinks that mental work is mere
+chattering, will learn through his novitiate at the desk, that
+thinking hurts. If he does not feel himself equal to this kneading and
+rummaging of the brain, he will go back with relief to his workshop;
+he will neither envy nor despise those who are operative workers with
+the brain, and will understand, or at least unconsciously feel, the
+oppositions in human nature and the differences in conditions of life,
+and will know them to be just. He cannot and must not keep himself
+wholly aloof from the elements of mental training; his contact with
+brainworkers will not cease; and thus his complete and passive
+resignation to the domination of ignorant rhetoric will lose its
+charm.</p>
+
+<p>Any man will be respected who contents himself with the lowest
+prescribed measure of culture,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[125]</a></span> who modestly renounces further study,
+and goes back to manual work. But there will be no excuse for those
+who know nothing and can do nothing, but pretend to set everybody
+right; for there will be no monopoly of culture to keep them down, and
+all genuine faculty must come to the test of action.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>To-day there are three classes of social swindlers. First, those who
+live on the community without returning it any service. These are the
+people who live idly on inherited money, and the loafers. Against
+these social legislation must be framed. Secondly, those who
+deliberately practise "ca' canny," and therefore live on the surplus
+work of their fellows. These are the champions of the principle: Every
+one according to his need, no one according to his deed; the
+<i>saboteurs</i> of labour. Against these the remedy lies in the spread of
+intelligence and a just system of remuneration. Thirdly, there are
+those who simulate thought and brain-work while they have nothing to
+give but hack phrases uttered with a glib tongue. Against these worst
+of all swindlers, these sinners against the Spirit, the remedy is
+culture.</p>
+
+<p>And this, in the new Order, is open to every one, young or old, who
+can maintain his foothold in the exercise of intellect, when the
+chance is offered him. He who in his test-exercise reaches a normal
+standard of accomplishment can demand that he shall not be<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[126]</a></span> sent back
+to manual work, but continue to be employed in the same occupation,
+and be further cultivated in whatever direction he desires. At every
+further stage of development a corresponding sphere of activity is to
+be opened to him, up to the point at which the limits of his capacity
+come into sight.</p>
+
+<p>Let no one object that the rush for intellectual work will become
+uncontrollable. Would that it might! For then the country would be so
+highly developed and its methods of work so perfected that there would
+be quite a new relation between the demand for head-work and for
+hand-work. For a long time to come this rush will be far smaller than
+we imagine; for the immediate future it will suffice if the rising
+forces are set free, and the laggard are tranquillized.</p>
+
+<p>But, the Radicals will cry, what an unsocial principle! Have we at
+last, with difficulty, brought it to the point that the accursed
+one-year examination<a name="FNanchor_33_33" id="FNanchor_33_33"></a><a href="#Footnote_33_33" class="fnanchor">[33]</a> is abrogated, and now are we again to be
+condemned according to this so-called standard of culture?</p>
+
+<p>Stay! there is a fallacy here. In our transition period which is still
+quite dominated by the monopoly of culture, I have nothing to say
+against the abrogation of every educational test, even though in a few
+years we shall feel the deeply depressing <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[127]</a></span> effects which will arise
+from the domination of the uncultured.</p>
+
+<p>But the transition period will come to an end. Then every one who
+likes will be able to learn and to execute, and every one who is able
+will wish to do so.</p>
+
+<p>"But supposing one does not wish? May not he be the very one who is
+most capable of achievement? We don't want model pupils."</p>
+
+<p>Nor do I want model pupils. The boy who has learnt nothing may make
+his trial as a man when culture is open to all. But if, as a man, he
+does not care to rack his brains he will be thought none the less of;
+he will merely be offered ordinary work according to his choice.</p>
+
+<p>But those who wish to see responsibility and the destiny of the
+country placed in the hands of men who do not care to rack their
+brains, must not entrench themselves behind social principles, but
+plainly admit that they want for all time to establish the rule of
+demagogy and the vulgarization of intellect. It is not for such a one
+to pass judgment on the mission of Germany.</p>
+
+<p>The way to the German mission, to German culture, which is to be no
+more a culture of the classes but of the people, stands open to all by
+means of the Interchange of Labour. The whole land is as it were a
+single ship's crew; the issues are the same for all. The manual worker
+is no longer kept down by over-fatigue, and the brainworker is no
+longer cut off from the rest of the people.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[128]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The manual worker no longer regards the territory of culture as a sort
+of inaccessible island, but rather as a district which he can visit
+every day and in which he is quite at home. Every one in future will
+start even in school training, and the degree to which his further
+culture may be carried will not be limited by want of money or of
+time, or, above all, of opportunity. He will continually have
+intercourse with men of culture, and in that intercourse he will at
+once give and receive; the habits of thought, the methods and the
+range of intellectual work which are now only the heritage of a few
+will be his own; and the twofold language of the country, the language
+of conceptions and the language of things, will for him be one.</p>
+
+<p>There will be no permanent system of stratification; the energies of
+the people, rising and falling, will be in constant movement and their
+elements will never lose touch. There may be self-tormenting and
+unhappily constituted natures who will hate their own dispositions and
+the destiny they have shaped for themselves&mdash;these aberrations will
+never cease so long as men are men&mdash;but there will be no more hatred
+of class for class, any more than there is in any voluntary
+association of artists or of athletes.</p>
+
+<p>And since culture is to be at once the recognized social aim of the
+country and the personal goal and standard of each individual, the
+struggle for possessions and enjoyments, doubly restrained by public<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[129]</a></span>
+opinion and by deeper insight, will sink into the background.</p>
+
+<p>But the spirit of the land will not resemble any that we know at
+present. As in the Middle Ages, a spiritual power will rule, but it
+will not be imposed from without or above, it will be a creation from
+within. The competition of all will be like that of the best in the
+time of the Renaissance, but it will not be a competition for
+conventional values but for the furthering of life. The country will
+become, as it was in former days, a generous giver, not, however, from
+the lofty eminence of a class set apart, but out of the whole strength
+of the people.</p>
+
+<p>Again, for the first time, the convinced and conscious will of a
+people will be seen to direct itself to a common and recognized goal.
+This is a fact of immeasurable significance, it implies the exercise
+of forces which we only discern on the rare mountain-peaks of history,
+and of which the last example was the French Revolution.</p>
+
+<p>But those dangers of which we have spoken, that hell of a mechanical
+socialism, of institutions and arrangements without sentiment or
+spirit, are done away with, for production has ceased to be merely
+material and formal, it has acquired absolute value and substance.
+Spirit is the only end that sanctifies all means; and it sanctifies
+not by justifying them but by purifying them.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[130]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_31_31" id="Footnote_31_31"></a><a href="#FNanchor_31_31"><span class="label">[31]</span></a> Vergeistigt werden. It is difficult to render this word
+in the sense in which Rathenau uses it; 'intellectualized' does not
+say enough, and 'spiritualized' says a little too much.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_32_32" id="Footnote_32_32"></a><a href="#FNanchor_32_32"><span class="label">[32]</span></a> Assuming that the highest output is reached in the
+particular instance which of course will not be the case with every
+worker whether in the mechanical or intellectual sphere. The author
+appears to be referring to amount, not quality, of output, as the
+latter would be covered by the second clause, relating to grade of
+culture (Bildungsstufe).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_33_33" id="Footnote_33_33"></a><a href="#FNanchor_33_33"><span class="label">[33]</span></a> Referring to the shortening of military service which
+used to be accorded to recruits of a certain educational standard.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr />
+<h2><a name="XIII" id="XIII"></a>XIII</h2>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">As</span> the kinsfolk of a dying man comfort themselves in the death-chamber
+with every little droop in the curve of temperature, although they
+know in their hearts that the hour has come, so our critics flatter
+themselves with the idea that in the end all will come right, if not
+by itself at least with trifling exertion. But it is not so: except by
+the greatest exertion nothing will come right. Our lake-city of
+economics and social order is ripe for collapse, for the piles on
+which it is built are decayed. It is true that it still stands, and
+will be standing for an hour or so, and life goes on in it very much
+as in the days when it was sound. We can choose either to leave it
+alone, and await the downfall of the city, among whose ruins life will
+never bloom again, or we can begin the underpinning of the tottering
+edifice, a process which will last for decades, which will allow no
+peace to any of us, which will be toilsome and dangerous, and will end
+almost imperceptibly, when the ancient city has been transformed into
+the new.</p>
+
+<p>Let us have no doubt about it: something tremendous and unprecedented
+has to be accomplished here. Does any thinking man believe that when
+the social<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[131]</a></span> order of the world has collapsed, when a country of the
+importance of Germany has lost the very basis of its existence, when
+the development of centuries is broken off, its faculties and its
+traditions emptied of value and repudiated&mdash;does any man really
+believe that by means of certain clauses in a Constitution a few
+confiscations, socializations and rises in wages, a nation of sixty
+millions can be endowed with a new historical reason for existence?
+Why is not the negro republic of Liberia ahead of all of us?</p>
+
+<p>Our character is weak on the side of will, and our former lords say
+that we are good for nothing except under strict discipline
+administered by dynasts and hereditary nobles. If that is true, it is
+all over with us; unless some dictator shall take pity on us and give
+us a modest place among the nations with a great past and a small
+future. If we are worthy of our name we must be born again of the
+Spirit. Merely to conceive this is in itself an achievement for a
+people; to carry it out, to embody the conception in a new order of
+society, is at once a test and an achievement.</p>
+
+<p>Our social ethics must take up a new position. Hitherto&mdash;stripping off
+the usual rhetorical phrases&mdash;it has taken its stand on two effective
+and really driving principles, those of Duty and of Success; two
+side-views of Individualism. All else, including love of one's
+neighbour, sense of solidarity, faith, spiritual cultivation, feeling
+for Nature, was (apart from a few lofty spirits) merely subsidiary;
+means<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[132]</a></span> to an end, convention or falsehood. There were few whose
+careers were not influenced by these estimates; the majority of the
+upper classes was wholly under their dominion.</p>
+
+<p>The two goals of our wishes, to have something and to be something,
+were expressed by the whole outward aspect of society. The great
+object was not to be counted as a Tom, Dick or Harry, one who had
+less, or was less, than others. There were grades of being, grades of
+human being: it was possible to be something, to be much, to be
+little, or to be nothing at all. From the white collar to the pearl
+necklace, from the good nursery to the saloon car, from the
+watch-ribbon to the sword-belt, from the place at the ordinary to the
+title of Excellency, everything was a proof of what one had, or was,
+or believed oneself to be. If one did not know a man one must not
+speak to him; if one knew him, one might borrow a hundred marks from
+him, but one must not ask him for a penny. Whoever had wealth
+displayed it in order to be admired; whoever had a social position
+displayed his unapproachability and the weight of his dignity, as, for
+instance, when with an absent look and lost in the burden of his own
+existence he entered a dining-hall. From inferiors one demanded a
+degrading attitude and forms of speech, and presented to them a face
+of stone; towards those in higher position one came to life and
+displayed an attentive civility. It was&mdash;or shall we say
+is?&mdash;permissible to lavish in an hour the monthly income<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[133]</a></span> of a poor
+family. "One had it to spend" and "what business was it of theirs?" In
+the lower ranks there was much of genuine revolt against these abuses
+and also much envy and malice, much open imitation, and much of secret
+admiration. Every silly craze was cheapened in hideous imitations, the
+suburb and the village made a display which in quality, indeed, fell
+below the model, but in quantity not at all.</p>
+
+<p>It may be said that these were excrescences or city fashions; that one
+must not generalize. These are empty phrases. To understand the spirit
+of a society it is not hermits that one must study. And, moreover, let
+any one ask himself whether this society was really based on the idea
+of solidarity and human friendliness or upon unscrupulous personal
+interests and exploitation, on shows and shams, on the demand for
+service and the claim to command. If anything can explain the
+eagerness with which we Germans flung ourselves into a war whose
+origins we did not know and did not want to know, then besides the
+conscious objects, advantage, rehabilitation, and renown, we must also
+take into account the obscure impulse of the national conscience which
+in the midst of evil individualism and of personal and class egoism
+yearned for the sense of solidarity and fusion.</p>
+
+<p>Is it objected that all this lies deeply rooted in human nature, that
+it has been there from time immemorial, and it is impossible to alter
+it at one stroke? Pedantic drivel! Many things lie deep in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[134]</a></span> human
+nature, and it depends on which of these the will chooses to develop.
+And who talked of altering things at one stroke? Our judgment of
+values is to be transformed, and if human nature never changed, much
+that now flaunts itself in the sunshine would be creeping in the
+shade. This transformation of judgment is a matter of recognizing
+things for what they are. When pomp, extravagance, exclusiveness,
+frivolity and fastness, greed, place-hunting and vulgar envy are
+looked on with the same eyes as aberrations in other provinces of
+life, then we shall not indeed have abolished all vice, but the
+atmosphere will be purified. Look at our sturdy Socialists of the
+November days<a name="FNanchor_34_34" id="FNanchor_34_34"></a><a href="#Footnote_34_34" class="fnanchor">[34]</a> and proselytes of every description: you can see
+that the acquisition of a new judgment of values may be the affair of
+an hour! And for that reason one must not criticize them too
+closely&mdash;unless they try to make a profit out of their conversion.</p>
+
+<p>All social judgments presuppose a system of recognized values. The
+values of Christian ethics have never penetrated deeply into the
+collective judgment of mankind; even in the medi&aelig;val bloom of
+Christian, or rather of ecclesiastical, culture the moral conceptions
+of Christianity remained the possession of a few chosen spirits and
+communities; society in general accepted the mythical element, did
+homage to the hierarchy, and remained ethically pagan, the upper
+classes being guided by a code of honour resting on the worship of
+courage. The Churches never made <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[135]</a></span>any serious effort to shape an
+ethical code; they were preoccupied with the teaching of dogmas of
+faith which carried them ever farther and farther from the groundwork
+of the Gospels, and they devoted whatever surplus energies they had to
+politics, and to accommodations with the ruling powers of the world.</p>
+
+<p>The cult of courage imposed on and exercised by the ruling classes,
+and symbolically imaged in their code of honour, took an effective
+shape in the banning of cowardice and of cowardly crime. So far as
+positive values go, the ethics of nobility degenerated into smartness,
+the claim for "satisfaction" and the exclusiveness of rank; a Prussian
+and Kantian abstraction, the conception of duty, a conception at
+bottom unproved and incapable of generating conviction, became a rule
+of life, made effective by training and control. The ruling powers and
+their controls have given way, and their dry brittleness is revealed.</p>
+
+<p>We have not succeeded in finding a substitute for social ethics in an
+idealized type of national character. The imagination of the Western
+nations, like those of antiquity, has shaped ideal types which they
+believe or would wish themselves to resemble; they know what they mean
+by "esprit gaulois," or "English character," or "American Democracy,"
+while, in accordance with the problematic character of our being, we
+Germans, except for the statuesque heroes of legendary times, or
+certain historic but inimitable figures, have conceived or poetically
+created no<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[136]</a></span> character of which we can say that it embodies the
+collective spirit of Germany.</p>
+
+<p>The super-ethical doctrine of the being, the growth and the empire of
+the soul has been laid down by us, but there are as yet few into whose
+consciousness it has penetrated; the transformation of thought and
+feeling which must proceed from it will not lay hold of the masses
+directly, but will filter continually from one social stratum to
+another.</p>
+
+<p>The recognized values of social judgment! It sounds so abstract, so
+remote from practice, that one might well believe we were landed again
+in the cloudland of festal oratory and the emotions of the leading
+article. The voluntary recognition of an invisible authority! And this
+after we have shattered the visible, and are living in the midst of
+intellectual anarchy and moral Nihilism! And yet moral valuations,
+simple, binding, and on the level of social judgment, are near enough
+to be within our grasp.</p>
+
+<p>Are not all the four quarters of the world to-day talking about
+Democracy? Have not we ourselves got tired of this word, forbidden
+till a year ago&mdash;tired, even in circles where the modest word
+"Liberal" was never pronounced without a frown? And what does
+Democracy mean? Do we take it in the merely negative sense, that one
+is no longer obliged to put up with things? Or in the meagre sense,
+that responsibility goes by favour, and that the majority must decide?
+Or the dubious sense, that we are yearning to make our way through a
+sham Socialism to the Dollar Republic?<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[137]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>It is not the form of government, it is the form of society, that
+determines the spirit of a land. There is no democratic form of
+society, for democracy can be in league with capitalism, with
+socialism, or even with the class of clubs and castes. The unspoken
+fundamental conception which gives significance and stability both to
+the forms of a democratic constitution and to those of an organic
+society is called Solidarity&mdash;that is to say, cohesion and the sense
+of community. Solidarity means that each man does not come first in
+his own eyes, but before God and State and himself each man must stand
+and be answerable for all, and all for each.</p>
+
+<p>In this sense of solidarity the dominion of the majority over the
+minority is not an object to be striven for but an evil to be avoided;
+the true object of a solid democracy is the dominion of a people over
+itself, not by reckoning up the relative strength of its various
+interests, but by virtue of the spirit and of the will which it sets
+free. In this sense of solidarity no society can be based on
+hereditary monopolies either of capital or of cultivation; nor can it
+be delivered over to the terrorism of vocations and unions which,
+under the leaderships of shouters, claim the right whenever they
+please, to strangle indispensable industries; nor can it be based on
+demagogic flattery of excitable mobs. Every born man must from his
+cradle onwards have the same right to existence; he must be sheltered
+and fostered as he grows up, and be free to choose his lot. Every
+occupation must be<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[138]</a></span> open to him, except that he must not encroach on
+the sphere of another man's liberty. The standard of his activity is
+not to be fixed by birth or privilege or force or cunning or the glib
+tongue, but again, by spirit and by will.</p>
+
+<p>To-day, while cultivation of the spirit is still a class-monopoly, it
+cannot form any standard of creative capacity. And yet it has been
+demonstrated that so powerful is the passion for culture in a spirit
+which is in any degree qualified for it, that even to-day it is
+capable, by self-education, of surmounting some of the artificial
+barriers. There was not, to my knowledge, any illiterate among the
+Prussian or German Ministers of the new era, and the one of them who
+excused his deficiencies of language with the class-monopoly of
+education was in the wrong, for any man of normal capacity might in
+ten years' practice of popular oratory have learned the elements of
+syntax.</p>
+
+<p>When access to the cultivation of the German spirit has become a
+common right of the whole people, Culture will become, if not the sign
+at least the presupposition of creative activity. The proof of
+capacity will then cease to be settled either between agitators and
+the masses, or in the dimness of privileged chanceries, but in the
+productive competition of men of high intellectual endowment.</p>
+
+<p>Society will not be divided by classes and castes, it will not be
+graded according to pedigree or possessions, it will not be ruled by
+separate interests; by<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[139]</a></span> ideas or by the masses; it will be an ordered
+body&mdash;ordered by spirit, by will, by service and responsibility.</p>
+
+<p>Any one who does not accept this self-created and self-renewing order,
+and who at the same time rejects the old, is simply working for the
+dominion of force and chance. A society can no more remain permanently
+without order than the staff of a factory or the crew of a ship. Only
+instead of an organic order we may have an accidental and arbitrary,
+an order of the personal type, springing from the dexterity shown in
+some favourable moment, maintaining itself by force, and seeking to
+perpetuate itself in some form of hereditary oligarchy.</p>
+
+<p>An order of the priestly and hierarchical type is no longer thinkable
+to-day, nor can one of the peasant type come into question in a land
+of urban industry. Whoever wishes to see an organic self-determining
+and self-regenerating order of society, has therefore to choose
+between the military order, resting upon disciplined bodily capacity,
+or the mercantile and capitalist order which rests upon business-sense
+and egoistic alertness, or the demagogic order which rests upon the
+rhetorical domination of the masses, and does not last long as it soon
+turns to violence and oligarchy, or finally the order of culture,
+resting upon spirit, character, and education.</p>
+
+<p>This last is not merely the only suitable one for us and the only one
+which is worthy of our past; it will also in time become the general
+order of society prevailing over all the world. In the vision of this
+order<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[140]</a></span> we recognize the mission that Prussia neglected, though it lay
+within its grasp for a hundred years; what it neglected and the rock
+on which it foundered.</p>
+
+<p>The greatness of Prussian policy since 1713 lay in its premonition and
+appreciation of the principle of mechanism even before it became
+common to all the world. Organization and improvement, the war machine
+and money, science, practicality and conscientiousness&mdash;all this is
+clearly mechanization seen from the political side.</p>
+
+<p>The early application of these principles was a stroke of genius far
+in advance of the then condition of the world. Seen from this
+standpoint, all the rest of the continental world, not yet mechanized,
+and burdened with the relics of medi&aelig;valism, C&aelig;sarism and clericalism,
+seemed torpid and lost in illusions: arbitrary, inaccurate and
+slovenly. With short interruptions this Prusso-central point of view
+was maintained until the middle of the World-War; and not quite
+unjustly, for Prussia remained in every respect ahead of other powers
+in the department of mechanization.</p>
+
+<p>For a hundred years the Prussian principles had a monopoly of success;
+elsewhere they were scarcely understood and much less imitated. Then
+came Napoleon.</p>
+
+<p>He took over the mechanistic principle and handled it as never a man
+had done before; he became the mechanizer of the world. At the same
+time he was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[141]</a></span> something mightier than that: he was the heir of the
+French idea of spiritual and popular liberty.</p>
+
+<p>Prussia fell, and would have fallen, even if its mechanism had not
+grown rusty. Its leaders learnt their lessons from France and England,
+they set on foot a liberation of the people by departmental authority
+and a liberation of the spirit by the people; they put new life into
+the mechanism, and they conquered with the help of England as we have
+lately seen France conquer with the help of America.</p>
+
+<p>But here came a parting of the ways. It was possible to pursue either
+the way of mechanization or that of the liberation of the spirit.
+Prussia did neither; it stood still. In the place of the liberation of
+the spirit came the reaction; in the place of mechanization came the
+bureaucracy. On the rest of the Continent, too, the movement for
+political mechanization was stifled, the force that stifled it being
+the uprising economic movement.</p>
+
+<p>Bismarck was aware of the untried forces that lay in the system of
+political mechanization. The world, as we looked at it from our
+Prussian window, seemed as loose and slovenly as ever, and it was so.
+Once again, with a mighty effort, the Prussian mechanism was revived
+and the movement of the bourgeoisie towards liberty and the life of
+the spirit was repressed. This was called "realism" in politics, and
+the estimate was a just one. There was no progress to be made with
+professional Liberalism; but with Krupp and Roon one organized
+victories. As in Frederick's<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[142]</a></span> time the slovenly Continent had to give
+way, Prussia mounted to the climax of her fortunes, and won Germany.</p>
+
+<p>And again there was a parting of the ways; but this time there was no
+one to stand for civic and spiritual freedom. People believed they had
+all they wanted of it; democracy was discredited and broken, the
+professors were political realists, success followed the side of
+mechanization, which was rightly supposed to be linked with the
+dynasty, and mechanization in the economic sphere drew to its side the
+hope of gain.</p>
+
+<p>Bismarck died in the midst of anxieties, but to the end he had no
+scruples. The two systems of mechanization were at their zenith, and
+the other countries looked, in political affairs, as slovenly as ever.
+One was wearing itself out in parliamentary conflicts, another had no
+battle-cruisers, another was lacking in cannon, or in recruits, or in
+railways, or in finances; the trains never came in up to time,
+everywhere one found public opinion or the Press interfering in
+process of law or in the administration, everywhere there were
+scandals; in Prussian Germany alone was everything up to the mark.</p>
+
+<p>Only one thing was overlooked. The mechanization of economics had
+become a common possession for everybody. Starting from this and with
+the methods and experiences attached to it, it was possible also for
+other countries, if necessary, to mechanize their politics or, as we
+say now, to militarize them. And this could be done with even more
+life and vigour<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[143]</a></span> than in Prussia, whose organization was there
+believed to be inimitable and where the principle of mechanism was, as
+it were, stored up in tins and in some places was obviously getting
+mouldy. In the matter of Freedom, however, the other peoples were
+ahead of us, and to the political isolation of Prussia spiritual
+isolation was now added.</p>
+
+<p>In the encircling fog which prevailed on economic developments there
+was not a single statesman who recognized that Prussian principles had
+ceased to be a monopoly, or an advantage, not to mention a conception
+of genius. This lack of perception was the political cause of the war.
+Instead of renewing ourselves inwardly through freedom and the spirit,
+and carrying on a defensive policy as quietly, discreetly, and
+inconspicuously as possible, we took to arming and hurrahing. Worse
+than any playing of false notes was the mistake we made in key and in
+tempo: D major, <i>Allegro</i>, <i>Marcia</i>, <i>Fortissimo</i>, with cymbals and
+trumpets!</p>
+
+<p>To-day we have no longer a choice before us, only a decision. The
+period of mechanical Prussianization is over for us, the period of the
+mechanical policy of Force is over for all the world, although the
+heliographs of Versailles seem to reflect it high above the horizon.
+It is not a capitalistic Peace of God as imagined by the international
+police which has now begun; it is the social epoch. In this epoch the
+people will live and will range themselves according to the strength
+of the ideas which they stand for.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[144]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>It is not enough for us to become Germans instead of Prussians; not
+even if, as it were to be desired, we should succeed in rescuing from
+the collapse of Prussia her genuine virtues of practicality, order and
+duty. It is not enough to brew some soulless mixture out of the
+worn-out methods of the Western bourgeoisie and the unripe attempts of
+Eastern revolutionaries. It is not enough&mdash;no, it will lead us to
+destruction quicker than any one believes&mdash;to blunder along with the
+disgusting bickerings of interests and the complacent narrowness of
+officialism, talking one day of the rate of exchange, another of our
+debts, and the next of the food question, plugging one hole with the
+stopping of another and lying down at night with a sigh of relief:
+Well, something's got done; all will come right.</p>
+
+<p>No, unthinking creatures that you are; nothing will come right until
+you drop your insincere chatter, your haggling, your agitating and
+compromising, and begin to think. Here is a people that has lost the
+basis of its existence, because, in its blind faith in authority, it
+staked that existence on prosperity and power; and both are gone. Do
+you want to stake <i>our</i> existence, on ships, soldiers, mines,
+trade-connexions, which we no longer possess, or upon the soil, of
+which we have not enough, or upon our broken will to work? Are we to
+be the labour-serfs and the serfage stud-farm of the world? Only on
+Thoughts and Ideals can our existence be staked. Where is your
+thought? Where is the thought of Germany?</p>
+
+<p>We can and must live only by becoming what we<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[145]</a></span> were designed to be,
+what we were about to be, what we failed to become: a people of the
+Spirit, the Spirit among the peoples of mankind. That is the thought
+of Germany.</p>
+
+<p>This thought is shaping the New Society&mdash;the society of the spirit and
+the cultivation of the spirit, the only one which can hold its ground
+in the new epoch, and which fulfils it.</p>
+
+<p>This is why we have been endowed with a character whose will is weak
+in external things and strong in inward responsibility; why depth and
+understanding, practicality and uprightness, many-sidedness and
+individuality, power of work and invention, imagination and aspiration
+have been bestowed upon us, in order that we may fulfil these things.
+For what do these qualities, as a whole, betoken? Not the conqueror,
+not the statesman, not the worldling, and not the man of business; it
+is a narrow and trivial misuse of all faculty for us to pretend to
+represent these types among the nations. They betoken the labourers of
+the spirit; and far as we are from being a nation of thinkers and
+poets, it is nevertheless our right and our high calling to be a
+thinking nation among the nations.</p>
+
+<p>But on what, you may ask with scorn, is this thinking nation to live?
+With all its wisdom, will it not be reduced to beggary and starvation?</p>
+
+<p>No&mdash;it will live. That people which amid a century of world-revolution
+is able to form for itself a stable, well-balanced, ordered and highly
+developed form of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[146]</a></span> society will be one that works and produces. All
+around there will be quarrelling and conflict, there will be little
+work and little production. For the next decade the question will be,
+not where is the demand but where is the supply?</p>
+
+<p>The countries are laid waste, as Germany was after the Thirty Years'
+War; only we do not as yet recognize it, so long as the fever lasts we
+do not notice the decline.</p>
+
+<p>Production, thought-out and penetrated with spirit, on the part of a
+highly developed society, and combined with labour-fellowship, is more
+than valuable production or cheap production; it is something
+exemplary and essential. And this applies not only to production
+itself but to the methods of production, to the technique, the
+schooling, the organization, the manner of thinking.</p>
+
+<p>It is a petty thing to say that we were destroyed out of envy. Why did
+not envy destroy America and England? The world regarded us at once
+with admiration and with repulsion; with admiration for our systematic
+and laborious ways, with repulsion for our tradesman-like
+obtrusiveness, the brusque and dangerous character of our leadership
+and the ostentatious servility with which we endured it. If it had
+been possible anywhere outside of our naked, mercantile and national
+egoism to discover a German idea, it would have been respected.</p>
+
+<p>The German idea of cultivation of the spirit will win something for us
+which we have not known for a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[147]</a></span> century, and the scope of which we
+cannot yet measure; people will freely appreciate us, they will
+further us and follow us on our way. We have no idea what it means for
+a people to have these sympathetic forces at its side, as France had
+in its creation of forms, England and America in civilization and
+democracy, Russia in Slavonic orthodoxy and the neutral States in
+their internationalism.</p>
+
+<p>There is no fear: we shall live, and more than live. For the first
+time for centuries we shall again be conscious of a mission, and
+around all our internal oppositions will be twined a bond which will
+be something more than a bond of interest.</p>
+
+<p>The goal of the world-revolution upon which we have now entered means
+in its material aspect the melting of all strata of society into one.
+In its transcendental aspect it means redemption: redemption of the
+lower strata to freedom and to the spirit. No one can redeem himself
+but every one can redeem another. Class for class, man for man: thus
+is a people redeemed. Yet in each case there must be readiness and in
+each there must be good-will.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_34_34" id="Footnote_34_34"></a><a href="#FNanchor_34_34"><span class="label">[34]</span></a> 1918, when the revolution in Germany broke out at Kiel.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+<p class="center" style="padding-top: 2em; font-weight: bold">THE END</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<div class="advertisements">
+<h2><a name="THE_EUROPEAN_LIBRARY" id="THE_EUROPEAN_LIBRARY"></a>THE EUROPEAN LIBRARY</h2>
+
+<p class="center" style="font-weight: bold">Edited by J.&nbsp;E. SPINGARN</p>
+
+
+<p>This series is intended to introduce foreign authors whose works are
+not accessible in English, and in general to keep Americans in touch
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+Europe. No attempt will be made to give what Americans miscall "the
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+standard of past greatness; any twentieth-century book which displays
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+Fiction will predominate, but belles lettres, poetry, philosophy,
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+<div class="blockquot"><p>"The first organized effort to bring into English a series
+of the really significant figures in contemporary European
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+as any of its kind on the other side of the Atlantic."&mdash;<i>New
+York Evening Post.</i></p></div>
+
+
+<p class="ads2">THE WORLD'S ILLUSION. By <span class="smcap">J. Wassermann</span>. Translated by Ludwig Lewisohn.
+Two volumes. (Second printing.)</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>One of the most remarkable creative works of our time, revolving about
+the experiences of a man who sums up the wealth and culture of our age
+yet finds them wanting. The first volume depicts the life of the upper
+classes of European society, the second is a very Inferno of the
+Slums; and the whole mirrors, with extraordinary insight, the beauty
+and sorrow, the power and weakness of our social and spiritual world.
+"A human comedy in the great sense, which no modern can afford not to
+hear."&mdash;H.&nbsp;W. Boynton, in the <i>Weekly Review</i>.</p>
+</div>
+
+
+<p class="ads2">PEOPLE. By <span class="smcap">Pierre Hamp</span>. Translated by James Whitall. With an
+Introduction by Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant.</p>
+
+<p>Introducing one of the most significant writers of France, himself a
+working man, who in these stories of the French underworld expresses
+the new self-consciousness of the worker's outlook.</p>
+
+
+<p class="ads2">THE NEW SOCIETY. By <span class="smcap">Walter Rathenau</span>. Translated by Arthur Windham.</p>
+
+<p>One of Germany's most influential thinkers and men of action presents
+his vision of the new society emerging out of the War.</p>
+
+
+<p class="ads2">DECADENCE AND OTHER ESSAYS ON THE CULTURE OF IDEAS. By <span class="smcap">Remy de
+Gourmont</span>. Translated by William Aspenwall Bradley.</p>
+
+<p>The first authorized version of the critical work of one of the great
+aesthetic thinkers of France.</p>
+
+
+<p class="center" style="font-weight: bold; margin-top: 1.5em">IN PREPARATION</p>
+
+<p class="ads2">THE PATRIOT. By <span class="smcap">Heinrich Mann</span>. Translated by Ernest A. Boyd.</p>
+
+<p>The career of a typical product of militarism, in school, university,
+business, patriotism, and love, told with a biting incisiveness and
+irony.</p>
+
+
+<p class="ads2">THE REFORM OF EDUCATION. By <span class="smcap">Giovanni Gentile</span>. With an Introduction by
+<span class="smcap">Benedetto Croce</span>. Translated by Dino Bigongiari.</p>
+
+<p>A new interpretation of the meaning of education, by one who shares
+with Croce the leadership of Italian thought to-day.</p>
+
+
+<p class="ads2">A POET'S LOVES: FROM THE UNPUBLISHED MANUSCRIPTS OF VICTOR HUGO. By
+<span class="smcap">Louis Barthou</span>. Translated by Daniel Cr&eacute;hange Rosenthal.</p>
+
+<p>A striking, not to say sensational, revelation of the intimate private
+life of a great poet, by an ex-Premier of France.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="publisher">
+HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY<br />
+Publishers        <span style="padding-left: 8em">New York</span><br />
+</p>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The New Society, by Walther Rathenau
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@@ -0,0 +1,4075 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The New Society, by Walther Rathenau
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The New Society
+
+Author: Walther Rathenau
+
+Translator: Arthur Windham
+
+Release Date: March 29, 2007 [EBook #20936]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE NEW SOCIETY ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Markus Brenner, Irma Spehar and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
+file made using scans of public domain works at the
+University of Georgia.)
+
+
+
+
+
+                    THE NEW SOCIETY
+
+                          BY
+
+                   WALTHER RATHENAU
+
+               AUTHORIZED TRANSLATION BY
+                    ARTHUR WINDHAM
+
+
+                       NEW YORK
+               HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY
+                         1921
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+Walther Rathenau, author of _Die neue Gesellschaft_ and other studies
+of economic and social conditions in modern Germany, was born in 1867.
+His father, Emil Rathenau, was one of the most distinguished figures
+in the great era of German industrial development, and his son was
+brought up in the atmosphere of hard work, of enterprise, and of
+public affairs. After his school days at a _Gymnasium_, or classical
+school, he studied mathematics, physics and chemistry at the
+Universities of Berlin and of Strassburg, taking his degree at the age
+of twenty-two. Certain discoveries made by him in chemistry and
+electrolysis led to the establishment of independent manufacturing works,
+which he controlled with success, and eventually to his connexion with
+the world-famous A.E.G.--_Allgemeine Electrizitaetsgesellschaft_--at
+the head of which he now stands. During the war he scored a very
+remarkable and exceptional success as controller of the organization
+for the supply of raw materials. He is thus not merely a scholar and
+thinker, but one who has lived and more than held his own in the thick
+of commercial and industrial life, and who knows by actual experience
+the subject-matter with which he deals.
+
+The present study, with its wide outlook and its resolute
+determination to see facts as they are, should have much value for all
+students of latter-day politics and economics in Europe; for though
+Rathenau is mainly concerned with conditions in his own land the same
+conditions affect all countries to a greater or less degree, and he
+deals with general principles of human psychology and of economic law
+which prevail everywhere in the world. It is not too much to say that
+"The New Society" constitutes a landmark in the history of economic
+and social thought, and contains matter for discussion, for sifting,
+for experiment and for propaganda which should occupy serious thinkers
+and reformers for many a day to come. His suggestions and conclusions
+may not be all accepted, or all acceptable, but few will deny that
+they constitute a distinct advance in the effort to bring serious and
+disinterested thought to the solution of our social problems, and in
+this conviction we offer the present complete and authorized
+translation to English readers.
+
+
+
+
+THE NEW SOCIETY
+
+
+I
+
+Is there any sign or criterion by which we can tell that a human
+society has been completely socialized?
+
+There is one and one only: it is when no one can have an income
+without working for it.
+
+That is the sign of Socialism; but it is not the goal. In itself it is
+not decisive. If every one had enough to live on, it would not matter
+for what he received money or goods, or even whether he got them for
+nothing. And relics of the system of income which is not worked for
+will always remain--for instance, provision for old age.
+
+The goal is not any kind of division of income or allotment of
+property. Nor is it equality, reduction of toil, or increase of the
+enjoyment of life. It is the abolition of the proletarian condition;
+abolition of the lifelong hereditary serfage, the nameless hereditary
+servitude, of one of the two peoples who are called by the same name;
+the annulment of the hereditary twofold stratification of society, the
+abolition of the scandalous enslavement of brother by brother, of that
+Western abuse which is the basis of our civilization as slavery was
+of the antique, and which vitiates all our deeds, all our creations,
+all our joys.
+
+Nor is even this the final goal--no economy, no society can talk of a
+final goal--the only full and final object of all endeavour upon earth
+is the development of the human soul. A final goal, however, points
+out the direction, though not the path, of politics.
+
+The political object which I have described as the abolition of the
+proletarian condition may, as I have shown in _Things that are to
+Come_,[1] be closely approached by a suitable policy in regard to
+property and education; above all, by a limitation of the right of
+inheritance. Of socialization in the strict sense there is, for this
+purpose, no need. Yet a far-reaching policy of socialization--and I do
+not here refer to a mere mechanical nationalization of the means of
+production but to a radical economic and social resettlement--is
+necessary and urgent, because it awakens and trains responsibilities,
+and because it withdraws from the sluggish hands of the governing
+classes the determination of time and of method, and places it in the
+hands that have a better title, those of the whole commonalty, which,
+at present, stands helpless through sheer democracy. For only in the
+hands of a political people does democracy mean the rule of the
+people; in those of an untrained and unpolitical people it becomes
+merely an affair of debating societies and philistine chatter at the
+inn ordinary. The symbol of German bourgeois democracy is the tavern;
+thence enlightenment is spread and there judgments are formed; it is
+the meeting place of political associations, the forum of their
+orators, the polling-booth for elections.
+
+But the sign that this far-reaching socialization has been actually
+carried out is the cessation of all income without work. I say the
+sign, but not the sole postulate; for we must postulate a complete and
+genuine democratization of the State and public economy, and a system
+of education equally accessible to all: only then can we say that the
+monopoly of class and culture has been smashed. But the cessation of
+the workless income will show the downfall of the last of
+class-monopolies, that of the Plutocracy.
+
+It is not very easy to imagine what society will be like when these
+objects have been realised, at least if we are thinking not of a brief
+period like the present Russian regime, or a passing phase as in
+Hungary, but an enduring and stationary condition. A dictatorial
+oligarchy, like that of the Bolshevists, does not come into
+consideration here, and the well-meaning Utopias of social romances
+crumble to nothing. They rest, one and all, on the blissfully ignorant
+assumption of a state of popular well-being exaggerated tenfold beyond
+all possibility.
+
+The knowledge of the sort of social condition towards which at present
+we Germans, and then Europe, and finally the other nations are tending
+in this vertical Migration of the Peoples, will not only decide for
+each of us his attitude towards the great social question, but our
+whole political position as well. It is quite in keeping with German
+traditions that in fixing our aims and forming our resolves we should
+be guided not by positive but by negative impulses--not by the effort
+to get something but to get away from it. To this effort, which is
+really a flight, we give the positive name of Socialism, without
+troubling ourselves in the least how things will look--not in the
+sense of popular watchwords but in actual fact--when we have got what
+we are seeking.
+
+This is not merely a case of lack of imagination; it is that we
+Germans have, properly speaking, no understanding of political
+tendencies. We are more or less educated in business, in science, in
+thought, but in politics we are about on the same level as the East
+Slavonic peasantry. At best we know--and even that not always--what
+oppresses, vexes and tortures us; we know our grievances, and think we
+have conceived an aim when we simply turn them upside down. Such
+processes of thought as "the police are to blame, the war-conditions
+are to blame, the Prussians are to blame, the Jews are to blame, the
+English are to blame, the priests are to blame, the capitalists are to
+blame"--all these we quite understand. Just as with the Slavs, if our
+good-nature and two centuries of the love of order did not forbid it,
+our primitive political instincts would find expression in a pogrom in
+the shape of a peasant-war, of a religious war, of witch-trials, or
+Jew-baiting. Our blatant patriotism bore the plainest signs of such a
+temper; half nationalism, half aggression against some bugbear or
+other; never a proud calm, an earnest self-dedication, a struggle for
+a political ideal.
+
+We have now a Republic in Germany: no one seriously desired it. We
+have at last established Parliamentarianism: no one wanted it. We have
+set up a kind of Socialism: no one believed in it. We used to say:
+"The people will live and die for their princes; our last drop of
+blood for the Hohenzollerns"--no one denied it. "The people mean to be
+ruled by their hereditary lords; they will go through fire for their
+officers; rather death than yield a foot of German soil to the foe."
+Was all this a delusion? By no means; it was sincere enough, only it
+did not go deep. It was the kind of sincerity which depends on not
+knowing enough of the alternative possibilities.
+
+When the alternatives revealed themselves as possible and actual, then
+we all turned republican, even to the cottagers in Pomerania. When the
+military strike had broken down discipline, the officers were
+mishandled; when the war was lost, the fleet disgraced, and the
+homeland defiled, then we began to play and dance.
+
+But was this frivolity? Not at all; it was a childish want of
+political imagination. The Poles, a people not remotely comparable to
+the German in depth of soul and the capacity for training talent, have
+for a century cherished no other thought than that of national unity,
+while we passively resign our territories. No Englishman or Japanese
+or American will ever understand us when we tell him that this
+military discipline of ours, this war-lust, did not represent a
+passion for dominion and aggression, but was merely the docility of a
+childish people which wants nothing, and can imagine nothing, but that
+things should go on as they happen, at the moment, to be.
+
+We Germans know but little of the laws which govern the formation of
+national character. The capacity of a people for profundity is not
+profundity, either of the individual or of the community. It may
+express itself in the masses as mere plasticity and softness of
+spirit. The capacity for collective sagacity and strength of will
+demands from the individual merely a dry intelligence in human
+affairs, and egoism. It would be too much to say that our political
+weakness may be merely the expression of spiritual power, for the
+latter has not proved an obstacle to success in business. Indolence
+and belief in authority have their share in it.
+
+But have we not been the classic land of social democracy, and have we
+not become that of Radicalism? Well, we have been, indeed, and are,
+with our submissiveness to authority and our capacity for discipline,
+the classic land of organized grumbling; and the classic land, too, of
+anti-semitism which deprived us of the very forces we stood most in
+need of--productive scepticism and the imagination for concrete
+things. Organized grumbling is not the same thing as political
+creation. A Socialism and Radicalism poorer in ideas than the
+post-Marxian German Socialism has never existed. Half of it was merely
+clerical work, and the other half was agitators' Utopianism of the
+cheapest variety.
+
+Nothing was more significant than the fact that the mighty event of
+the German Revolution was not the result of affection but of
+disaffection. It is not we who liberated ourselves, it was the enemy;
+it was our destruction that set us free. On the day before we asked
+for the armistice, perhaps even on the day before the flight of the
+Kaiser, a plebiscite would have yielded an overwhelming majority for
+the monarchy and against Socialism. What I so often said before the
+war came true: "He who trains his children with the rod learns only
+through the rod."
+
+And to-day, when everything is seething and fermenting--no thanks to
+Socialism for that--all intellectual work has to be done outside of
+the ranks of social-democracy, which stumbles along on its two
+crutches of "Socialization" and "Soviets."[2] Orthodox Socialism is
+still a case of the "lesser evil," what the French call a _pis aller_.
+"Things are so bad that any change must be for the better." What is to
+make them better we are told in the socialist catechism; but _how_ it
+is to do so, how and what anything is to become, this, the only
+question that matters, is regarded as irrelevant. It is answered by
+some halting and insincere stammer about "surplus value" which is to
+make everybody well off--and which would yield all round, as I have
+elsewhere shown, just twenty-five marks a head. Fifteen millions of
+grown men are pressing forward into a Promised Land revealed through
+the fog of political assemblies and in the thunder of parrot-phrases--a
+land from which no one will ever bring back a bunch of grapes.
+
+If one would interrogate not the agitators, but their hearers, and
+find out what they instinctively conceive this land to look like, we
+should get the answer, timid and naive but at the same time the
+deepest and shrewdest that it is possible to give--that it is a land
+where there are no longer any rich.
+
+A most true and truthful reply! And yet a profound error silently
+lurks in it. You imagine, do you not, that in a land where there are
+no more rich people there will also be no more poor? "Why, of course
+not! How can there be poor people when there are no more rich?" And
+yet there will be. In the land where there are no more rich there will
+be _only_ poor, only very poor, people.
+
+Whoever does not know this and is a Socialist, that man is merely one
+of the herd or he is a dupe. He who knows it and conceals it is a
+deceiver. He who knows it, and in spite of that, nay, on account of
+that, is a Socialist, is a man of the future.
+
+Though the crowd be satisfied with some dim feeling that this, anyhow,
+is the tendency of the times and that with this stream one must swim;
+though the more thoughtful contemplate the evils of the time and
+decide to put up with the _pis aller_; the responsible thinker is
+under the obligation of investigating the land into which the people
+are being led. We must know what it looks like, where there are no
+rich people and where no one can have an income without working for
+it, we must understand what we call the "new society" so as to be able
+to shape it aright.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 1: _Von Kommenden Dingen_, by Walther Rathenau. Berlin. S.
+Fischer.]
+
+[Footnote 2: Workers' and Soldiers' Councils.]
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+The question is not very urgent.
+
+As surely as the hundred years' course of the social World-Revolution
+cannot be arrested, so surely can we prophesy that the process cannot
+maintain all along the line the rapid movement of its beginning. The
+victorious and the defeated countries will have to work out to the end
+the changes and interchanges of their various phases, for in the
+historical developments which we witness to-day, we find mingled
+together the phenomena of organic growth and of disease; already we
+see that the Socialism of the healthy nations is different from that
+of the sick ones. It is in vain that those who are sick with the
+Bolshevist disease dream that they can infect the world.
+
+The small daily and yearly movements in our realm of Central Europe
+cannot be determined beforehand, because they depend upon small,
+accidental, local, and external forces. The great and necessary issues
+of events can be predicted, but it would be folly to discuss their
+accidental flux and reflux. When an unguarded house is filled with
+explosives from the cellar to the roof, then we know that it will one
+day be blown up; but whether this will happen on a Sunday or a
+Monday, in the morning or in the evening, or whether the left door
+post will be left standing or no, it would be idle to inquire.
+
+From the historical point of view it is of no consequence whether
+Radicalism may make an inroad here and there, or whether here and
+there the forces of reaction and restoration may collect themselves
+for a transitory triumph. The great movement of history, as we always
+find when a catastrophe has worked itself out, grows slower, and this
+retardation in itself looks like reaction. We, who are not accustomed
+to catastrophes, and who did not produce this first one, but rather
+suffered it, we, who easily get sea-sick after every rapid
+movement--think, for instance, of the former Reichstag--we shall
+certainly experience, as the first deep wave of the Revolution sinks
+into us, an aristocratic, dynastic, and plutocratic Romanticism, a
+yearning for the colour and glitter of the time of glory, a revolt
+against the spiritless, mechanical philanthrophy of unemployed orators
+of about fourth-form standard intellectually; against the monotonous
+and insincere tirades of paid agitators and their restless disciples;
+against laziness; ignorance, greed, and exaggeration masquerading as
+popular scientific economy; and against the brutal and extortionate
+upthrust from below. And so we shall arrive at the reverse kind of
+folly, an admiration and bad imitation of foreign pride and pomp, an
+arrogant individualism and a hardening of our human feeling. The
+intellectual war profiteers, who are all for radicalism to-day, will
+soon be wearing cornflowers[3] in their button-holes.
+
+For the third time we shall see an illustration of the naive
+shamelessness of the turn-coat. The spiritual process of conversion is
+worth noticing; Paul was converted to be a converter. But the
+scurrying of the intellectual speculator from the position which has
+failed into the position which has won, with the full intention of
+scurrying back again if necessary, and always with the claim to
+instruct other people, is an expression of the alarming fact that life
+has become not an affair of inward conviction, but of getting the
+right tip.
+
+The turn-coat movement began when a shortsighted crowd, incapable of
+judgment, and with their minds clouded with a few cheap phrases,
+expected from a quick and victorious war the strengthening of all the
+elements of Force, and feared to be left stranded. Even the most
+threadbare kind of liberalism appeared to be compromising, they
+clamoured for "shining armour." The most wretched victims in soul and
+body, who were obliged to flee forwards because they could not flee in
+any other direction, were called heroes, and the manliest word in our
+language, a word of which only the freest and the greatest are worthy,
+was degraded. One who has experienced the hate and fury of the
+turn-coats who poured contempt upon every word against the war and the
+"great days," is unable to understand how a whole people can throw
+its errors overboard without shame and sorrow--or he understands it
+only too well. At this day we are being mocked and preached at by the
+turn-coats of the second transformation, and to-morrow we shall be
+smiled at by those of the third.
+
+But it does not matter. The moving forces of our epoch do not come
+from business offices nor from the street, the rostrum, the pulpit, or
+the professorial chair. The noisy rush of yesterday, to-day and
+to-morrow is only the furious motion of the outermost circle, the
+centre moves upon its way, quietly as the stars.
+
+We have in our survey to leap over several periods of forward and
+backward movement and we shall earn the thanks of none of them. What
+is too conservative for one will be too revolutionary for another, and
+the aesthete will scornfully tell us that we have no fibre. When we
+show that what awaits us is no fools' paradise, but the danger of a
+temporary reverse of humanity and culture, then the facile Utopianist
+will shout us down with his two parrot-phrases,[4] and when we, out of
+a sense of duty, of harmony with the course of the world and
+confidence in justice at the soul of things, tread the path of danger,
+precipitous though it be, then we shall be scorned by all the
+worshippers of Force and despisers of mankind.
+
+But we for our part shall not pander either to the force-worshippers
+or to the masses. We serve no powers that be. Our love goes out to the
+People; but the People are not a crowd at a meeting, nor a sum-total
+of interests, nor are they the newspapers or debating-clubs. The
+People are the waking or sleeping, the leaking, frozen, choked, or
+gushing well of the German spirit. It is with that spirit, in the
+present and in the future, as it runs its course into the sea of
+humanity, that we have here to do.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 3: The emblem of the Hohenzollerns.]
+
+[Footnote 4: The reference, apparently, is to the argument that any
+change must be for the better, and to the reliance on surplus value.
+See pp. 13, 14.]
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+The criterion which we have indicated for the socialized society of
+the future is a material one. But is the spiritual condition of an
+epoch to be determined by material arrangements? Is this not a
+confession of faith in materialism?
+
+We are speaking of a criterion, not of a prime moving force. I have no
+desire, however, to avoid going into the material, or rather we should
+say mechanical, interpretation of history. I have done it more than
+once in my larger works, and for the sake of coherence I may repeat it
+in outline here.
+
+The laws which determine individual destinies are reproduced in the
+history of collective movements. A man's career is not prescribed by
+his bodily form, his expression, or his environment; but there is in
+these things a certain connexion and parallelism, for the same laws
+which determine the course of his intellectual and spiritual life
+reflect themselves in bodily and practical shape. Every instant of our
+experience, all circumstances in which we find ourselves, every limb
+that we grow, every accident that happens to us, is an expression or
+product of our character. We are indeed subject to human limitations;
+we are not at liberty to live under water or in another planet; but
+within these wide boundaries each of us can shape his own life. To
+observe a man, his work, his fate, his body and expression, his
+connexions and his marriage, his belongings and his associations, is
+to know the man.
+
+From this point of view all social, economic and political schemes
+become futile, for if man is so sovereign a being there is no need to
+look after him. But these schemes re-acquire a relative importance
+when we consider the average level of man's will-power, as we meet it
+in human experience--a power which, as a rule, shows itself unable to
+make head against a certain maximum of pressure from external
+circumstances. And again, these schemes are really a part of the
+expression of human will, for through them collective humanity battles
+with its surroundings, its contemporary world, and freely shapes its
+own destinies.
+
+The inner laws of the community harmonize with those of the
+individuals who compose it. The fact that certain national traits of
+will and character are conditioned or even enforced by poverty or
+wealth, soil and climate, an inland or maritime position, tends to
+obscure the fact that these external conditions are not really laid on
+the people but have been willed by themselves. A people _wills_ to
+have a nomadic life, or wills to have a sea-coast, or wills
+agriculture, or war; and has the power, if its will be strong enough,
+to obtain its desire, or failing that to break up and perish. It is
+the same will and character which decides for well-being and culture,
+or indolence and dependence, or labour and spiritual development. The
+Venetians did not have architecture and painting bestowed upon them
+because they happened to have become rich, nor the English sea-power
+because they happened to live on an island: no, the Venetians willed
+freedom, power and art, and the Anglo-Saxons willed the sea.
+
+There is a grain of truth in the popular political belief that war
+embodies a judgment of God. At any rate character is judged by it; not
+indeed in the sense of popular politics, that one can "hold out" in a
+hopeless position, but because all the history that went before the
+war, the capacity or incapacity of politics and leadership is a
+question of character--and with us it was a question of indolence, of
+political apathy, of class-rule, philistinish conceit and greed of
+gain. Nowhere was this conception of the judgment of God so
+blasphemously exaggerated as with us Germans, when the lord of our
+armed hosts, at the demand of the barracks greedy for power, of the
+tavern-benches, the state-bureaus and the debating societies was
+summoned, and charged with the duty, forsooth, of chastising
+England--England, which they only knew out of newspaper reports!
+To-day this exaggeration is being paid for in humiliation, for God did
+not prove controllable, and His naive blasphemers must silently and
+with grinding teeth admit that their foes are in the right when they,
+in their turn, appeal to the same judgment to justify, without limit,
+everything they desire to do.
+
+After these brief observations on the psycho-physical complex, Spirit
+and Destiny, we hope we shall not be misunderstood when for the sake
+of brevity we speak as if the spirit of the new order were determined
+by its material construction, while in reality it incorporates itself
+therein. The structure is the easier to survey, and we therefore make
+it the starting-point of our discussion.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+All civilisations known to us have sprung from peoples which were
+numerous, wealthy and divided into two social strata. They reached
+their climax at the moment when the two strata began to melt into one.
+
+It is not enough, therefore, that a people should be numerous and
+wealthy; it must, with all its wealth and its power, contain a large
+proportion of poor and even oppressed and enslaved subjects. If it has
+not got these, it must master and make use of other foreign cultures
+as a substitute. That is what Rome did; it is what America is doing.
+
+It is terrible, but comprehensible. For up to this point the
+unconscious processes of Nature, the law of mutual strife, has
+prevailed. So far, collective organizations have been beasts of prey;
+only now are they about to cross the boundaries of the human order.
+
+Comprehensible and explicable. For all creations of culture hold
+together; one cannot pursue the cheaper varieties while renouncing the
+more costly. There is no cheap culture. In their totality they demand
+outlay, the most tremendous outlay known to history, the only outlay
+by which human toil is recompensed, over and above the supply of
+absolute necessaries.
+
+The creations of civilisation, like all things living and dead, follow
+on each other--plants, men, beasts and utensils have their sequence
+generation after generation. Men must paint and look at pictures for
+ten thousand years before a new picture comes into existence. Our
+poetry and our research are the fruit of thousands of years. This is
+no disparagement to genius in work and thought, genius is at once new,
+ancient and eternal, even as the blossom is a new thing on the old
+stem, and belongs to an eternal type. When we hear that a native in
+Central Africa or New Zealand has produced an oil-painting we know
+that somehow or other he must have got to Paris. When a European
+artist writes or paints in Tahiti, what he produces is not a work of
+Tahitian culture. When civilisation has withered away on some
+sterilized soil, it can only be revived by new soil and foreign seed.
+
+The continuity of culture, even in civilized times, can only, however,
+be maintained by constant outlay, just as in arid districts a
+luxuriant vegetation needs continuous irrigation. The flood of
+Oriental wealth had to pour itself into Italy in order to bring forth
+the bloom of Renaissance art. Thousands of patricians, hundreds of
+temporal and spiritual princes, had to found and to adorn temples and
+palaces, gardens, monuments, pageants, games and household goods in
+order that art and science, schooling, mastership, discipleship and
+tradition might grow up. The worship of foreign culture which
+characterized Germany in the seventeenth and half of the eighteenth
+centuries only meant that our soil was grown too poor to yield a crop
+of its own. The culture of the Middle Ages remained international only
+so long as the population of Europe was too sparse and the
+opportunities of work too scanty to occupy local energies; even in the
+thinly populated, Homeric middle-ages of Greece, the builder and the
+poet were not settled in one place, they were wandering artists. If
+to-day the Republic of Guatemala or Honduras should want a
+senate-house or a railway-station they will probably send to London or
+Paris for an architect.
+
+Even technique in handicraft and industry, that typical art of
+civilization, cannot dispense with a great and continuous outlay on
+training, commissioning and marketing in order to maintain itself.
+Although it has not happened yet, there is no reason why a Serb or a
+Slovak should not make some important discovery if he has been trained
+at a European University and learnt the technical tradition. That will
+not, however, give rise to an independent and enduring Serbian or
+Slovakian technique, even though the costliest Universities and
+laboratories should be established in the country and foreign teachers
+called to teach in them. After all that, one must have a market in the
+country itself; expert purchasers, manufacturers, middle-men, a
+trained army of engineers, craftsmen, masters, workmen and a foreign
+market as well--in short, the technical atmosphere--in order to keep
+up the standard of manufacture and production.
+
+A poor country cannot turn out products of high value for a rich one;
+it has not had the education arising from demand. In products relating
+to sport and to comfort, for instance, England was a model, but in
+France these products were ridiculously misunderstood and imitated
+with silly adornments, while on the other hand French products of
+luxury and art-industry were sought for by all countries. German wares
+were considered to be cheap and nasty, until the land grew rich, and
+brought about the co-operation of its forces of science and technique,
+production and marketing, auxiliary industries and remote profits,
+finance and commerce, education and training, judgment and criticism,
+habits of life and a sense of comparative values.
+
+But human forces need the same nurture, the same outlay and the same
+high training, as institutions and material products. Delicate work
+demands sensitive hands and a sheltered way of life; discovery and
+invention demand leisure and freedom; taste demands training and
+tradition, scientific thinking and artistic conception demand an
+environment with an unbroken continuity of cultivation, thought and
+intelligence. A dying civilisation can live for a while on the
+existing humus of culture, on the existing atmosphere of thought, but
+to create anew these elements of life is beyond its powers.
+
+Do not let us deceive ourselves, but look the facts in the face! All
+these excellent Canadians, with or without an academic degree, who
+innocently pride themselves on a proletarian absence of prejudice, are
+adoptive children of a plutocratic and aristocratic cultivation. It is
+all the same even if they lay aside their stiff collars and
+eye-glasses; their every word and argument, their forms of thought,
+their range of knowledge, their strongly emphasized intellectuality
+and taste for art and science, their whole handiwork and industry, are
+an inheritance from what they supposed they had cast off and a tribute
+to what they pretend to despise. Genuine radicalism is only to be
+respected when it understands the connexion of things and is not
+afraid of consequences. It must understand--and I shall make it
+clear--that its rapid advance will kill culture; and the proper
+conclusion is that it ought to despise culture, not to sponge on it.
+The early Christians abolished all the heathen rubbish and
+abominations, the early Radicals would have hurried, in the first
+instance, to pick out the plums.
+
+Culture and civilization, as we see, demand a continuous and enormous
+outlay; an outlay in leisure, an outlay in working power, an outlay in
+wealth. They need patronage and a market, they need the school, they
+need models, tradition, comparison, judgment, intelligence,
+cultivation, disposition, the right kind of nursery--an atmosphere.
+One who stands outside it can serve it, often more powerfully with
+his virgin strength than one who is accustomed to it--but he must be
+carried along and animated by the breath of the same atmosphere.
+Culture and civilization require a rich soil.
+
+But the richness of the soil is not sufficient; culture must be based
+upon, and increased by, contrast. Wealth must have at its disposal
+great numbers of men who are poor and dependent. How otherwise shall
+the outlay of culture be met? One man must have many at his disposal;
+but how can he, if they are all his equals? The outlay will be large,
+but it must be feasible; how can it, if the labour of thousands is not
+cheap? The few, the exalted, must develop power and splendour, they
+must offer types for imitation: how can they do that without a
+retinue, without spectators, without the herd? A land of well-being,
+that is to say, of equally distributed well-being, remains petty and
+provincial. When a State and its authorities, councils of solid and
+thrifty members of societies for this or that, take over the office of
+a Maecenas or a Medici, with their proposals, their calculations, their
+objections, their control, then we get things that look like
+war-memorials, waiting-rooms, newspaper-kiosks and drinking-saloons.
+It was not always so? No; but even in the most penurious times it was
+kings who were the patrons.
+
+But if culture is such a poison-flower, if it flourishes only in the
+swamp of poverty and under the sun of riches, it must and ought to be
+destroyed. Our sentiment will no longer endure the happiness and
+brilliance of the few growing out of the misery of the many; the days
+of the senses are over, and the day of conscience is beginning to
+dawn.
+
+And now a timid and troubled puritanism makes itself heard: Is there
+no middle way? Will not half-measures suffice? No, it will not do; let
+this be said once for all as plainly as possible, you champions of the
+supply of "bare necessities" who talk about "daily bread" and want to
+butter it with the "noblest pleasures of art." It will not do!
+
+No, half-measures will not do, nor quarter-measures. They might, if
+the whole world, the sick, the healthy and the bloated all together
+were of the same mind as ourselves. In Moscow it is said that people
+are expecting the world-revolution every hour, but the world declines
+to oblige. Therefore, if culture and civilization are to remain what
+they were, is there nothing for it but with one wrench to tear the
+poisoned garment from our body? Or--is there then an "or"? Let us see.
+We have a long way before us. First of all we must know how rich or
+how poor we and the world are going to be, on the day when there will
+be no income without working for it and no rich people any more.
+
+If our economic system made us self-supporting we might arrange
+matters on the model of the Boer Republic which had all it needed, and
+now and then traded a load of ostrich feathers for coffee and hymn
+books. But we, alas! in order to find nourishment for twenty
+millions[5] have to export blood and brains. And if, in order to buy
+phosphates, we offer cotton stockings and night-caps as the highest
+products of our artistic energies, and declare that they are all the
+soundest hand-work--for in our "daily bread" economy we shall have
+long forgotten how to work such devil's tools as the modern
+knitting-machine--then people will reply to us: in the first place we
+don't want night-caps, and if we did we can supply them for one-tenth
+of the cost; and our cotton goods will be sent back to us as
+unsaleable.
+
+A world-trade, even of modest dimensions, can only be carried on upon
+the basis of high technical accomplishment, but this height of
+accomplishment cannot be attained on the basis of any penny-wise
+economy. Whoever wills the part must also will the whole, but to this
+whole belongs not merely the conception of a technique, but of a
+civilization, and indeed of a culture. One might as well demand of a
+music-hall orchestra which plays ragtime all the year round that once
+in the year, and once only, on Good Friday, it should pull itself
+together to give an adequate performance of the Passion Music of Bach.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 5: By this figure the author seems to be referring to the
+population of the impoverished Germany of the future if the course of
+Socialism proceeds on wrong lines.]
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+For some decades Germany will be one of the poorest of countries. How
+poor she will be does not depend on herself alone, but on the power
+and the will for mischief of others--who hate us.
+
+However, poverty and wealth are relative terms; Germans are still
+richer on the average than their forefathers; richer than the Romans
+or Greeks. The standard of well-being is set by the best-off of the
+competitors, for he it is who determines the current standard of
+technique and industry, the methods of production, the minimum of
+labour and skill. We cannot, as we have already seen, keep aloof from
+world-competition, for Germany needs cheap goods. We must therefore
+try to keep step so far as we can.
+
+Even if we shut our eyes and take no more account of our debt to
+foreign lands than we do of the war-tribute, we must admit that the
+average standard of well-being in America far surpasses the German.
+Goods are not so dear as with us, and the wages of the skilled worker
+amounts to between seven and ten dollars a day--more than 100 marks in
+our money; and many artisans drive to their workshops in their own
+automobiles.
+
+If, now, we ask our Radicals how they envisage the problem of
+competition with such a country, which in one generation will be
+twenty-or thirty-fold as rich as we are, they will blurt out a few
+sentences in which we shall catch the word "Soviet system," "surplus
+value,"[6] "world revolution." But in truth the question will never
+occur to them--it is not ventilated at public meetings.
+
+Among themselves they talk, albeit without much conviction, about
+"surplus value"--which has nothing whatever to do with the present
+question, and in regard to which it has been proved to them often
+enough that so far as it can be made use of at all, it only means
+about a pound of butter extra per head of the population.
+
+The economic superiority of the Western powers, however, goes on
+growing, inasmuch as to all appearance they are getting to work
+seriously to establish the new economy (which we have buried) in the
+form of State Socialism. A healthy, or what is to-day the same thing,
+a victorious economy, does not leap over any of its stages; it will
+work gradually through the apparently longer, but constant, movement
+from Capitalism to State Socialism and thence to full Socialism; while
+we, it seems, want to take a shortcut, and to miss out the intervening
+stage. And we lose so much time and energy in restless fluctuations
+forward and backward, hither and thither, that this leap in advance
+may fall short.
+
+If anything could be more stupid and calamitous than the war itself it
+was the time when it broke out. There was one thing which the big
+capitalism of the world was formed to supply, which it was able to
+supply, and, in fact, was supplying: the thing which not only
+justified capitalism, but showed it to be an absolutely necessary
+stage in the development of a denser population. This was the
+enrichment of the peoples, the rapid, and even anticipatory
+restoration of equilibrium between the growing population and the
+indispensable increase in the means of production; in other words,
+general well-being. The unbroken progress of America, and the almost
+unbroken progress of England will demonstrate that in one, or at most
+two, generations the power of work and the output of mechanism would
+have risen to such a pitch that we could have done anything we liked
+in the direction of lightening human labour and reconciling social
+antagonisms.
+
+Alas, it was in vain! The rapid advance to prosperity of the people of
+Central Europe, who had been accustomed to thrift and economy, went to
+their heads; they fell victims to the poison of capitalism and of
+mechanism; they were unable, like America in its youthful strength, to
+make their new circumstances deepen their sense of responsibility; in
+their greedy desire to store as much as possible of the heavenly manna
+in their private barns they abandoned their destinies to a
+superannuated, outworn feudal class and to aspiring magnates of the
+bourgeoisie; they would not be taught by political catastrophes, and
+at last, in the catastrophe of the war, they lost at once their
+imaginary hopes, their traditional power and the economic basis of
+their existence.
+
+Those who are now pursuing a policy of desperation are unconsciously
+building their hopes on the breakdown which brought them to the top:
+they are avowedly making the hoped-for revolution in the West the
+central point of their system. If the West holds out, they will be
+false prophets; but it will not only hold out, it will in the
+beginning at all events, witness a great and passionate uprising of
+imperialistic and capitalistic tendencies. If there is any one who did
+not understand that a policy based on hopes of other peoples'
+bankruptcy is the most flimsy and frivolous of all policies, he might
+well have learned it from the war.
+
+Germany must forge her own destinies for herself, without side-glances
+at the good or ill fortune of others. Had time only been given us to
+pass naturally from the stage of a prolonged and corrupted childhood
+into that of a manly responsibility, our ultimate recovery would be
+assured. But we have to accomplish in months what ought to be the
+evolution of decades; our national training has left us without
+convictions, we have no eye for the true boundaries of rights, claims
+and responsibilities, and we hesitate as to how far we must or ought
+to go. Unprepared, weakened, impoverished and sick, we are required,
+at the most unlucky moment, to work out a new and unprecedented order
+of life. Before even the educated classes are capable of forming a
+judgment on the question, the most incapable masses of the rawest
+youth, of the lowest classes of society, are let loose, and sit upon
+the judgment-seat.
+
+It is not only that we have been rich and have become very poor, but
+we were always politically immature, and are so still. If the order of
+Society is to be that of root-and-branch Socialism, it will mean the
+proletarian condition for all of us, and for a long time to come.
+There is no use in flattering ourselves and painting the future better
+than it is; the truth must be spoken with all plainness. If we work
+hard, and under capable guidance, each of us will at most have an
+effective income of 500 marks in pre-war values, or, say, 2000 marks
+for the family. This average will be higher if we proceed on the
+principles of the New Economy,[7] but again will be reduced by the
+necessity for allowing extra pay for work of higher value. If to-day
+the average income available is markedly higher than the above, the
+reason is that we are living on our capital; we are living on the
+products of work which ought to be reserved for the maintenance and
+renewal of the means of production; in other words we are exhausting
+the soil and slaughtering our stock. We are also consuming what
+foreign countries give us on credit; in other words, we are living on
+borrowed money.
+
+It is childish lying and deception to act on the tacit assumption that
+thoroughgoing Socialism means something like a garden-city idyll, with
+play-houses, open-air theatres, excursions, picturesque raiment and
+fire-side art. This in itself quite decent ideal of the average
+architect, art-craftsman and art-reformer if expressed in dry figures
+would, "at the lowest estimate" as they say, demand about fivefold the
+capacity for production attainable by the utmost exertions and with a
+ten hours' day _before the war_--before the downfall of our economy
+and our exploitation by the enemy.
+
+To place one-third of our working-class in decent, freehold dwellings
+would alone, if the material and means of production sufficed, require
+the whole working-capacity of the country for two years. Even after
+the last manufacturer's villa-residence, the last palace-hotel, have
+long been turned into tenements, the solution of the most urgent part
+of the housing-question will still be an affair of decades. For the
+sake of the last remnant of our self-respect we must finally tear
+asunder that web of economic falsehood, woven out of ignorance, mental
+lethargy, concealment and illusion, which has taken the place of the
+political. Let us see any one attempt to prove that Germany can carry
+on, I do not say a well-off, but even a petty tradesman's kind of
+existence, unless our means of production can by some stroke of magic
+be multiplied tenfold--on paper it can be done with ease--or unless
+the production value (not turnover), which an adult working-man can
+with the utmost exertion bring into being in the course of a year does
+not many times exceed the average value of 2000 marks.
+
+No doubt the young folk of our big cities promise themselves a merry
+time for six weeks when they have got power, the shops, the wardrobes
+and the wine-cellars into their hands. For the leaders, it may last a
+little longer than for the rank-and-file. And then, for those of the
+former who have any sense of honesty, will come a question of
+conscience, which may be delayed by printing paper-money, but cannot
+be solved by any appeal to the people.
+
+If Bolshevism were the contrary to what it is--if it were a success, a
+thing not absolutely impossible in a peasant-State, we might
+understand the self-assurance of those who, in opposition to our
+forecast, expect everything from the will of the people, the Soviet
+system and the inspirations of the future. We do understand it in the
+case of the drawing-room communists, and the profiteer-extremists who
+are out not for the cause, but for power, and perhaps only for
+material objects.
+
+I know that by these observations I am favouring the cause of those
+sorry dignitaries of a day, the Majority Socialists, but I cannot help
+that. The truth is not false because it favours one party, nor is
+falsehood truth because it harms the other. The Socialism now in
+power is doing the right thing, although it is doing it out of
+ignorance and helplessness--it is waiting, and getting steam up. It is
+better to do the right thing out of error than to do the wrong thing
+out of wisdom. Out of error: for besides omitting to do what ought not
+to be done it also omits the things it ought to do--among others, the
+introduction of the New Economy.[8] It is like mankind before the
+Fall; it does not know good from evil, what is useful and what is
+noxious, what can be done and what cannot. Well--let it take its time;
+it shall have time enough.
+
+This time must be turned to good account. When we have come to the end
+of these observations we shall understand what a huge task lies
+between us and the realization of the new social order. In this case
+the longest way round is the shortest way home. And even if Germany
+should choose the mountain road with its broad loops and windings, we
+shall stray often enough, and go backward now and then; while if, in
+impatient revolt, we try to climb straight up, we shall slip down
+lower than where we started. Let us never forget how mysteriously our
+social and political immaturity seems to be bound up with our once
+lofty and even now remarkable intellectuality and morality.[9] We have
+not won our liberties, they have fallen into our laps; it was by the
+general breakdown, by a strike, by a flight, that Germany and her
+former rulers have parted company. These liberties, social and
+political, are not rooted in the soil, they can hardly be said to be
+prized among the treasures of life, it is not their ideal, but their
+material side which attracts us. Those who used to shout Hurrah! now
+cry "All power to the Soviets!" and the day will come when they will
+again shout Hurrah! Then we shall witness a real sundering of our
+different visions of the world, visions now buried under a mass of
+interests and speculations.
+
+In any case, whether the change is to be catastrophic or evolutionary,
+the journey will be a long one, and every attempt to hurry it will
+only prolong it further; it will throw us back for years, or it may be
+decades. Above all things, we must know whither we are going. In order
+to adapt ourselves to a new form of society we must know what it _may_
+look like, what it _ought_ to look like, and what it _will_ look like.
+We shall find that Germany is not going to be landed in an earthly
+Paradise, but in a world of toil, and one which for a long period will
+be a world of poverty, of a penurious civilization and of a
+deeply-endangered culture. The unproved, parrot-phrases of a cheap
+Utopianism will grow dumb--those phrases which offer us entrance into
+the usual Garden of Eden with its square-cut, machine-made culture and
+gaudy, standardized enjoyments--phrases which assure us that when we
+have introduced the six-hours' working day and abolished private
+property, the cinema horrors will be replaced by classical concerts,
+the gin-shops by popular reading-rooms, the gaming-hells by edifying
+lectures, highway robberies by gymnastic exercises, detective novels
+by Gottfried Keller, bazaar-trifles and comic vulgarities by works of
+refined handicraft; and that out of boxing contests, racecourse
+betting, bomb exercises, and profiteering in butter, we shall see the
+rise of an era of humility and philanthropy.
+
+In the Promised Land as we conceive it, the classes which are now the
+bearers of German culture will lose almost everything, while the gain
+of the proletariat will be scarcely visible. And yet for the sake of
+this scarcely visible gain we must tread the stony path that lies
+before us. Willingly and joyfully shall we tread it; for out of this,
+at first, dubious conquest of equal rights for all men will grow the
+might of justice, of human dignity, of human solidarity and unity.
+
+That is truly work for a century, and yet for that very reason the
+hard path will lead to its reward. We must learn to know it, and to
+understand that it is a path of sacrifice. We must not accept the
+invitation of fools to a Christmas party--fools who will make the
+welkin ring with their outcries when they find out their
+self-deception. Let us tread our path of suffering with a pride which
+disdains to be consoled by illusions.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 6: By surplus-value (_Mehrwert_) the author means all that
+is produced above and beyond the bare necessities of life.]
+
+[Footnote 7: _Die Neue Wirtschaft_, by Walther Rathenau (S. Fischer).
+In this brief study, Rathenau urges (1) the unification and
+standardization of the whole of German industry and commerce in one
+great Trust, working under a State charter, and armed with very
+extensive powers; and (2) a great intensification of the application
+of science and mechanism to production.]
+
+[Footnote 8: See p. 37, _note_.]
+
+[Footnote 9: Morality, _Sittlichkeit_, a word of broader meaning than
+"morality," for it comprehends not only matters of ethical right and
+wrong, but the general temper and habit of mind of a people as
+expressed in social life.]
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+
+In order to throw some light into the obscurity of that social
+dreamland which no one seriously discusses because no one honestly
+believes in it, let us, as it were, cut out and examine a section from
+the fully socialized Germany of the future. Let us suppose that
+certain economic and social conditions have lasted for a generation or
+so, and have therefore become more or less stabilized. At a normal
+rate of progress this state of things should be reached about the end
+of this century.
+
+To begin with, let us make two very optimistic assumptions--first,
+that technical progress in Germany shall have developed to a point at
+which we are no longer impossibly outclassed and distanced by foreign
+nations, and, secondly, that by a timely and far-reaching reform of
+education and culture (the lowest cost of which must be set down at
+about three milliards of marks) the complete breakdown of civilisation
+may be averted. This reform is one which must be taken in hand very
+early, for _after_ the event its adoption is improbable. A third, less
+optimistic but on that account more probable assumption may be added
+to this--namely, that the Western countries shall have progressed
+towards Socialism more steadily and therefore more slowly, and that
+at the period of our comparison America shall find itself at the stage
+of State-Socialism, not of full socialization. We know that in making
+this assumption we are smoothing the way for attack to our
+professional opponents, uncritical and self-interested, who with one
+blast of the fanfare of world-revolution can scatter our further
+observations to the winds.
+
+Full Socialism is characterized, as we have seen, by the abolition of
+all incomes that are not worked for, and the fact that there are no
+more rich. But this criterion must be limited in its application, for
+it can never be fully realized.
+
+According to the theory and the laws every one must hold some
+appointment and be paid for his work, or for not working. What he is
+paid, however, he can at will utilize, or waste, or hoard up, or give,
+or gamble away, or destroy. He cannot invest it, or get interest on it
+or turn into capital, because these private undertakings or means of
+production will no longer exist.
+
+Now each of these assumptions is so shaky that not only must trifling
+divergences and shortcomings be winked at, but the meshes of the
+system are so wide that only a rough approximation to the ideal is
+possible.
+
+It is true that every one can be made to hold some appointment and be
+paid for some minimum of work, but no one can be prevented from
+devoting his leisure hours to some work of rare quality and turning it
+into value for his own purposes. He can make himself useful by
+subsidiary employment of an artistic, scientific or technical
+character, by rendering services or assistance of various kinds, by
+advising, or entertaining, or acting as a guide to strangers, or going
+on employment abroad, and no law can prevent him from turning his
+services into income even if he was merely paid in kind. Gaming and
+betting will flourish and many will grow rich by them. A man who has
+lost his money and who has exhausted his rights to an advance from the
+public institutions for that object will have recourse to lenders who
+will supply him with bread and meat and clothes, and who will make
+money by it. Similarly with people who are tempted to make
+acquisitions beyond their standard remuneration. On every side we
+shall see private stores of goods of all kinds, which will take the
+place of property as formerly understood.
+
+There will be an enormous temptation to smuggling and profiteering
+which will reach a height far surpassing all scandals of the war and
+revolution periods. Foreigners and their agents, who look after the
+export trade "from Government to Government," will help hoarders and
+savers to turn their goods to account. Suppose citizens are attacked
+because their senseless expenditure is a mockery of their legal
+remuneration, they will say: I got this from friends--that I got by
+exchange--this came from abroad--my relatives in America sent me that.
+Law, control, terrorism, are effective just so long as there is not a
+blade of grass in the land--once remove the fear of hunger and they
+are useless. Great properties will arise, drawing interest both abroad
+and at home, and they will grow by evasions and bribery. The
+profiteer, the true child of the "great days," will not perish from
+the land, on the contrary, he will grow tougher the more he is
+persecuted, he will be the rich man of the future, and he will form a
+constant political danger if he and his fellows combine.
+
+So long as we have not acquired an entirely new mentality, one which
+detaches men from possessions, which points them towards the Law,
+which binds the passions, and sharpens the conscience, so long will
+the principle of "No rich people and no workless income" have to be
+contracted into the formula, "There ought to be none."
+
+Without this profound alteration of mentality, even the legally
+prescribed incomes will exhibit quite grotesque variations, and will
+adapt themselves to the rarity-value of special gifts, to
+indispensable qualities, to favouritism, with a crudity quite unknown
+to-day. A scarcity of Ministers, a Professor's nourishment, and
+soldiers' supplies, will then as now be met according to the law of
+supply and demand. Consider what ten years' practice in the war for
+wages and strike-management, with the public in it as partisans, will
+bring with it in the way of favouritisms, celebrities, and
+indispensabilities. Popular jockeys, successful surgeons, managers of
+sports' clubs, tenors, demimondaines, farce-writers and champion
+athletes could, even to-day, if they were class-conscious and joined
+together to exploit their opportunities, demand any income they liked.
+Even as a matter of practical political economy, the cinema-star (or
+whatever may succeed her) will be able to prescribe to the Government
+what amount of adornments, drawn from Nature or Art, are necessary for
+her calling, and what standard of life she must maintain in order to
+keep herself in the proper mood.
+
+Organizers, popular leaders, authors and artists will announce and
+enforce their demands to the full limit of their rarity-value. At a
+considerable distance below these come the acquired and more or less
+transferable powers and talents. The Russians for the first few months
+believed in a three-fold order of allowances, rising within a limit of
+about one to two. If the ideas now prevailing have not undergone a
+radical change, then we may, in the society of the future, look for
+divergences of income in the limit of one to a thousand.
+
+Therefore the principle that there shall be no more rich people must
+again be substantially limited. We must say, "There will be people
+receiving extraordinary incomes in kind to which must be added the
+claims to personal service which these favoured persons will lay down
+as conditions of their work."
+
+In its external, arithmetical structure, the fabric of life and its
+requirements in the new order will resemble that of to-day far more
+closely than most of us imagine--on the other hand, the inward and
+personal constitution of man will be far more different. Already we
+can observe the direction of the movement.
+
+Extravagance and luxury will continue to exist, and those who practise
+it will be, as they are to-day, and more than to-day, the profiteers,
+the lucky ones, and the adventurers. Excessive wealth will be more
+repulsive than it is now; whether it will be less valued depends upon
+the state of public ethics, a topic which we shall have to consider
+later. It is probable that in defiance of all legislation wealth will
+turn itself into expenditure and enjoyment more rapidly and more
+recklessly than to-day.
+
+But the relics of middle-class well-being will by that time have been
+consumed; the families which for generations have visibly incorporated
+the German spirit will less than others contrive to secure special
+advantages by profiteering and evading the laws; as soon as their
+modest possessions are taxed away or consumed they will melt into the
+general mass of needy people who will form the economic average of the
+future.
+
+The luxury which will exhibit itself in streets and houses will have a
+dubious air; every one will know that there is something wrong with
+it, people will spy and denounce, and find to their disgust that
+nothing can be proved; the well-off will be partly despised, partly
+envied; the question how to suppress evasions of the law will take up
+a good half of all public discussions, just as that of capitalism does
+now. The hateful sight of others' prosperity cannot, even at home,
+not to mention foreign countries, be withdrawn from the eyes of the
+needy masses; capitalism will have merely acquired another name and
+other representatives.
+
+The fact that the average of more or less cultivated and responsible
+folk are plunged in poverty will not be accepted as the consequence of
+an unalterable natural law, nor as a case of personal misfortune; it
+will be set down to bad government, and the rising revolutionary
+forces of the fifth, sixth and seventh classes will nourish the
+prevailing discontent in favour of a new revolt. For the greater
+uniformity of the average way of life and its general neediness will
+not in itself abolish the division of classes. I have already often
+enough pointed out that no mechanical arrangements can avail us here.
+
+At first there will be three, or more probably four classes who, in
+spite of poverty, will not dissolve in the masses, and who, through
+their coherence and their intellectual heritage are by no means
+without power. The Bolshevist plan of simply killing them out will not
+be possible in Germany, they are relatively too numerous; persecution
+will weld them closer together, and their traditional experiences,
+habits of mind, and capacity, will make it necessary to have recourse
+to them and employ them again and again.
+
+The first of these classes is that of the feudal nobility. Their
+ancient names cannot be rooted out of the history of Germany, and even
+in their poverty the bearers of these names will be respected--all
+the more if, as we may certainly assume, they maintain the effects of
+their bodily discipline, and the visible tradition of certain forms of
+life and thought. They will be strengthened by their mutual
+association, their relationship with foreign nobility will give them
+important functions in diplomacy; these are two elements which they
+have in common with Catholicism and Judaism. They will retain their
+inclination and aptitude for the calling of arms and for
+administration; their reactionary sentiments will lead now to success,
+now to failure, and by both the inner coherence of the class will be
+fortified. Finally, the inevitable reversion to an appreciation of the
+romantic values of life will make a connexion with names of ancient
+lineage desirable to the leading classes, and especially to the
+aristocracy of officialism.
+
+This aristocracy of officialism forms the second of the new strata
+which will come to light. The first office-bearers of the new era, be
+their achievements great or small, are not to be forgotten. Their
+descendants are respected as the bearers of well-known names; in their
+families the practice of politics, the knowledge of persons and
+connexions are perpetuated; fathers, in their lifetime, look after the
+interests of sons and daughters and launch them on the same path. From
+these, and from the first stratum, the representatives of Germany in
+foreign lands are chosen, and in this way a certain familiarity with
+international life and society will be maintained. They will have the
+provision necessary for their position abroad, and will also find
+ways and means to keep up a higher standard of life at home. Persons
+in possession of irregular means of well-being will offer a great deal
+to establish connexions with these circles, which control so many
+levers in the machine of State.
+
+The third group consists of the descendants of what was once the
+leading class in culture and in economics. Here we find a spirit
+similar to that of the refugees, _emigres_ and Huguenots of the past.
+The lower they sink in external power, the more tenaciously they hold
+to their memories. Every family knows every other and cherishes the
+lustre of its name, a lustre augmented by legendary recollections, all
+the more when the achievements of their class are ostentatiously
+ignored in the new social order. People spare and save to the last
+extremity in order to preserve and hand down some heirloom--a musical
+instrument, a library, a manuscript, a picture or two. A puritanical
+thrift is exercised in order, as far as possible, to maintain
+education, culture and intellectuality on the old level; to this class
+culture, refinement of life as an end in itself, the practice of
+religion, classical music, and artistic feeling will fly for refuge.
+No other class understands this one; it holds itself aloof, it looks
+different from the rest in its occupations, its habits, its garb and
+its forms of life. It supplies the new order with its scholars, its
+clergy, its higher teaching power, its representatives of the most
+disinterested and intellectual callings. Like the monasteries of the
+Middle Ages, it forms an island of the past. Its influence rises and
+falls periodically, according to the current ideas of the time, but
+its position is assured by its voluntary sacrifices, by its knowledge
+and by the purity of its motives.
+
+A fourth inexpugnable and influential stratum will in all probability
+be formed by the middle-class landowners and the substantial peasants.
+Even though the socialization of the land should be radically carried
+through--which is not likely to be the case--it will remain on paper.
+A class of what may be called State-tenants, estate-managers, or
+leaders of co-operative organizations will very much resemble a
+landowning class. Its traditional experience and the ties that bind it
+to the soil make it a closed and well-defined body, self-conscious and
+masterful through the importance of its calling, its indispensability
+and its individualism. It suffers no dictation as regards its manner
+of life. Here we shall see the conservative traditions of the country
+strongly mustered for defence, incapable of being eliminated as a
+political force, and forming a counterpoise to the radical democracy
+of the towns.
+
+Everywhere we find a state of strain and of cleavage. The
+single-stratum condition of society cannot be reached without a
+profound inward change; politics are still stirred and shaken by
+conflicts, and society by the strife of classes. A very different
+picture from the promised Utopian Paradise of a common feeding-ground
+for lions and sheep!
+
+We are all aggrieved by the illegal opulence of the profiteers, but we
+are all liable to the infection. The feudalistic Fronde awaits its
+opportunity. The aristocracy of office endeavours to monopolize the
+State-machine. The _emigres_ of culture find themselves looked askance
+at, on suspicion of intellectual arrogance, and they insist that the
+country cannot get on without them. The agriculturalists are feared,
+when they show a tendency to revolt against the towns. The ruling
+class, that is to say the more or less educated masses of the
+city-democracy, looks in impatient discontent for the state of general
+well-being which refuses to be realized, lays the blame alternately on
+the four powerful strata and on the profiteers, and fights now this
+group now that, for better conditions of living.
+
+But the conditions of living do not improve--they get worse. The level
+of the nation's output has been sinking from the first day of the
+Revolution onwards. The absolute productivity of work, the relative
+efficacy and the quality of the product, have all deteriorated. With a
+smaller turnover we have witnessed a falling-off in the excellence of
+the goods, in research-work, and in finish. Industrial plant has been
+worked to death and has not yet recovered. Auxiliary industries,
+accessories and raw materials have fallen back. High-quality
+workmanship has suffered from defective schooling, youthful
+indiscipline and the loss of manual dexterity. The new social order
+has lost a generation of leaders in technique, scholarship and
+economics. Universities, with all institutions of research and
+education, have suffered from this blank. Technical leadership is
+gone, and the deterioration in quality has reacted detrimentally on
+output. We can now turn out nothing except what is cheap and easy, and
+what can be produced without traditional skill of hand, without
+serious calculation and research. For all innovations, all work of
+superior quality, Germany is dependent on the foreigner. The
+atmosphere of technique has vanished, and the stamp of cheap hireling
+labour is on the whole output of the country.
+
+In the weeks of the Revolution street orators used to tell us that
+five hundred Russian professors had signed a statement that the level
+of culture had never been so high as under Bolshevism. And Berlin
+believed them! To educate Russia it would take, to begin with, a
+million elementary schools with a yearly budget of several dozen
+milliards of roubles, and a corresponding number of higher schools and
+universities: if every educated Russian for the next twenty years were
+to become a teacher, there would not be enough of them--not to speak
+of the requirements of transport, of raw materials and of agriculture.
+The fabric of a civilization and a culture cannot be annihilated at
+one blow, nor can it grow up save in decades and centuries. The
+maintenance of the structure demands unceasing toil and unbroken
+tradition; the breach that has been made in it in Germany can only be
+healed by the application in manifold forms of work, intellect and
+will; and this hope we cannot entertain.[10]
+
+But we have not yet done with the question of social strata and inward
+cleavage. Revolutionary threats are causing strife every day.
+Revolution against revolution--how is this possible? We are not
+speaking of a reactionary revolution but of the "activist."
+
+In an earlier work I discussed the theory of continuous
+revolution.[11] Behind every successful revolutionary movement there
+stands another, representing one negation more than its predecessor.
+Behind the revolt of the aristocracy stood that of the bourgeoisie,
+behind that of the bourgeoisie stood Socialism. Behind the now ruling
+fourth class[12] rises the fifth, and a sixth is coming into sight. If
+a ninth should represent pure Anarchism, we may see an eleventh
+proclaiming a dictatorship, and a twelfth standing for absolute
+monarchy.
+
+To-day the Majority Socialists are in power, that is to say the Right
+section of the fourth class. This is composed of the older, trained
+and work-willing Trade Unionists, who are amazed at the Revolution,
+who do not regard it as quite legitimate, but who are determined to defend
+the _status quo_ in so far as a certain degree of self-determination
+and elbow-room in the material conditions of life still remain to them.
+
+The Left section consists of youths and of persons disgusted with
+militarism, ignorant of affairs but cherishing a certain independence
+of judgment; still ready for work but equally so for politics. To
+these, as a "forward" party, the doctrinaire theorists have allied
+themselves. The designation of the party "The Independents" is
+characteristic; its goal, "All power to the Soviets," is a catchword
+from Russia.
+
+A fifth class is now emerging--the work-shy. The others call them the
+tramp-proletariat, the disgruntled, the declassed, who set their hopes
+on disorder. Their goal is still undetermined--their favourite
+expression is "bloodhound," when those in power, or Government troops,
+are referred to.
+
+Then comes the sixth class, still partly identified with the Left of
+the fourth and embryonically attached to the fifth. These are the
+indomitable loafers and shirkers, physically and mentally unsound,
+aliens in the social order, excluded by their sufferings, their
+punishments, their vices and passions; self-excluded, repudiators of
+law and morality, born of the cruelty of the city, pitiable beings,
+not so much cast out of society as cast up against it, as a living
+reproach to its mechanical organization. If these ever come into the
+light in politics, they will demand a kind of syndicalistic
+communism.
+
+That is as far as we can see at present into the as yet unopened germs
+of continuous revolutionary movement. In these are contained the
+infinite series of all principles that can conceivably be supported;
+and it would be wholly false to see in this series merely so many
+successive steps in moral degeneration, even though the earlier stages
+should proceed on a flat denial of ethical principles. Later on will
+come revivals and restorations, political, ethical and religious, and
+each time we shall see the rising stratum attaching to itself strays
+and converts, above all, the disappointed and ambitious, from those
+that went before.
+
+But the number of revolutions will grow till we lose count of them,
+and each, however strenuously it may profess its horror of bloodshed,
+will have only one hope and possibility: that of defending itself by
+armed force against its successor. The game is a grotesquely dishonest
+one, because every aspirant movement will cast against its forerunner
+the charge of ruling by bloodshed, while it itself is already
+preparing its armed forces for the conflict.
+
+It is therefore wholly vain to hope that an advanced social
+organization implies stability, that a brotherhood mechanically
+decreed will exclude further revolutions, and will establish eternally
+an empire of righteousness and justice according to any preconceived
+pattern.
+
+The fiercest hatred will prevail amongst those who are most closely
+associated--for instance, between handworkers and brainworkers,
+between leaders and followers; and this hate will be all the more
+inappeasable when it is open to every one to rise in the world, and
+none can cherish the excuse that he is the victim of a social system
+of overwhelming power. To-day this hatred is masked by the general
+class-hatred--hatred of the monopolists of culture, of position and of
+capital.
+
+At the bottom of it, however, lies even to-day the more universal
+hatred of the defeated for the victor, and when those three monopolies
+have fallen, it will emerge in its original Cain-like form. It cannot
+be appeased by any mechanical device. Human inequality can never be
+abolished, human accomplishment and work will always vary, and the
+human passion for success will always assert itself.
+
+We have discussed the material foundation and the stratification of
+the German people when full socialization has been realized. Let us
+now forecast the manner of their existence.
+
+The future community is poor; the individual is poor. The average
+standard of well-being corresponds, at best, to what in peace-time one
+would expect from an income of 3000 marks.[13] But the requirements of
+the population are not mediaevally simplified--they could not be, in
+view of the density of the population and the complexity of industrial
+and professional  vocations. They are manifold and diverse, and they
+are moreover intensified by the spectacle of extravagance offered by
+the profiteering class and the licence of social life. The traditional
+garden-city idyll of architects and art-craftsmen is a Utopia about as
+much like reality as the pastoral Arcadianism of Marie Antoinette.
+
+All things of common use are standardized into typical forms. It must
+not be supposed, however, that they are based on pure designs and
+models. The taste of the artist will clash with that of the crowd, and
+since the former has no authority to back him he will have to
+compromise. The compromise, however, consists in cheap imitation of
+foreign models, for in foreign countries art-industry will exist, and
+no legislation can prevent its products from finding their way (in
+reproductions or actual examples) into Germany and being admired
+there. Our half or wholly imitative products are turned out as cheaply
+as possible, in substitute-materials, and are made as well or as ill
+as the relics of our craftsmanship permit, or as our existing
+machinery for the purpose is capable of. Cheapness and ease of
+manufacture are the principles aimed at, for even with narrow means no
+one will want to do without certain things; fashions still prevail,
+and will have to be satisfied with things that do not last, but can be
+constantly changed.
+
+How far will a new system of education tend to simplify the needs of
+men and women and to purify their taste? Probably very little, for
+good models will be lacking, poverty is not fastidious, and the taste
+of the populace is the sovereign arbiter. But on this taste it depends
+whether vulgar ornaments and gewgaws, frivolities and bazaar-horrors,
+are to satisfy the desires of the soul.
+
+Objects of earlier art and industry have been alienated through need
+of money or destroyed by negligence. Here and there one may find an
+old cup or an engraving, as we do to-day in plundered territories, but
+these things are disconnected specimens; all they can do is
+occasionally to interest an artist. Whoever wants to procure some
+object or to get something done which has not been standardized in the
+common range of approved requirements must gain it by a tedious course
+of pinching and saving. Personal possessions in the way of books,
+musical instruments, works of art, as well as travel outside the
+prescribed routes are rarities; a tree of one's own, a horse of one's
+own are legendary things.
+
+Thus luxury in its better aspect has gone to ruin quicker than in the
+bad. All outlay devoted to culture, to beauty, to invigoration has
+dried up; all that survives is what stimulates, what depraves and
+befouls; frivolities, substitutes and swindles. What we have arrived
+at is not the four-square simplicity of the peasant-homestead, but a
+ramshackle city suburb. To some of us it is not easy, and to many it
+is not agreeable to picture to themselves the aspect of a thoroughly
+proletarianized country, and the difficulty lies in the fact that the
+popular mind has, as it were by universal agreement, resolved to
+conceive the future on a basis of domestic prosperity about tenfold as
+great as it can possibly be. The leaders and office-holders of the
+proletariat have an easy task in convincing themselves and others that
+what they approve and are struggling for is the so-called middle-class
+existence with all the refinement and claims of historic culture.
+Tacitly, as a matter of course, they accept what plutocracy has to
+give them, and imagine that the loans they take up from the
+civilization and culture of the past can be redeemed from the social
+gains of the future.
+
+The stages at which a nation arrives year by year, can be estimated by
+its building. In the new order, little is being built. Apart from
+certain perfunctory garden-cities, which are being erected for the
+principle of the thing, to meet the needs of a few thousand favoured
+households, and which perhaps will never be finished, we will for
+decades have to content ourselves with new subdivisions and
+exploitation of the old buildings; old palaces packed to the roof with
+families, will stand in the midst of vegetable gardens and will
+alternate with empty warehouses in the midst of decayed cities. In the
+streets of the suburbs the avenues of trees will be felled, and in the
+cities grass will grow through the cracks of the pavement.
+
+For a long time it used to be believed that the passion of the
+landscape painters of the seventeenth century for introducing ruins
+with hovels nestling among them arose from a feeling for romance.
+This is not so--they only painted what they saw around them after the
+ravages of the Thirty Years' War. It must not be supposed, however,
+that the forecast in these pages is based on the consequences of the
+war; these no doubt must darken our picture of the future; but the
+shadows, which I have put in as sparingly as I could, are essentially
+the expression of a greatly reduced economic efficiency, combined with
+the uniformity produced by the general proletarianization of life with
+the absence of any correcting factor in individual effort of a
+rational character and of the influence of higher types.
+
+A brighter trait in the material conditions of life will be formed by
+effort of a collective character, such as even the most penurious
+community may be able to undertake. The more severely the domestic
+household has to pinch, and the more unattractive it thereby becomes,
+the more completely will life be forced into publicity. Private claims
+and aspirations, which cannot be satisfied, will be turned over to the
+public. Men will gather in the streets and places of public resort,
+and have more mutual intercourse than before, since every transaction
+of life, even the most insignificant, will have to be a subject of
+discussion, agreement and understanding. In all the arrangements of
+social life, _e.g._ for news, communications, supplies, discussion and
+entertainment, and demands will be made and complied with for greater
+convenience and comprehensiveness, for popular aesthetics and popular
+representation. In these arrangements and in these alone Art will
+have to find its functions and its home. Public buildings, gardens,
+sanatoriums, means of transit and exhibitions will be established at
+great cost. All the demands of the spirit and of the senses will seek
+their satisfaction in public. There will be no lack of popular
+performances, excursions, tours and conducted visits to collections;
+of clubs, libraries, athletic meetings and displays. The aspect of
+this tendency from the point of view of culture and ethics we have
+still to consider; in its social aspect (apart from the fact that it
+causes a vacuum in the home and forces young people to the surface of
+life, and in spite of its mechanical effect) it will act as a
+comforting reminiscence of the civic commonalty and solidarity of
+mediaeval times.
+
+In considering the spiritual and cultural life of a fully socialized
+society, we have to start with the assumption that any one man's
+opinion and decision are as good as another's. Authority, even in
+matters of the highest intellectual or spiritual character, only
+exists in so far as it is established, acknowledged and confirmed
+either by direct action of the people's will, or indirectly through
+their representatives. Every one's education and way of life are much
+the same; there are no secrecies, no vague authority attaching to
+special vocations; no one permits himself to feel impressed by any
+person or thing. Every one votes, whether it be for an office, a
+memorial, a law, or a drama, or does it through delegates or the
+delegates of delegates. Every one is determined to know the how and
+where and why of everything--just as to-day in America--and demands a
+plausible reason for it. The reply, "This is a matter you don't
+understand," is impossible.
+
+Everything is referred to one's own conscience, one's own
+intelligence, one's own taste, and no one admits any innate or
+acquired superiority in others. In debate, the boundaries between the
+ideal and the practicable are obliterated; for on the one hand every
+one is too much preoccupied with material needs, and on the other, too
+confident, too unaccustomed to submit himself to what in former days
+was called a deeper insight, too loosely brought up to let himself be
+taught. We never, therefore, hear such judgments as: This, although it
+is difficult, is a book to be read; this drama ought to have been
+produced although it is not sensational; I don't myself care for this
+memorial, but it must remain because a great artist made it; this is a
+necessary branch of study, although it has no practical application; I
+will vote for this man on account of his character and ability,
+although he has made no election-promises. On the other hand, the
+following kind of argument will have weight: This historic building
+must be demolished, for it interferes with traffic; this collection
+must be sold, for we need money; we need no chair of philosophy, but
+we do need one for cinema-technique; these ornamental grounds are the
+very place for a merry-go-round; tragedies are depressing, they must
+not be performed in the State theatres. Let us recall certain oversea
+legislation--carried out, be it noted in countries still swayed by the
+traditional influence of culture--and these examples will not seem
+exaggerated.
+
+Where there is no appeal to authority, where none need fear
+disapproval or ridicule, where convenience is prized and thrift rules
+supreme, there thought and decision will be short-breathed, and will
+never look beyond the needs of the day. Who will then care for far-off
+deductions, for wide arcs of thought? Calculation comes to the front,
+everything unpractical is despised; opinions are formed by discussion,
+everyday reading and propaganda. Men demand proofs, success, visible
+returns. The fewer the aims, the stronger will be their attraction.
+People are tolerant, for they are used to hearing the most varied
+opinions, and all opinions have followers, from the water-cure to
+Taoism; but the only opinion of any influence is that whose followers
+are many.
+
+Public opinion settles everything. The champions of absolute values
+have to accommodate themselves to the law of competition. Religious
+teaching has to seek the favour of the times by the same methods as a
+new system of physical culture. A work of art must compete for votes.
+Only by popularity-hunting can anything come to life; there will be no
+doing without much talking. As in the later days of Greece, rhetoric
+and dialectic are the most powerful of the arts.
+
+And since manual labour cherishes silently or openly a bitter grudge
+against intellectual labour, the latter has to protect itself by a
+pretence of sturdy simplicity; when two teachers are competing for the
+head-mastership of a classical school each tries to prove that he has
+the hornier hand.
+
+Most things in this new order are decided by weight of numbers.
+Advertisement and propaganda are banished from socialized industry and
+commerce; instead, they compete in the service of personal and ideal
+aims--in elections, theatres, systems of medicine, superstitions,
+arts, appointments, professorships, churches.
+
+Art has for the third time changed its master--after the princes,
+Maecenas, the middle-class market; after Maecenas, the plebs, and export
+trade. Whether by means of representation through gilds, by
+compulsion, by patronage, or by favour, Art has become dependent; it
+must explain, exhort, contend; it can no longer rest proudly on
+itself. It must aim at getting a majority on its side, and this it can
+only do by sensationalism. Like all other features of intellectual
+life, it must march with the times. Like all technique, research,
+learning and handicraft it suffers through the loss, for several
+generations, of tradition and hereditary skill, but together with this
+drop there is also a drop in the character of the demand; quality has
+given way to actuality.[14]
+
+Certain reactions based on practical experience are  not excluded;
+the constant comparison with the past and with foreign countries will
+show the value of the cultivation of a science, of an art which has no
+fixed prepossessions and serves no immediate aims. Measures are taken,
+though without much conviction, by free Academies or the like, to win
+back something of this; but the atmosphere is not favourable to such
+attempts, and an artificial and sterile discipline is all that can
+result.
+
+The general tone is that of an excitable, loquacious generation, bent
+on actualities and matters of practical calculation, fonder of debate
+than of work, not impressed by any authority, prizing success,
+watching all that goes on abroad, taking refuge in public from the
+sordidness of private life, and passionately hostile to all
+superiority. Through the constant secession of elements to which this
+tone is antipathetic a kind of natural selection is constantly taking
+place, and the political defencelessness of the transition period
+favours disintegrating tendencies of foreign origin. The carving away
+of ancient German territories works in the same direction. Apart from
+the varying influence of the four strata already referred to, the
+general tone will be set by the half-Slavonic lower classes of Middle
+and North Germany, who have brought about and who control the existing
+conditions, and by the other elements which have been assimilated to
+these.
+
+In place of German culture and German intellectuality we have a state
+of things of which a foretaste already exists in parts of America and
+of Eastern Europe. The fully socialized order, repelling all tutelage
+through those strata which possess a special tradition, outlook and
+mentality, has created its own form of civilization.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 10: Rathenau means that it cannot be entertained except on
+the hypothesis of the profound _inward_ change, which is to be
+discussed later on.]
+
+[Footnote 11: _Kritik der dreifachen Revolution._ S. Fischer.]
+
+[Footnote 12: The classes referred to are (1) the old aristocracy, (2)
+the aristocracy of officialism, (3) that of traditional middle-class
+culture; (4) the mass of what is called Socialism.]
+
+[Footnote 13: L150 in pre-war values. By thrift, by co-operation, and
+by the cheapness of the public services generally, a surprisingly high
+standard of life could be maintained on this kind of income in pre-war
+Germany.]
+
+[Footnote 14: Aktualitaet; as, for instance, reference to current
+topics.]
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+
+Thoughtful and competent judges to whom I have submitted the foregoing
+section of my work have said to me: This is Hell. That is perhaps
+going too far, since those who will live in that generation and who
+have themselves helped it into being will have become more or less
+adapted to their circumstances.
+
+A large part of the proletariat of to-day will certainly not be
+daunted by the prospect, but will regard it as a distinct improvement
+on their present situation. That is the terrible fact, a fact for
+which we are responsible and for which we must atone, with what ruin
+to German culture remains to be seen.
+
+Who, in this Age of Mechanism, who on the side of the bourgeoisie, who
+of our statesmen, our professors, our captains of industry, above all
+who of our clergy, has pitied the lot of the working-man? The
+statesmen, for peace' sake, worked out the Insurance Laws; the
+professors, with their emphatic dislike to the world of finance and
+their unemphasized devotion to the monopoly of their own stipends,
+preached a doctrinaire socialism; the clergy lauded the
+divinely-appointed principle of subordination; the great
+industrialists, wallowing in their own greed for power, money, favour,
+titles and connexions, scolded the workers for wanting anything. The
+silent subjugation of our brothers was assured through the laws of
+inheritance, our leaders put the socialistic legislation in fetters,
+freedom of combination was thwarted, electoral reform in Prussia was
+scornfully denied, demands for better conditions of living, conditions
+which to-day we think ridiculously low, were suppressed by force. And
+all the time, the cost of a single year of war, a tiny fraction of the
+war-reparations, would have sufficed to banish want for ever from the
+land. At last the millions of the defenceless and disappointed were
+driven into that war of the dynasties and the bourgeois, which was
+unloosed by the folly of years, the dazzlement of weeks, the
+helplessness of hours.
+
+If the state of things I have foreseen is hell, then we have earned
+hell. And it ill becomes us to wrap ourselves in the superiority of
+our culture, to rebuke the masses for their want of intellect, their
+want of character, their greed, and to keep insisting on the
+unchangeability of human character, on the virtues of rulership and
+leadership, on the spiritual unselfishness and intellectual priesthood
+of the classes born to freedom. Where was this heaven-nurtured
+priestly virtue sleeping when Wrong straddled the land and the great
+crime was wrought? It was composing feeble anthologies and pompous
+theories, cooking its culture-soup, confusing, with true professorial
+want of instinct, 1913 with 1813[15]--and putting itself at the
+disposition of the Press Bureau. _That_ was the hour in which to fight
+for the supremacy of the spirit. Now romance comes, as it always does,
+too late.
+
+What is romance in history? It is sterility. It is incapacity to
+imagine, still less to shape, the yet unknown. It is an inordinate
+capacity for flinging oneself with feminine adaptability into anything
+that is historically presented and accomplished--from Michael Angelo
+to working samplers. Fearing the ugly present and the anxious future,
+the romantic takes refuge with the dear good dead people, and spins
+out further what it has learned from them. But every big man was a
+shaper of his own time, a respecter of antiquity and conscious of his
+inheritance as a grown and capable man may be; not a youth in
+sheltered tutelage, but a master of the living world, and a herald of
+the future. "Modernity" is foolish, but antiquarianism is rubbish;
+life in its vigour is neither new nor antique, but young.
+
+True it is indeed that we love the old, many-coloured, concrete,
+pre-mechanistic world; we cannot take an antique thing in our hands or
+read an antique word without feeling its enchantment. It is a joy to
+the heart, and one prohibited to no man, to dream at times romantic
+dreams, to live in the past, and to forget, as we do it, that this
+very dreaming, this  very life, owes its charm to the fact that we
+are of another age. It is a magic like that of childhood--but to want
+to go back to it is not only childish, but a deliberate fraud and
+self-deception. We should realize, as I have shown years ago, that the
+difference of our age from that age is the ever-present fact of the
+density of our population. Any one who wants to go back, really wants
+that forty million Germans should die, while he survives. It is
+ignorant, it is insincere, to put on a frown of offended virtue and to
+say: For shame, what are you thronging into the towns for? Go back to
+the land; plough, spin, weave, ply the blacksmith's hammer, as did our
+forefathers, who were the proper sort of people. And leave the people
+like us, who think and write poetry and brood and dream for you, a
+house embowered in vines--there will be room enough for that!--Ah, you
+thinkers and brooders, what would you say if men answered you: No! Go
+yourself and spin in a factory, for you have shown clearly enough that
+your thinking and brooding are futile. All your fine phrases amount to
+nothing but the one dread monosyllable--Die! Are you so wicked as
+that, and know it? or so stupid, and know it not?
+
+Thought is the most responsible of all functions. He who thinks for
+others must look after them, and if they live he may not slay them. It
+is therefore a mischievous piece of romantic folly to point us to the
+past. We must all pass through the dark gateway, and the sage has no
+right to growl: Leave me out--I am the salt of the earth! The first
+thing we have to do is to save humanity; not a selected pair in the
+Ark but the whole race, criminals and harlots, fools, beggars and
+cripples. We ourselves have cast down Authority, and there will be a
+crush, and many things will look very different from what the sages
+would wish and what the romantics dream. And if it is going to be hell
+for people like you and me, we must only accept it in the name of
+justice, and think of Dante's terrible inscription: "I was made by the
+Might of God, by the supreme Wisdom and by the primal Love."[16]
+
+But is it hell? That depends on ourselves.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 15: In 1913 all Germany was celebrating with great pomp and
+warlike display the centenary of the liberation of the country from
+Napoleon, and also paying a huge property tax for the coming war.]
+
+[Footnote 16:
+
+_Fecemi la divina Potestate
+La somma Sapienza e il primo Amore._
+
+This is part of the inscription over the gates of Hell in the
+_Inferno_, Canto III.]
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+
+Our description of the future order of society was tacitly based on
+the assumption that our mentality, our ethics, our spiritual outlook,
+would remain as they are at present.
+
+This assumption is a probable one, but it is not irrevocably certain.
+What we have endeavoured to demonstrate is simply the obvious
+fact--the fact which our once so rigid but, since November, 1918,
+uprooted and flaccid intellectualism has forgotten--that our salvation
+is not to be found in any kind of mechanical apparatus or
+institutions. Institutions do not mean evolution. If institutions run
+too far ahead of evolution there will be reaction. When evolution runs
+too far, there is revolution.
+
+At this point both groups of our opponents will start up against us.
+
+The Radicals cry: Ha! only give us food, give "all power to the
+Soviets," let us have free-thought lectures, and mentality, insight,
+experience and culture will come of themselves.
+
+The Reactionaries smile: Ho! this man has never learned that there is
+no such thing as evolution; that human character never changes.
+
+I shall not answer either of these. They know, both of them, that they
+are saying what is not true.
+
+Something of unprecedented greatness can and must take place;
+something that in the life of a people corresponds to the awakening of
+manhood in the individual.
+
+In every conscious existence there comes a moment when the living
+being is no longer determined but begins to determine himself; when he
+takes over responsibility from the surrounding Powers, in order to
+shoulder it for himself; when he no longer accepts the forces that
+guide him, but creates them; when he no longer receives but freely
+chooses the values, ideals, aims and authorities whose validity he
+will admit; when he begets out of his own being the relations with the
+divine which he means to serve. For the German people this moment,
+this opportunity, has now arrived--or is for ever lost.
+
+We have made a clear sweep of all authorities. The inherited
+influences which we accepted unconsciously have dropped away from
+us--persons, classes, dogmas. The persons are done with for the
+present. The classes, even though they may still keep up the struggle,
+are broken to pieces together with all the best that they contained:
+mentality, sense of honour, devotion, training, tradition. We can
+never reanimate them and never supply their place. Ideas and dogmas
+have long ago lost their cogency; the power they wielded through
+police and school, the power which we tried to prop up by a
+blasphemous degradation of religion and by developing the church as a
+kind of factory, is gone, and it would be a piece of mechanical
+presumption to suppose that we can breed them again for the sake of
+the objects they fulfilled. If we live and thrive, ideas and faiths
+will grow up of themselves.
+
+We must of our own free choice lay upon ourselves a certain
+life-potency or faculty which we shall freely obey, and which shall be
+so broad and so buoyant that thought and creation can grow out of it.
+A deed without precedent only in its voluntary, conscious
+self-determination: for other peoples in earlier days also accepted
+these faculties, not indeed out of conscious choice, but from the
+hands of prophets, rulers and classes. Thus theocracy was laid upon
+Israel; the caste-system on the Indians; the idea of the city on the
+Greeks; empire on the Romans; the Church on the Middle Ages; commerce,
+plutocracy, colonial dominion, on the modern world; militarism on
+Germany. For these imposed forces men lived and died; they had only a
+mythical conception of where they came from, and they believed and
+some still believe them to be everlasting.
+
+A thunder-stroke of destiny has at once stripped us bare and has
+opened our eyes. The tremendous choice is before us. Are we to reject
+it, and, blinded anew, to resign ourselves to the casual and
+mechanical laws of action and reaction, of needs and interests, and
+the competition of forces? Are we to recover ourselves, and enter into
+the intellectual arena of the nations, to begin a new and enduring
+life with no other guiding thought than that of self-preservation and
+the division of property? In the harbour of the nations is our ship to
+drift aimlessly while every other knows its course, whether to a near
+or distant port? Is that penurious Paradise which we have described,
+the goal of Germany's hopes and struggles?
+
+Compared with us, the French movement of the eighteenth century had an
+easy task. All it had to do was to deny and demolish. When it had
+cleared away the wreckage of feudalism, at once a strong new class,
+the bourgeoisie, sprang up from the soil, more vigorous than its
+aristocratic forerunner, and it was able to take care of itself. And
+the bourgeoisie was also a class of defined boundaries, and already
+trained for its task; it had long ago taken over French culture, it
+alone had for a century been the champion of French ideas, it had
+acquired enthusiasm for the nation, for freedom, for militarism and
+for money; the aspirations for equality and fraternity were not indeed
+fulfilled, but the first mechanized and plutocratic state of the
+Continent came into being.
+
+Germany, as we have seen, is not in the same position. When we are
+stripped we find no new stratum of culture growing up below the
+surface; society is simply dissolved, and in its place we find the
+masses, of which the most hopeful thing we can say is that they are an
+ordered body. Tradition has been torn in two. No--we have to build
+from the foundations up. But whether we shall build according to the
+changing needs of the seasons, according to the casual balance of
+forces, or according to an idea and a symbol--that is the question!
+
+Our current Socialism has no qualms about bringing new nations to
+birth with the aid of a few simple apparatus and radical eliminations;
+it believes that the right spirit will soon enter in if only
+institutions are provided for it. It would be too severe to describe
+this way of thinking solely as contempt for or want of understanding
+of a spiritual mission. Socialism in its prevailing form arises indeed
+simply from material or so-called "scientific" conceptions (as if
+there could be a science of ideal aims and values): but it has, though
+only as a secondary object, annexed to itself the values of a
+spiritual faith--the latter are, as the language of the market has it,
+"thrown in." We have seen to what the material domination of
+institutions and apparatus is leading us. To national dignity, or to
+any mission for humanity, it does not lead.
+
+What is unprecedented in our problem is not, as we have said, that a
+people should beget out of itself its own idea and mission. From the
+Jewish theocracy to the French rationalism, from the Chinese
+ancestor-worship to the pioneer-freedom of America, all the cultured
+peoples have brought this creative act to pass, although in formative
+epochs leading classes and leading men have born the responsibility
+and made it easy for their countrymen to become aware of their own
+unconscious spirit, and through this awareness and consciousness to
+isolate and intensify it.
+
+What is unprecedented is just this: that the process should take place
+as a deliberate act of will, in democratic freedom, without pressure
+and compulsion of authority, in the consciousness of its necessity, on
+our own responsibility. Germany is not at present growing leaders and
+prophets, we are not in a formative stage, all authority has been
+scattered to the winds. It is true that we have one stratum of society
+which is capable of understanding the meaning of the task, but it is
+deeply cloven, the hatreds and interests of its parties make them more
+each other's enemies than the people's.
+
+And yet it is this very class--not as possessor of means but as
+possessor of the tradition, which is capable, which is indispensable,
+and which is summoned to take in hand the transformation of the German
+spirit, to free it from the bonds of mechanism, of capitalism, of
+militarism, and to lead it to its true destinies. It cannot do this
+for itself alone, amid the blind bitterness of the war of classes; it
+cannot do it as a sovran leader relying on its deeper insight, for its
+and every other prestige has gone by the board; it can only do it by
+the way of service and sacrifice--it can only do it if the service and
+the sacrifice are approved and accepted.
+
+The masses will not understand this sacrifice of service; but the more
+responsible of their leaders will. Not to-day, indeed, nor to-morrow;
+but on the day when experience has shown them that I am telling the
+truth. At first they will do as in Russia; when want becomes acute,
+they will seek to buy experience and tradition at a high price from
+individuals. But mentality and spirit cannot be bought--only labour
+and dexterity. Then gradually men will come to understand that the
+highest things are not marketable commodities, they are only given
+away. And at last the responsible leaders, those who rule in order to
+serve, will separate themselves from those of the Cataline type, who
+serve in order to rule.
+
+So long has the narrow, parsonical, cynical contempt for the
+understanding of the lower classes prevailed--through our fault--a
+reversal to blind worship of the masses, of the immature and the
+unsuccessful, is not inexcusable. We are here to love mankind--all
+mankind, the outcast as well as the weak--every man and all men. But
+the masses are not quite the same thing as mankind. The masses who
+congregate in the streets and at public meetings are not communities
+consisting of whole men, but assemblages in which each man takes a
+part and is present, indeed, with his whole body, but by no means with
+his whole being. The masses are absent-minded; and presence of mind
+only comes to them when through the lips of some true prophet the
+Spirit descends upon them. But when that happens, they take no
+decisions; they do not get beside themselves; rather, they sink into
+themselves. Before the distortions of a mob orator, with his
+extravagant promises, the masses become merely a driven crowd eager
+for gain, not human souls. They are the concave reflector of passions
+and greeds that rage in the focal point of the speaker's rostrum; they
+return in concentrated form the rays that dazzle them. He who puts the
+masses in the judgment-seat, who looks for counsel and decision at
+their hands, has neither reverence nor love for man. Sooner or later
+the truth of this will be realized by all honourable men among their
+leaders.
+
+The day is also far when the upper classes will come to their senses.
+They have never understood what the world is, nor what Germany is, nor
+what has happened to themselves. They see houses and fields, streets
+and trees very much as they were; they think, if they only play the
+game a little craftily at the beginning, everything will remain as it
+used to be, and they will come out all right in the end. It is just as
+when some merchant goes bankrupt for a million; for the first
+fortnight the servants wait at table as usual and the family eat off
+silver plate; the ruin is still on paper. But in a year's time
+everything is dispersed to the winds, and men have changed along with
+their utensils. When one sees for what trivialities people are
+fighting to-day one begins to understand how callously and shamelessly
+they gave up a thousand times over that which they had sworn to defend
+with the last drop of their blood; then none of them know what has
+really happened. In a few years' time they will know; and then they
+will fight no more for things that no longer exist; they will be
+meditating a general sacrifice to save what can still be saved, and
+what is worth saving.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+
+Germany is a land without power, without poise, with its prosperity
+shattered, its authorities and its external aims annihilated, its
+intellect and its ethics at a low ebb. In such a condition, if we wish
+to understand the only kind of life-faculty which can save us from
+intellectual and spiritual death, give us force and inspiration to
+shape for ourselves and for the world the new social order of freedom,
+spirituality[17] and justice, and in the true sense to "save" us, we
+must look ourselves and the German character in the face--this
+unknown, problematic character, which for a century in contradiction
+to its own inmost being, has been flattering and lulling itself with
+hackneyed and complacent phrases and unproved judgments. For we can
+undertake nothing and claim nothing which has not its prototype in our
+own soul and is not founded in our own past, our own traditions.
+
+There is no people, not even the French, which in recent decades has
+administered to itself and digested so much praise as we have. We
+never  discussed ourselves but at once the stereotyped toasts began.
+The more German culture declined, the more disgusting became our
+babble about it.
+
+The persons through whose mouths we let ourselves be lauded were
+school-teachers without comparative knowledge, professional
+banquet-orators, nationalists who praised in the service of some
+interested hatred, and scholars with appointments who were simply
+commissioned to demonstrate that the Hohenzollern system was the last
+word of creation. No one dreamed of distinguishing this glorification
+of the German people from the apotheosis of the dynasties--to which we
+had vowed our heart's blood--and the profound insincerity of these
+declamations was shown by the indifference with which the dynasties,
+the main feature in the programme, were afterwards got rid of, and the
+affair of the heart's blood shelved.
+
+We know the stereotyped phrases. German faith, French knavery. The
+world is to find healing in the German soul. We are the heroes--the
+others are hucksters.[18] To be German means to do a thing for its own
+sake. We are a "race of thinkers and poets." We have Culture, the
+others merely Civilization.[19] We alone are free--the others are
+merely undisciplined (or, as the case may be, enslaved). All this we
+owe to the favour of God and our education under the (here fill in
+Prussian, Bavarian or Saxon) reigning House, which all the world
+envies us. Clearly therefore we are destined for world-dominion; we
+have only to fall-to.
+
+In one of these phrases, about doing things for their own sake,[20]
+there is truth. All the more was it for us in particular a vice and a
+sign of degradation to let ourselves be dazzled by the shadowless
+transparency-picture of glorification that was offered to us. There
+were interests concealed in the game, and much lack of moral fibre,
+all of which we passed over in silence; it was out of place in our
+festal oratory.
+
+It would be an equal or even a greater vice, only reversed, if we were
+now to despair of ourselves. Moderation was what we needed then; what
+we need now is vigorous and conscious self-possession. To-day it is no
+easy and attractive business to bring our strong qualities to the
+surface; it implies an amount of conviction which it is hard to
+attain, and self-depreciation means a pitiful faint-heartedness. But
+all sham goods offered by babblers, by selfish interests, prophets of
+hate and commercial travellers must go overboard.
+
+We have never been a "race of thinkers and poets," any more than the
+Jews were a race of prophets, the  French and Dutch a race of
+painters, or Koenigsberg a city of Pure Reason.[21] The old German
+upper classes have, in three well-defined epochs, had force enough to
+throw up individuals of mighty endowments for music, poetry and
+philosophy; the former lower-classes, whose blood runs in nine-tenths
+of our present population, have scarcely contributed anything to these
+glories. They have in recent years shown themselves thoroughly
+industrious, plastic, apt for discipline, order-loving, intelligent,
+practical, honourable, trustworthy, warm-hearted, prudent and helpful,
+and adapted beyond all expectation to the mechanization of life and
+industry; of their power to produce talent we know little, except
+perhaps in the domain of research and technique, which are less a test
+of creative energy than of applied knowledge and methodical assiduity.
+
+The important question as to what relations exist between the number,
+quality and greatness of individual endowments and genius on the one
+side, and the character of a people on the other, is still unexplored
+and very obscure, although we possess a science which calls itself by
+the quite unjustified name of national psychology.
+
+While on one side we have rarely made any serious study of national
+characteristics, but have confused them with achievements of culture
+and habits of life that mostly proceeded from a thin upper stratum
+alone, on the other we have as a rule tacitly set down individual
+endowment (with a strong emphasis on our own) as illustrations of
+national character. In this respect, too, we showed that laxity in
+proving what we wanted to prove which abounds everywhere from the
+point where calculation with things weighable and measurable leaves
+off, and judgment begins. We think it an established fact--in
+accordance with just this arbitrary test of genius--that genius
+belongs _par excellence_ to the so-called blonde blue-eyed races of
+the earth. The fact that among the score or two of geniuses of all
+ages who have been determining forces in the world it is hardly
+possible to find a single example of this blue-blonde race, but they
+can be proved to have been almost all dark, did not affect the
+question. On the other hand the English, whose influence on culture
+has been surpassed by none, had their genius-forming power, in which
+they are actually deficient, seriously over-estimated. It was the
+reverse with the Jews. The fact that in spite of their small numbers
+they have produced more of world-moving genius than all other nations
+put together, and that from them has proceeded the whole
+transcendental ethics of the Western world, has not prevented their
+being pronounced wholly incapable of creative endowment.
+
+We shall put aside all this rubbish and for the present decline to go
+into theoretic questions. Great individual endowments are related to
+national character--to the character of the mind, not that of the
+will, which must be considered apart--as the blossom to the plant or
+the crystal to the mother-solution; to determine the one from the
+other needs something more than a mechanical generalization. There is
+no such thing as a "race of thinkers and poets." This, however, we can
+say: that a people which begets great musicians, poets and
+philosophers is one which devotes itself to moods and to visions,
+while another, as for instance the Latin group, which creates forms
+and standards, is one that at the cost of mood and vision, incarnates
+its sense of will.
+
+Devotion, receptivity, the feeling for Nature, comprehension, the
+passion for truth, meditative depth, spiritual love, are the fairest
+gifts that can be granted to any people, and to us they have been
+granted. But they exclude other gifts, which stand to-day in high
+repute, and which we affect in vain. They exclude the capacity for
+shaping forms and standards, the aptitude for rule, if not even for
+self-government; in any case the qualities which go to the creation of
+nationalities and civilizations.
+
+It is no mere accident that in not one of the hundredfold provinces of
+life, from art to military organization, from State-craft to
+jointstock-companies, from saintliness to table-utensils, have we
+Germans discovered a single essential and enduring form. And again,
+there is scarcely one of these forms which we have not filled with a
+richer and more living content than those who first discovered it.
+
+For whoever bears the All within himself can be satisfied with no
+form; he finds in himself at once vision and reality, thesis and
+antithesis. He seeks for a synthesis, but all form is one-sided. He
+conceives, chooses, comprehends, fulfils, breaks in pieces and throws
+away. He remains a unity in constant change, like the year as it
+proceeds day by day, hour by hour, and no two of them alike. He does
+not force things--out of respect for creation.
+
+But he who makes forms must use force. He makes himself the standard
+and comprehends himself only. Everything else, everything that is
+extra-normal, unconformable, unintelligible and not understood remains
+for him something alien, trivial, inferior, or negligible. The maker
+of forms can rule, even by compulsion, without being a tyrant, for he
+is convinced of the value of what he brings and knows no doubts. He is
+ruthless, yet only up to a certain limit, which is determined by his
+sense of the inferiority of the other. The man who rejects forms,
+however, cannot rule; the very penetration into the domain of another
+seems to him a wrong to his own, the basis of which is recognition and
+allowance. If he is forced to penetrate, he loses all balance, for in
+wrong-doing he understands no gradations. Similarly he is incapable of
+civilizing, for he cannot take forms seriously; he violates them
+himself--how can he impose them upon others? In his inmost soul he is
+naive, for creation is seething in him; but in execution he is
+conscious, critical, eclectic and methodical, in order that he may be
+completely master of the one-sided element into which he has forced
+himself. The man of forms, however, is, in his soul, rigid and
+conscious, but in action naive, because he does not know the meaning
+of doubt.
+
+Forms grow up like natural products in the course of centuries. They
+assume the existence of uniformity in individuals, fathers reproduced
+in sons with scarcely a variation. Egypt, Rome, and that modern land
+of antiquity, France, are examples. For generations France has been
+content with three architectural styles, which are really one and the
+same style. The changes in the language are hardly perceptible. The
+principal domestic utensils are almost the same as they were a hundred
+years ago, fashion is merely a vibration. Foreign living languages are
+little studied, their spirit is not understood, the pronunciation
+remains French. Foreign countries are looked on as a kind of
+menagerie; everything is measured by the native standard. Every one is
+a judge of everything, for he holds fast to the norm. Within the norm
+the French are keenly sensitive, their feeling for relations is very
+sure; the slightest deviation is observed. To doubt the validity of
+the norm is out of question; one might as well criticize the sun and
+moon as the style of Louis Quatorze.
+
+The final judgment of the British in the affairs of life is "this is
+English," "that is not English." Foreign lands are a subject of
+geographical and ethnological study. The whole mighty will of a
+nation is here concentrated in the form of civilizing political
+energy. Every private inclination is a fad, and even fads have their
+fixed forms. An offence against table-manners is banned like an attack
+on the Church. Nature is mastered with consideration and intelligence,
+whether the problem is the breeding of sheep or the ruling of India.
+
+The assurance, self-command and art of ruling which spring from forms
+are lacking in Germany. Our strongest spirits are formless; they are
+eclectic or titanic, whether they despise forms or choose forms or
+burst forms. We have three homes between which we hover--Germany, the
+earth, and heaven. We comprehend and honour everything--every land,
+every man, every art and every language; and we are fertilized by what
+is foreign; on the lower level we enjoy it and imitate it, on the
+higher it spurs us to creation. We are docile, and do not hate what
+rules and determines us, only what contracts us and makes us
+one-sided; an autocratic government may be tolerated, even venerated,
+if it knows how to be national and popular and does not interfere with
+our elbow-room.
+
+We have already touched on the volitional character[22] of the German
+people, a character which has been gravely altered by the subsidence
+of the ancient upper stratum of society, and by long privations and
+miseries. The Germans of Tacitus were a freedom-loving  and turbulent
+people; of this not a trace is left. Any one who did not recognize
+under the autocracy that we care little for self-determination and
+self-responsibility may do so under the revolution, which merely
+arises out of an alteration in external conditions. We are not even
+yet a nation, but an association of interests and oppositions; a
+German _Irredenta_, as it has been and unfortunately will be shown, is
+an impossible conception. And since we are not a nation and represent
+no national idea, but only an association of households, it follows
+that our influence abroad can only be commercial, and not civilizing
+or propagandist.
+
+From this side we are able to understand the German history of the
+past two centuries. Prussia, an extra-German Power, grown up in
+colonized territory, organized itself into a bureaucratic, feudal and
+military State. It succeeded in mastering half Germany and in loosely
+linking up the remainder. By rigid organization, by its federated
+Princes and by the strongest army in the world, it supplied the place
+of the national character and will which were wanting. Mechanism was
+pressed into the service, and bore the colossus into a period of
+blooming prosperity. The system looked like a nation; in reality it
+was an autocratic association of economic interests bristling with
+arms. It was incapable of developing national forces and ideas, not
+even in relation to its settlers in other lands; it was confined to
+commercial competition; weak alliances were relied on to secure the
+position externally; self-government was not granted, because the
+military organization was the pivot of the whole system; the
+drill-sergeant tone at home had its counterpart in the brusqueness of
+our foreign policy; enmities grew and organized themselves, and the
+catastrophe came.
+
+For character of will we had substituted discipline. But discipline is
+not nationality; it is an external instrument, and when it breaks it
+leaves--nothing. Now since the Prussian system which called itself by
+the mediaeval title of the German Empire was, in spite of the
+professors, no popular, national fabric, but a dynastic, military and
+compulsory association, with a constitutional facade, the interested
+nationalist elements took on the repulsive and dishonourable forms
+that we all know. The most deeply interested parties, cool and
+conscious of their strength, the Prussian representatives of the
+military and official nobility, avoided all declamation and only
+interfered when their interests were endangered. The greater
+industrialists sold themselves. A higher stratum of the middle-classes
+composed of certain circles of higher teachers and subaltern officials
+took the business seriously, and in order to escape from their drab
+existence created that atmosphere of hatred of Socialists, telegrams
+of homage, and megalomania, which made us intellectually and morally
+impossible before the world. Instead of the Germany of thought and
+spirit one saw suddenly a brutal, stupid community of interested
+persons, greedy for power, who gave themselves out as that Germany
+whose very opposite they were; who, unable to point to any
+achievements, any thought of their own, prided themselves on an
+imaginary race-unity which their very appearance contradicted; who had
+no ideas beyond rancour; the slaverings of league-oratory and
+subordination, and who with these properties, which they were pleased
+to call _Kultur_, undertook to bring blessing to the world.
+
+It was no wonder; for our slavonicized association of interests, bent
+on subordination and on gain, does not produce ideas; its possessions
+were power, mechanism and money; whoever was impressed by these things
+believed they must impress others too, and so the conclusion was
+arrived at that all the great spirits of the past had lived only to
+make this triple combination supreme. Wagner had formed the bridge
+between the old Germany and the new--armoured cruisers and giant guns
+appeared as a free development from Kant and Hegel, and the word
+_Kultur_, a word which Germany ought to prohibit by law for thirty
+years to come, masked the confusion of thought.
+
+To discover now, after our downfall, that Germany ought never to have
+carried on a continental let alone a world policy, would be a pitiful
+example of _esprit d'escalier_. It is true that it was our right, and
+even our duty, by our intellect, our ethics and our greatness, to
+carry it on; but the weakness of our character on the side of Will was
+the cause of its failure. Bismarck, a born realist in politics, grown
+up in the Prussian tradition, trained in the diplomatic tradition by
+Gortschakov, made the calamitous choice. He made us safe for certain
+decades; but it was only an intuitive policy in the manner of
+Stein[23] that could have saved us for centuries.
+
+In the midst of self-administered and self-determining nations the
+German people, from lack of self-consciousness, indolence of will and
+innate servility remained under a patriarchal system of government, a
+minor under tutelage of divinely-appointed dynasties and ruling
+classes. In the childish movement of the educated bourgeoisie of 1848
+Bismarck saw only the helpless and Utopian, but not the symbolic side,
+which Marx might have shown him. His practical spirit judged with a
+smile that a handful of peasantry and grenadiers would suffice to
+bring to reason this dynastically-minded people. It was only too true;
+although the bulk of this people had not for thirty years been formed
+by the peasant class, and although he himself had learned how to make
+use of the power of the modern industrial State in peasant disguise.
+And so he refused to allow his countrymen to come of age; broke, with
+the superiority of genius, and with the weapons of success and
+authority, the incompetent forces that resisted him; created, by  the
+magical mechanism of his Constitution, the German Empire as a mere
+continuation of the Prussian bureaucratic State reinforced, by the
+self-glorifying dynasties, with the whole volume of the still existing
+and justly appreciated habit of obedience; and annihilated for a
+generation every aspiration for freedom by branding it with the stain
+of moral and social depravity. Our political worthlessness and
+immaturity came to its climax in the race of office-climbers in 1880,
+which in 1900 gave place to the battle-fleet patriotism of the great
+capitalists.
+
+A self-administered and a self-determining nation--such as the nations
+of the world, except ourselves, Austria and Russia, were, on the
+whole, at the turn of the century--would have been able to carry on a
+sound and steadfast policy in economics and public affairs, and to
+enjoy the confidence of the world, as little begrudged as America. On
+the other hand, a dangerous warship, armed upon an unexampled scale,
+given to backward movements and commanded by an uncontrollable sovran
+dilettante, could only expect sooner or later to be expelled from the
+harbour of the nations. History is apt to overdo it, especially when
+corruption has gone on too long; with every year that passed the doom
+became more certain; instead of being expelled, we were annihilated.
+
+That four years of hunger, a lost war and a military revolt at last
+set us free, does not betoken any change of character; and when to-day
+a servile and facile Press lauds our wretched and idealess
+Constitution as the finest in the world, that gives us no assurance
+of its power to endure. Understanding is no substitute for character,
+but it is at any rate a step towards the goal; and if it is once
+understood that other measures are possible, and if, out of this
+period, certain writings and thoughts shall survive--and survive they
+will--then at any rate we may still be weak, but we shall be no longer
+blind.
+
+It might be possible at the outset of our journey towards strength of
+will that we should grope our way slowly--very slowly--back to the old
+problems of power. It does not matter if we do. Before we get there,
+the world will be changed, and will be pregnant with new thoughts. Let
+us fulfil the duties for which Germany was made what it is. Let us go
+in quest of the idea and the faculty that are laid upon us; let us do
+this in order to live, to recover our health, to shape ourselves anew,
+to remain a People, to become a Nation, to create a future and to
+serve the world.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 17: Geistigkeit. This is a difficult word to translate. It
+sometimes means merely intellectuality, sometimes in addition (as
+here) all that is implied in the phrase, "Ye know not what manner of
+spirit ([Greek: oiou pneumatos]) ye are of."]
+
+[Footnote 18: Referring to Werner Sombart's war-book, _Haendler und
+Helden_.]
+
+[Footnote 19: _Cf._ Thomas Mann's remarkable book on the real
+significance of the war: _Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen_ (1918).]
+
+[Footnote 20: Sachlichkeit. Rathenau seems to have in mind the German
+feeling for disinterested study and research as illustrated, for
+instance, by the fact that when the German Government heard of the
+genius of Einstein they brought him to Berlin with a salary of nearly
+L1000 a year and no duties except to think. Modern bigotry has
+expelled him.]
+
+[Footnote 21: Where Kant lived and taught, and published his _Kritik
+der reinen Vernunft_.]
+
+[Footnote 22: As opposed to the inward, intellectual and spiritual
+character.]
+
+[Footnote 23: Stein was the chief leader of Prussia from the
+Frederician into the modern era. His ministry of reform by which a
+peasant-proprietary was established, and municipal institutions
+created, lasted only from September 1807 to November 1808.]
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+
+On balance it seems that the endowments of the German people work out
+as follows:--
+
+High qualities of intellect and heart. Ethics and mentality normal.
+Originative will-power and independent activity, weak.
+
+We give our devotion freely, and the heart rules in action. Our
+feelings are genuine and powerful. We have courage and endurance. Led
+by sentiment rather than by inspiration. We create no forms, are
+self-forgetful, seek no responsibility, obey rather than rule. In
+obedience we know no limit, and never question what is imposed upon
+us.
+
+Of its own accord the German people would never have adopted an ideal
+of force. It was imposed on us by the idolaters of the great
+war-machine and those who gained by it; even Bismarck did not share
+it.
+
+We are not competent to form an ideal of civilization, for the sense
+of unity, will to leadership, and formative energy are lacking to us.
+We have no political mission for the arrangement of other people's
+affairs, for we cannot arrange our own; we do not lead a full life,
+and are politically unripe.
+
+We are endowed as no other people is for a mission of the spirit. Such
+a mission was ours till a century ago; we renounced it, because
+through political slackness of will-power we fell out of step; we did
+not keep pace with the other nations in internal political
+development, and, instead, devoted ourselves to the most far-reaching
+developments of mechanism and to their counterpart in bids for power.
+It was Faust, lured away from his true path, cast off by the
+Earth-Spirit, astray among witches, brawlers and alchemists.
+
+But the Faust-soul of Germany is not dead. Of all peoples on the earth
+we alone have never ceased to struggle with ourselves. And not with
+ourselves alone, but with our daemon, our God. We still hear within
+ourselves the All, we still expand in every breath of creation. We
+understand the language of things, of men and of peoples. We measure
+everything by itself, not by us; we do not seek our own will, but the
+truth. We are all alike and yet all different; each of us is a
+wanderer, a brooder, a seeker. Things of the spirit are taken
+seriously with us; we do not make them serve our lives, we serve them
+with ours.
+
+"And you dare to say this, in the face of all the brutalizing and
+bemiring that we experience--the profiteering and gormandizing, the
+abject submissiveness, the shameless desertions, the apathy, the
+insincerity, the heartlessness and mindlessness of our day?"
+
+Yes, I dare to say it, for I believe it and I know it. The soul of the
+German people lies still in the convulsions and hallucinations of its
+slow recovery. It is recovery not alone from the war, but from
+something worse, its hundred-years' alienation from itself. The
+much-ridiculed choice of our old romantic unheraldic colours, black,
+red and gold, instead of the bodiless and soulless colours under which
+we waged the war,[24] was, among the whirling follies of the time, a
+faint symbolic movement of our better mind. We must reunite ourselves
+with the days before we ceased to be Germans and became Berliners.
+
+What we need is Spirit. The whole world needs it, no more and no less
+than we do, but will never create it. History knows why it decided for
+Versailles and the Hall of Mirrors. Not mechanism alone, with its
+retinue of nationalism and imperialism, is now again and for the last
+time to be glorified; no, the whole Franco-British policy of
+acquisition mounts up even to the throne of the Sun-king, and it is
+seriously believed that it will govern the destinies of the world for
+centuries to come. An inconceivable, and, in its monstrous irony,
+unsurpassable drama, which is put forward as the introduction to the
+great era. The bourgeois conscience of the West  has no inkling of
+what it means. To this conscience, the war was a huge violation of
+decency, contrived by bandits; its victory is the final triumph of a
+capitalist, rationalistic civilization; the torch lit in the East
+means murder and incendiarism, and the upward migration of the people
+from the depths is to it invisible.
+
+No; it is not here that the spirit of the future is being formed. One
+may discover further ingenious devices, lightning-conductors to
+mitigate the stroke; but gently or violently a natural force will have
+its way, and the new earth which it is preparing needs new seed.
+
+That we have been given the faculty to shape a new spirit does not
+imply that we are at liberty to choose whether we shall do it or not.
+Even if it were not for our life's sake--even if it were against our
+life--still we must obey. But it _is_ for our life's sake, as we have
+seen, and as it is indeed obvious, for every organism can live only by
+fulfilling the purpose of its being.
+
+And now we have got to a very dangerous place--a place where the usual
+moral peroration lies in wait for us--that German peroration which
+announces universal redemption, and immediately, on that lofty note,
+closes the discussion. Fatherland, Morality, Humanity, Labour,
+Courage, Confidence--we all know how it goes, the writer has written
+something fine, the reader has read something fine; emotion on both
+sides, little conviction on either.
+
+It appears, then, that I have just been writing something extremely
+suspect. Has the reader followed me through five-and-thirty of these
+difficult folios in order to arrive in the end at that very everyday
+term, Spirit?[25] Is there any term in commoner use, and what are we
+to think about it? Softly--there is worse to come! The next word is
+still more dubious, philistinishly so, in fact--the word Culture.[26]
+I cannot help it--we must pass on by way of these everyday
+conceptions. We must get through the crowd, where hack-phrases elbow
+us. Any journey you may take, though it were to Tibet, must begin at
+the Berlin Central Railway Station. What is wrong with these popular
+phrases is not that they start from an everyday conception, but that
+they remain content with it, and do not think it out to the end.
+
+Our task, therefore, stated in the most general terms, is to make
+actually spiritual a people which is capable of spirituality. And
+since spirituality cannot be propped up by any external thrust, by
+sermons, newspaper articles, leagues, or propaganda, but must be
+associated with life and developed out of life, so the organic process
+and the condition of life to which it leads is called Culture.
+
+It is only with deep reluctance and after long search that I have
+written down this beautiful word, a word now worn almost beyond
+recognition. Can we find our way back to its application and
+significance? Even when it is not drawn out with a futile prefix[27]
+one can hardly detect its pure meaning by reason of the many
+overtones. The school, if possible the university, some French and
+English, the rules about I and Me, visiting-cards, shirt-cuffs,
+foreign phrases, top-hats, table-manners: these are some of the
+overtones that make themselves heard when we talk of a cultured man,
+or rather as they have it a cultured gentleman. A hundred years ago,
+as the word implies, we understood by culture the unfolding and the
+full possession of innate bodily, spiritual and moral forces. In this
+sense Goethe showed us the two fraternal figures formed after his own
+image: Faust the richer, and the poorer Wilhelm Meister, striving for
+culture.
+
+The ideal which hovers before us is not one of education, not even one
+of knowledge, although both education and knowledge enter into it; it
+is an ideal of the Will. It will not be easy to convey the breadth and
+the boundless range which we are to attach to this conception. That it
+is not an airy figment is clear from the fact that for centuries the
+Greeks, with full consciousness, adopted as their highest law (though
+directed to a somewhat different end) that impulse of the will which
+they called _Kalokagathia_.[28]
+
+From one who has introduced the conception of mechanism into German
+thought, who has rescued the conception of the soul from the hands of
+the psychologists and brought it back to its primal meaning, who has
+written so much about soulless intellectualism, and has put forward
+the empire of the soul as the goal of humanity, it is not to be
+expected that he should preach any mechanical kind of culture, or
+indeed any that it is possible to acquire by learning.
+
+How culture is to be produced we shall see; the first thing necessary
+is that it should be willed.
+
+Willed it must be, in a sense and with a strength of purpose and a
+force of appreciation of which we to-day, when the ages of faith, of
+the Reformation, of the German classics, and the wars of liberation,
+lie so far behind us, have no idea at all.
+
+When the current conception of intellectual culture so much prized in
+family, society and business life, and tricked out with criticisms of
+style, with historical data and incidents of travel is justly
+ridiculed, then the will to complete cultivation of the body, the
+intellect and the soul of the people must be so strong that all
+questions of convenience, of enjoyment, of prestige and of material
+interests must sink far into the background. This word must sound so
+that all who hear it can look in each other's eyes with a full mutual
+understanding and without the slightest sense of ambiguity; just as
+they do in Japan when the name of the common head of all families, the
+Mikado, is named. There must be one thing in Germany and it must be
+this thing, which is altogether out of reach of the yawning, blinking
+and grinning scepticism of the coffee-house, and of the belching and
+growling of the tavern. Any man who puts this thing aside in favour of
+his class-ideas, or his speculations in lard, or his dividends, or the
+demands of his Union, must understand that he is doing something as
+offensive as if he went out in public without washing himself.
+
+The conception of Culture as our true and unique faculty must be so
+profoundly grasped that in public life and legislation it must have
+the first word and the last. Though we become as poor as church-mice
+we must stake our last penny on this, and tune up our education and
+instruction, our models and outlook, our motives and claims, our
+achievement and our atmosphere, to so high a point that any one coming
+into Germany shall feel that he is entering into a new age.
+
+Society must be penetrated by this conception. Those classes which
+already possess something resembling it--such as training, education,
+experience, tradition, outlook, good breeding--must pour out with both
+hands what they have to dispense; not in the way of endowments,
+conventicles, lectures and patronizing visits, but in quiet,
+self-sacrificing, personal service.
+
+All this, of course, cannot be done without the free response of the
+other side. The devoted attempts which have been made, especially in
+England, and for some years with us too, to win this response by long
+and unselfish solicitation were destined to remain merely the mission
+of individual lives, for they were not supported by the will of the
+community as a whole; it rather ran counter to them. A Peace of God
+must be proclaimed, not as between the Haves and the Have-nots, not
+between the proletariat and the capitalists, not between the so-called
+cultured classes and the uncultured, but between those who are ready
+for a mutual exchange of experience, a give-and-take of their
+tradition on both sides. Not an exchange on business principles, such
+as propaganda in satisfaction of demands, or curiosity on one side for
+a new pastime on the other, but a covenant. This, however, is only
+practicable if the class-war, as an end in itself, is put a stop to.
+
+The great change itself cannot be come by so cheaply; it demands other
+assumptions, of which we shall have something to say later. But the
+attitude and temper, the recognition of the task, could not be better
+introduced than through the mutual service of the two social strata.
+
+We have still at our disposal, handed on from the past, certain
+organized methods of investigation and administration. We now need
+chairs and institutes of research, not for the trivial business of
+popular enlightenment and lectures, but for the study and
+investigation of the needs of national culture, the idea which must
+now take the place of national defence. We shall have need of central
+authorities, not, like the late Ministries of Culture skimping the
+scanty endowment of the Board Schools, but doing the work of German
+education, progress, and interchange of labour.[29]
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 24: Black, red and gold were originally the colours of a
+students' Corps in Frankfort. They were adopted as the colours of the
+abortive German Federation of 1848, apparently under a mistaken idea
+that they represented the colours of the ancient Germanic Empire. The
+colours of the Empire of 1870 were the Prussian black and white, with
+the addition of red.]
+
+[Footnote 25: Geist.]
+
+[Footnote 26: Bildung. It is as difficult in English as it is in
+German to render in one word exactly what the author is thinking of.
+In its literal sense Bildung implies a shaping and formative action.]
+
+[Footnote 27: Ausbildung.]
+
+[Footnote 28: A harmony of character, compounded of beauty and
+goodness.]
+
+[Footnote 29: Arbeitsausgleich. The meaning of this will be apparent
+later.]
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+
+Some decades ago the conscience of middle-class society in England was
+stirred. The result was Toynbee Hall and the Settlements-movement,
+which afterwards found praiseworthy counterparts in Germany. Society
+had begun to understand the wrong which it had done to its brothers,
+the proletariat, whom it had robbed of mind, and offered them instead
+soul-destroying, mechanical labour. Then choice spirits arose who
+dedicated their whole lives to the service of their brothers. This
+great and noble work did much to soften pain and hatred, and here and
+there many a soul was saved by it; but it could not act as it was
+intended to act, because it could not become what it imagined itself
+to be.
+
+It ought to have been, and believed itself to be, a simple and obvious
+piece of love-service, a pure interchange of spiritual possessions
+between class and class, no condescending pity or educative mission.
+It was a noble and a splendid error; the movement retained the form of
+sacrifice and benefaction. On both sides social feeling was
+indifferent to it, or even hostile. What one hand gave, a thousand
+others took back; what one hand received, a thousand others rejected.
+The collective conscience of a class had never been stirred, it was
+merely that the conscience of certain members of upper-class society
+had sent out envoys; it had not moved as a body. Individuals were
+ready to sacrifice themselves, but the conditions of labour remained
+unchanged.
+
+So long as a general wrong is allowed to stand, it gives the lie to
+every individual effort. The wrong becomes even more bitter because it
+loses its unconsciousness--men know it for wrong, and do not amend it.
+For this reason a second movement of importance, that of the People's
+High Schools, which has created in Denmark the most advanced
+peasant-class in existence, can achieve no social reform in lands
+cloven by proletarianism. If in addition to this the High School
+movement should depart from its original conception, that of a
+temporary community of life between the teachers and the taught, and
+should, instead of this, resolve itself into a lecture-institution,
+then the danger arises that what is offered will be disconnected
+matter, intended for entertainment, and without any basis of real
+knowledge, something commonly called half-culture which is worse than
+unculture, and is more properly described as misculture.
+
+No work of the charitable type can bring about the reconciliation of
+classes or be a substitute for popular education. The reconciliation
+of classes, however, even if it were attainable, is by no means our
+goal, but rather the abolition of classes, and our ultimate object is
+not popular education but popular culture. We do not intend to give
+with one hand and take back with the other, we shall not condemn a
+brother-people to dullness and quicken a few chosen individuals; no,
+we mean to go to the root of the evil, to break down the monopoly of
+culture, and to create a new people, united and cultured throughout.
+
+But the root of the trouble lies in the conditions of labour. It is an
+idle dream to imagine that out of that soulless subdivision of labour
+which governs our mechanical methods of production, the old
+handicrafts can ever be developed again. Short of some catastrophic
+depopulation which shall restore the mediaeval relation between the
+area of the soil and the numbers that occupy it, the subdivision of
+labour will have to stand, and so long as it stands no man will
+complete his job from start to finish--he will only do a section of
+it; at best, and assuming the highest mechanical development, it will
+be a work of supervision. But mindless and soulless work no man can do
+with any joy. The terrible fact about the mechanization of industry is
+that productive work, the elementary condition of life, the very form
+of existence, which fills more than half of each man's waking day, is
+by it made hated and hateful. It degrades the industrious man,
+thrilling with energy, into a work-shy slacker--for what else does it
+mean that all social conflicts culminate in the demand for a
+shortening of the hours of work? For the peasant, the research-worker,
+the artist, the working day is never long enough; for the artisan, who
+calls himself _par excellence_ a "worker," it can never be too short.
+
+The advance of technical invention will make it possible in the end to
+transform all mechanical work into supervision. But the process will
+be long and partial, we cannot wait till it is completed, especially
+as times will come when technical knowledge will stand still, or even,
+it may be, go back. Any one who knows in his own flesh what mechanical
+work is like, who knows the feeling of hanging with one's whole soul
+on the creeping movement of the minute-hand, the horror that seizes
+him when a glance at the watch shows that the eternity which has
+passed has lasted only ten minutes, who has had to measure the day's
+task by the sound of a bell, who kills his lifetime, hour after hour,
+with the one longing that it might die more quickly--he knows how the
+shortening of the working day, whatever may be put in its place, has
+become for the factory artisan a goal of existence.
+
+But he knows something else as well. He knows the deadliest of all
+wearinesses--the weariness of the soul. Not the rest when one breathes
+again after wholesome bodily exertion, not the need for relaxation and
+distraction after a great effort of intellect, but an empty stupor of
+exhaustion, like the revulsion after unnatural excess. It is the
+shallowest kind of tea-table chatter to talk about good music,
+edifying and instructive lectures, a cheerful walk in God's free
+Nature, a quiet hour of reading by the lamp, and so on, as a remedy
+for this. Drink, cards, agitation, the cinemas, and dissipation can
+alone flog up the mishandled nerves and muscles, until they wilt again
+under the next day's toil.
+
+The worker has no means of comparison. He does not know what wholesome
+labour feels like. He will never find his way back to work on the
+land, for there he cannot get the counter-poisons which he thinks
+indispensable, and he lacks the organic, ordering mind which
+mechanical employment has destroyed. Even if some did get back, it
+would be in vain, for though agriculture is hungering for thousands of
+hands it cannot absorb millions. The worker has no means of
+comparison; hence his bottomless contempt for intellectual work, the
+results of which he recognizes, but which, in regard to the labour it
+costs, he puts on a level with the idling of the folk whom he sees
+strolling or driving about with their lapdogs in the fashionable
+streets.
+
+The middle-class conscience, and even that of the men of science,
+turns away its face in shameful cowardice from the horror of
+mechanized labour. Apart from the well-meaning aesthetes who live in
+rural elegance surrounded by all the appliances which mechanism can
+supply, who wrinkle their brows when the electric light goes out, and
+who write pamphlets asking with pained surprise why people cannot
+return to the old land-work and handicraft, most of us take
+mechanical labour as an unalterable condition of life, and merely
+congratulate ourselves that it is not we who have to do it.
+
+The Utopianist agitators who knowingly or unknowingly suppress the
+essential truth that their world of equality will be a world of the
+bitterest poverty, treat the situation just as lightly. Before them,
+in the future State, hovers the vision of some exceptional literary or
+political appointment. The others may console themselves with the
+thought that in spite of a still deeper degree of poverty, towards
+which they are sinking by their own inactivity, the hell of mechanical
+work, by no means abolished, will probably be a little reduced, so far
+as regards the time they spend in it. The notion that mechanical work
+will be made acceptable and reconciled with intellectual, if only it
+is short enough and properly paid, has never been thought out; it is a
+still-born child of mental lethargy, like all those visions of the
+future that are being held up to our eyes. Try notions like this on
+any other ill--toothache, for instance! All our rhetoric about
+mechanical work being no ill at all, is ignorant or fraudulent, and if
+nothing further be done than to reduce it to four hours, all our
+social struggles will immediately be concentrated on bringing it down
+to two. The goal of Socialism, so far as it relates to this _pons
+asinorum_ of shortening hours, is simply the right to loaf.
+
+Let us look facts in the face. Mechanical work is an evil in itself,
+and it is one which we never can get rid of by any conceivable
+economic or social transformation. Neither Karl Marx nor Lenin has
+succeeded here, and on this reef will be wrecked every future State
+that may be set up on the basis of current Socialistic ideas. In this
+point lies the central problem of Socialism; undisturbed, as was till
+lately that legendary conception of surplus-value, and bedded, like
+that conception, in a rats'-nest of rhetorical phrases, repeated from
+mouth to mouth and never tested by examination.
+
+The bringing of Mind into the masses, the cultured State,[30] which is
+the only possible foundation of a society worthy of humanity, must
+remain unattainable until everything conceivable has been thought out
+and done to alleviate the mischievous operation of this evil, which
+dulls and stupefies the human spirit and which, in itself, is
+ineradicable. No Soviet-policy, no socialization, no property-policy,
+no popular education, nor any other of the catchwords which form _ad
+nauseam_ the monotonous staple of our current discussion of affairs,
+can go to the heart of the problem. Instead we must establish and put
+into practice the principle which I have called that of the
+Interchange of Labour, and which I must now, in broad outline,
+endeavour to explain.
+
+The object of this principle is to bring mind into labour. It
+demands--since mind cannot be brought into mechanical work beyond a
+certain degree fixed  by technical conditions--that the day's work as
+a whole shall have a share of it, by means of the exchange and
+association of mental and mechanical employment. Until this principle
+shall have been carried into effect, all true culture of the people
+remains impossible. So long as there is no culture of the people, so
+long must culture remain a monopoly of the classes, and of escapes
+from the masses; so long must society be wanting in equilibrium, a
+union open to breach from every side, and one which, however highly
+its social institutions may be developed, holds down the people to
+forced labour, and destroys culture.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 30: Bildungsstaat.]
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+
+There is a way by which the day's work can be ennobled, and even have
+mind brought into it,[31] on capitalistic lines. Before the War we
+were just about to enter on this path--America is treading it now. Its
+fundamental condition is a huge increase in general well-being.
+
+The daily wages of the American working-man have risen, as we have
+already remarked, to seven or even ten dollars, corresponding to a
+purchasing power of over a hundred marks. This amounts to so radical a
+removal of all restrictions in domestic economy that one can no longer
+speak of the proletarian condition as existing in the United States. A
+man who drives to his work in his own automobile can satisfy all his
+reasonable needs in the way of recreation and of extending his
+education, he looks at his sectional job (as has not seldom been the
+case in America even in earlier days) with a critical eye, he forms
+his own judgment of its place in the whole, he improves the processes,
+and amuses himself by  being both workman and engineer. (Consider in
+the light of this fact the value of the prophecy that America is
+standing on the brink of Bolshevism!)
+
+In a country whose wealth at this moment--in consequence of
+war-profits and depreciation of money--is almost equal to that of the
+rest of the world put together, the process of abolishing
+proletarianism can go forward on capitalistic lines. But we Germans,
+since it is decreed that we shall be among the poorest of the peoples,
+and must begin afresh, and live for the future--we shall renounce
+without envy the broad path of the old way of thought, the way of
+riches, in order to clear with hard work the new path on which, one
+day, all will have to follow us. The way of Culture is the way to
+which we are pointed, and we have described Interchange of Labour as
+the fundamental condition which enables us to travel it. It is now
+clear that the conception of popular culture is not, after all,
+represented by any of the five-and-twenty idealizing catchwords with
+which we are wont to console ourselves in our elegiac orations, but
+that by it is meant a clearly defined political procedure.
+
+By the principle of Interchange of Labour it is required that every
+employee engaged in mechanical work can claim to do a portion of his
+day's work in intellectual employment; and that every brainworker
+shall be obliged to devote a portion of his day to physical labour.
+
+There are, of course, fixed limits to the application of this
+principle, on the one side in intellectual, on the other in bodily
+incapacity, as well as in those rare cases where it is recognized that
+the interrupted hours of intellectual work cannot be made good.
+
+We would also establish a year of Labour-Service, to be devoted by the
+whole youth of Germany, of both sexes, to bodily training and work.
+
+The tests of capacity and of the claim to be reckoned as "cultured" is
+not to consist in examinations but in proof of work. Any one who can
+offer some show of claim can demand to be tested, and, if the result
+is favourable, to receive further culture. Thus we shall be taking
+seriously the question of the ascent to higher grades, which, so long
+as it depends on a particular age, or on school certificates, must
+remain on paper.
+
+Let no one say that this testing system is a mere mechanical method,
+that it degrades Culture from its intellectual dignity, and is
+equivalent to the Chinese literary tests for office. True culture is
+distinguished from mere sybaritic aestheticism in that in some sense or
+other it makes for production. Where there is no talent for art or for
+creative thought, then there remain to be developed the educational
+forces of judgment, or a faculty for the conduct of life, which must
+have their influence.
+
+Different categories of Culture will arise of themselves; not ranks or
+castes or classes, but grades of society, each of which may be
+attained by any one. No one must be able to say that any monopoly of
+culture has barred his way, or that training and testing have been
+denied him. If the culture be genuine it will never look down in
+intellectual arrogance on the stages below it; if it have duties
+associated with it, then he who has rejected the path of ascent, or
+has failed in it, cannot claim to fulfil those duties. Any one who has
+no faculty but that of a glib tongue will find in the multiplicity of
+callings some field for his activity; but the rule of the talker,
+backed by force or not, will at any rate be spared us.
+
+At this point we may hear a voice from the average heart of Socialism
+exclaim: "How is this? Do you call that having no castes? We have just
+begun to shake off the yoke of the capitalists and now are we expected
+to put the cultured in command? This is pure reaction!"
+
+Softly! If this is a case of misunderstanding, we shall clear it up.
+If any scruples still remain, we shall consider them further.
+
+Let us take the misunderstanding first. It is apparently forgotten
+that capitalism ruled by hereditary power. Any one who belonged to
+that circle ruled along with it, whether he were competent to rule or
+not. But culture is not a heritable possession; no one can win it save
+by virtue of a higher spirit and will. He who has this spirit and this
+will, can and will win it. He who wins it is fit for higher
+responsibilities. Is the voice from the average heart answered?
+
+No. It replies: "Heritable or not, what do we care? We are out for
+equality. Distinctions in culture are a kind of aristocracy."
+
+Now, good heart, you have revealed yourself. What was the meaning of
+your everlasting talk about the ladder for the rise of capacity? I
+shall tell you. The capable man is to toil, and to rise just so far as
+you permit him, namely, till you can possess yourselves of the fruits
+of his labour: then he is to be thrust down, and the loudest mouth is
+to rule. You are not pleased with this interpretation? Neither am I,
+so we are quits.
+
+For of the folly of imagining a society of equals I do not intend to
+speak. The average man, who cannot understand equality of human
+dignity, equality before God, thinks nothing of demanding equality in
+externals, equality in responsibility and vocation. But this sham
+equality is the enemy of the true, for it does not fit man's burden to
+his strength, it creates overburdened, misused natures, driving the
+one to scamped work and hypocrisy, and the other to cynicism. Every
+accidental and inherited advantage must indeed be done away with. But
+if there is any one who, among men equal in external conditions, in
+duties and in claims, demands that they should also be equal in mind,
+in will and in heart--let him begin by altering Nature!
+
+In remuneration also, that is to say, in the apportionment of
+conditions of work, a mechanical equality would be tantamount to an
+unjust and intolerable inequality in the actual distribution or
+remission of work. Work of the highest class, creative and
+intellectual work--the most self-sacrificing that is known to man
+because it draws to itself and swallows up a man's whole life,
+including his hours of leisure and recreation--this work demands
+extreme consideration, in the form of solitude, freedom from
+disturbance, from trivial and distracting cares or occupations, and
+contact with Nature. This kind of consideration is, from the economic
+point of view, an outlay which mechanical work does not require. If
+mechanical and intellectual work are to be placed under the same
+specific conditions, under which the highest standard of output is to
+be maintained and the producers are as far as possible to bear an
+equal burden, then the scale of remuneration must be different.
+Starting from a subsistence minimum it must for intellectual work be
+graded two stages upward, one for the output,[32] and one for the
+grade of culture implied.
+
+Women will also be subject to this system of grading whether they
+exercise any vocation outside their homes or not, for society has a
+deep interest in the culture of its mothers, and in external
+incentives to culture women must share equally with men.
+
+An intimate sense of association will grow up within each grade of
+culture. This, however, will not impair the general solidarity of the
+people, since no hereditary family egoism can arise. This sense of
+association, renewed with elements that vary from generation to
+generation, and corresponding very much to the relations between
+contemporary artists who spring from different classes or territories,
+will dissolve the relics of the old hereditary sentiment and absorb
+into itself whatever traditional values the latter may possess.
+
+Between the separate grades there will not only be the connexion
+afforded by the living possibilities of free ascent from one to the
+other, but the system of ever-renewed co-operation in rank-and-file at
+the same work will in itself promote culture, tradition, and the
+consciousness of union. We need only recall the old gilds and military
+associations in order to realize what a high degree of manly civic
+consciousness can arise from the visible community of duty and
+achievement. The mechanical worker will become the instructor of his
+temporary comrade and guest, and the latter will in turn widen the
+other's outlook, and emulate him in the development of the processes
+of production. The manual worker will bring to the desk and the
+board-room his freedom from prepossessions and the practical
+experience of his calling; he will learn how to deal with abstractions
+and general ideas; he will gain a respect for intellectual work, and
+will feel the impulse to win new knowledge and faculty, or to make
+good what he has neglected.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Two objections remain to be considered and confuted.
+
+First: there are far more places to be filled in mechanical than in
+intellectual employment. Is it possible so to organize the interchange
+of work that every one who desires intellectual employment can find
+it? The answer is: that, whether we like it or not, all work tends
+more and more to take on an administrative character. Just as in
+industry there is ever more talk and less production, so our economic
+life is working itself out through thousands upon thousands of new
+organizations. Industrial Councils, Councils of Workers,
+Gild-Councils, are forming themselves in among the existing agencies
+of administration; and the immediate consequence of this is a
+tremendous drop in production, to be followed later by a more highly
+articulated and more remunerative system of work. It is as if a marble
+statue came to life, and then had to be internally equipped with
+bones, muscles, veins and nerves. Or it resembles the transformation
+of a shabby piece of suburban building-ground: it has to be dug up,
+drained, paved, fenced; and until traffic has poured into it, it
+remains a comfortless and dismal waste.
+
+But the administrative side of our future economic and national life
+demands the creation of so many posts of intellectual work that at
+present there is not the trained _personnel_ to fill it. If the Year
+of Labour-Service is introduced, there will be still more defections
+and gaps to be filled. The rush for intellectual work is more likely
+to be too small than too great.
+
+Let us come to the second objection. Will not confusion be worse
+confounded if there are many who have to fill two jobs, if, in these
+jobs constant exchanges are taking place, if the periods of work are
+brief and subject to untimely interruptions, if time and work are lost
+through never-ending rearrangement?
+
+Assuredly. And any one who starts with the idea of the old high-strung
+work done, as it were, under military discipline, any one who
+cherishes the remotest idea that this system can ever return, in spite
+of the fact that its clamps and springs have been dashed to pieces,
+may well lament these unsettlements. One who starts from the
+fluctuating conditions of our present-day, make-believe labour will
+take organic unsettlements as part of the price to be paid, if they
+only lead in the end to systematic production. But one who weighs the
+fact that the make-believe life of our present economy has not even
+yet reached its final form, will discern in every new transition-form,
+however tedious, the final redemption; in so far, at least, as any
+equilibrium is capable of being restored at all.
+
+The essence of the interchange of labour will, therefore, consist in
+this, that while the distinction between physical and intellectual
+work will still exist, there will be no distinction between a physical
+and intellectual calling. Until advanced age may forbid, it will be
+open to every man not merely to acquire some ornamental branches of
+knowledge but seriously and with both feet to take his footing in the
+opposite calling to his own.
+
+The different callings will learn to know and respect each other, and
+to understand their respective difficulties. This applies particularly
+to those who call themselves the operative workers.
+
+As soon as hereditary idleness has come to an end and loafing has been
+trampled out, then many a one, who now thinks that mental work is mere
+chattering, will learn through his novitiate at the desk, that
+thinking hurts. If he does not feel himself equal to this kneading and
+rummaging of the brain, he will go back with relief to his workshop;
+he will neither envy nor despise those who are operative workers with
+the brain, and will understand, or at least unconsciously feel, the
+oppositions in human nature and the differences in conditions of life,
+and will know them to be just. He cannot and must not keep himself
+wholly aloof from the elements of mental training; his contact with
+brainworkers will not cease; and thus his complete and passive
+resignation to the domination of ignorant rhetoric will lose its
+charm.
+
+Any man will be respected who contents himself with the lowest
+prescribed measure of culture, who modestly renounces further study,
+and goes back to manual work. But there will be no excuse for those
+who know nothing and can do nothing, but pretend to set everybody
+right; for there will be no monopoly of culture to keep them down, and
+all genuine faculty must come to the test of action.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+To-day there are three classes of social swindlers. First, those who
+live on the community without returning it any service. These are the
+people who live idly on inherited money, and the loafers. Against
+these social legislation must be framed. Secondly, those who
+deliberately practise "ca' canny," and therefore live on the surplus
+work of their fellows. These are the champions of the principle: Every
+one according to his need, no one according to his deed; the
+_saboteurs_ of labour. Against these the remedy lies in the spread of
+intelligence and a just system of remuneration. Thirdly, there are
+those who simulate thought and brain-work while they have nothing to
+give but hack phrases uttered with a glib tongue. Against these worst
+of all swindlers, these sinners against the Spirit, the remedy is
+culture.
+
+And this, in the new Order, is open to every one, young or old, who
+can maintain his foothold in the exercise of intellect, when the
+chance is offered him. He who in his test-exercise reaches a normal
+standard of accomplishment can demand that he shall not be sent back
+to manual work, but continue to be employed in the same occupation,
+and be further cultivated in whatever direction he desires. At every
+further stage of development a corresponding sphere of activity is to
+be opened to him, up to the point at which the limits of his capacity
+come into sight.
+
+Let no one object that the rush for intellectual work will become
+uncontrollable. Would that it might! For then the country would be so
+highly developed and its methods of work so perfected that there would
+be quite a new relation between the demand for head-work and for
+hand-work. For a long time to come this rush will be far smaller than
+we imagine; for the immediate future it will suffice if the rising
+forces are set free, and the laggard are tranquillized.
+
+But, the Radicals will cry, what an unsocial principle! Have we at
+last, with difficulty, brought it to the point that the accursed
+one-year examination[33] is abrogated, and now are we again to be
+condemned according to this so-called standard of culture?
+
+Stay! there is a fallacy here. In our transition period which is still
+quite dominated by the monopoly of culture, I have nothing to say
+against the abrogation of every educational test, even though in a few
+years we shall feel the deeply depressing  effects which will arise
+from the domination of the uncultured.
+
+But the transition period will come to an end. Then every one who
+likes will be able to learn and to execute, and every one who is able
+will wish to do so.
+
+"But supposing one does not wish? May not he be the very one who is
+most capable of achievement? We don't want model pupils."
+
+Nor do I want model pupils. The boy who has learnt nothing may make
+his trial as a man when culture is open to all. But if, as a man, he
+does not care to rack his brains he will be thought none the less of;
+he will merely be offered ordinary work according to his choice.
+
+But those who wish to see responsibility and the destiny of the
+country placed in the hands of men who do not care to rack their
+brains, must not entrench themselves behind social principles, but
+plainly admit that they want for all time to establish the rule of
+demagogy and the vulgarization of intellect. It is not for such a one
+to pass judgment on the mission of Germany.
+
+The way to the German mission, to German culture, which is to be no
+more a culture of the classes but of the people, stands open to all by
+means of the Interchange of Labour. The whole land is as it were a
+single ship's crew; the issues are the same for all. The manual worker
+is no longer kept down by over-fatigue, and the brainworker is no
+longer cut off from the rest of the people.
+
+The manual worker no longer regards the territory of culture as a sort
+of inaccessible island, but rather as a district which he can visit
+every day and in which he is quite at home. Every one in future will
+start even in school training, and the degree to which his further
+culture may be carried will not be limited by want of money or of
+time, or, above all, of opportunity. He will continually have
+intercourse with men of culture, and in that intercourse he will at
+once give and receive; the habits of thought, the methods and the
+range of intellectual work which are now only the heritage of a few
+will be his own; and the twofold language of the country, the language
+of conceptions and the language of things, will for him be one.
+
+There will be no permanent system of stratification; the energies of
+the people, rising and falling, will be in constant movement and their
+elements will never lose touch. There may be self-tormenting and
+unhappily constituted natures who will hate their own dispositions and
+the destiny they have shaped for themselves--these aberrations will
+never cease so long as men are men--but there will be no more hatred
+of class for class, any more than there is in any voluntary
+association of artists or of athletes.
+
+And since culture is to be at once the recognized social aim of the
+country and the personal goal and standard of each individual, the
+struggle for possessions and enjoyments, doubly restrained by public
+opinion and by deeper insight, will sink into the background.
+
+But the spirit of the land will not resemble any that we know at
+present. As in the Middle Ages, a spiritual power will rule, but it
+will not be imposed from without or above, it will be a creation from
+within. The competition of all will be like that of the best in the
+time of the Renaissance, but it will not be a competition for
+conventional values but for the furthering of life. The country will
+become, as it was in former days, a generous giver, not, however, from
+the lofty eminence of a class set apart, but out of the whole strength
+of the people.
+
+Again, for the first time, the convinced and conscious will of a
+people will be seen to direct itself to a common and recognized goal.
+This is a fact of immeasurable significance, it implies the exercise
+of forces which we only discern on the rare mountain-peaks of history,
+and of which the last example was the French Revolution.
+
+But those dangers of which we have spoken, that hell of a mechanical
+socialism, of institutions and arrangements without sentiment or
+spirit, are done away with, for production has ceased to be merely
+material and formal, it has acquired absolute value and substance.
+Spirit is the only end that sanctifies all means; and it sanctifies
+not by justifying them but by purifying them.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 31: Vergeistigt werden. It is difficult to render this word
+in the sense in which Rathenau uses it; 'intellectualized' does not
+say enough, and 'spiritualized' says a little too much.]
+
+[Footnote 32: Assuming that the highest output is reached in the
+particular instance which of course will not be the case with every
+worker whether in the mechanical or intellectual sphere. The author
+appears to be referring to amount, not quality, of output, as the
+latter would be covered by the second clause, relating to grade of
+culture (Bildungsstufe).]
+
+[Footnote 33: Referring to the shortening of military service which
+used to be accorded to recruits of a certain educational standard.]
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+
+As the kinsfolk of a dying man comfort themselves in the death-chamber
+with every little droop in the curve of temperature, although they
+know in their hearts that the hour has come, so our critics flatter
+themselves with the idea that in the end all will come right, if not
+by itself at least with trifling exertion. But it is not so: except by
+the greatest exertion nothing will come right. Our lake-city of
+economics and social order is ripe for collapse, for the piles on
+which it is built are decayed. It is true that it still stands, and
+will be standing for an hour or so, and life goes on in it very much
+as in the days when it was sound. We can choose either to leave it
+alone, and await the downfall of the city, among whose ruins life will
+never bloom again, or we can begin the underpinning of the tottering
+edifice, a process which will last for decades, which will allow no
+peace to any of us, which will be toilsome and dangerous, and will end
+almost imperceptibly, when the ancient city has been transformed into
+the new.
+
+Let us have no doubt about it: something tremendous and unprecedented
+has to be accomplished here. Does any thinking man believe that when
+the social order of the world has collapsed, when a country of the
+importance of Germany has lost the very basis of its existence, when
+the development of centuries is broken off, its faculties and its
+traditions emptied of value and repudiated--does any man really
+believe that by means of certain clauses in a Constitution a few
+confiscations, socializations and rises in wages, a nation of sixty
+millions can be endowed with a new historical reason for existence?
+Why is not the negro republic of Liberia ahead of all of us?
+
+Our character is weak on the side of will, and our former lords say
+that we are good for nothing except under strict discipline
+administered by dynasts and hereditary nobles. If that is true, it is
+all over with us; unless some dictator shall take pity on us and give
+us a modest place among the nations with a great past and a small
+future. If we are worthy of our name we must be born again of the
+Spirit. Merely to conceive this is in itself an achievement for a
+people; to carry it out, to embody the conception in a new order of
+society, is at once a test and an achievement.
+
+Our social ethics must take up a new position. Hitherto--stripping off
+the usual rhetorical phrases--it has taken its stand on two effective
+and really driving principles, those of Duty and of Success; two
+side-views of Individualism. All else, including love of one's
+neighbour, sense of solidarity, faith, spiritual cultivation, feeling
+for Nature, was (apart from a few lofty spirits) merely subsidiary;
+means to an end, convention or falsehood. There were few whose
+careers were not influenced by these estimates; the majority of the
+upper classes was wholly under their dominion.
+
+The two goals of our wishes, to have something and to be something,
+were expressed by the whole outward aspect of society. The great
+object was not to be counted as a Tom, Dick or Harry, one who had
+less, or was less, than others. There were grades of being, grades of
+human being: it was possible to be something, to be much, to be
+little, or to be nothing at all. From the white collar to the pearl
+necklace, from the good nursery to the saloon car, from the
+watch-ribbon to the sword-belt, from the place at the ordinary to the
+title of Excellency, everything was a proof of what one had, or was,
+or believed oneself to be. If one did not know a man one must not
+speak to him; if one knew him, one might borrow a hundred marks from
+him, but one must not ask him for a penny. Whoever had wealth
+displayed it in order to be admired; whoever had a social position
+displayed his unapproachability and the weight of his dignity, as, for
+instance, when with an absent look and lost in the burden of his own
+existence he entered a dining-hall. From inferiors one demanded a
+degrading attitude and forms of speech, and presented to them a face
+of stone; towards those in higher position one came to life and
+displayed an attentive civility. It was--or shall we say
+is?--permissible to lavish in an hour the monthly income of a poor
+family. "One had it to spend" and "what business was it of theirs?" In
+the lower ranks there was much of genuine revolt against these abuses
+and also much envy and malice, much open imitation, and much of secret
+admiration. Every silly craze was cheapened in hideous imitations, the
+suburb and the village made a display which in quality, indeed, fell
+below the model, but in quantity not at all.
+
+It may be said that these were excrescences or city fashions; that one
+must not generalize. These are empty phrases. To understand the spirit
+of a society it is not hermits that one must study. And, moreover, let
+any one ask himself whether this society was really based on the idea
+of solidarity and human friendliness or upon unscrupulous personal
+interests and exploitation, on shows and shams, on the demand for
+service and the claim to command. If anything can explain the
+eagerness with which we Germans flung ourselves into a war whose
+origins we did not know and did not want to know, then besides the
+conscious objects, advantage, rehabilitation, and renown, we must also
+take into account the obscure impulse of the national conscience which
+in the midst of evil individualism and of personal and class egoism
+yearned for the sense of solidarity and fusion.
+
+Is it objected that all this lies deeply rooted in human nature, that
+it has been there from time immemorial, and it is impossible to alter
+it at one stroke? Pedantic drivel! Many things lie deep in human
+nature, and it depends on which of these the will chooses to develop.
+And who talked of altering things at one stroke? Our judgment of
+values is to be transformed, and if human nature never changed, much
+that now flaunts itself in the sunshine would be creeping in the
+shade. This transformation of judgment is a matter of recognizing
+things for what they are. When pomp, extravagance, exclusiveness,
+frivolity and fastness, greed, place-hunting and vulgar envy are
+looked on with the same eyes as aberrations in other provinces of
+life, then we shall not indeed have abolished all vice, but the
+atmosphere will be purified. Look at our sturdy Socialists of the
+November days[34] and proselytes of every description: you can see
+that the acquisition of a new judgment of values may be the affair of
+an hour! And for that reason one must not criticize them too
+closely--unless they try to make a profit out of their conversion.
+
+All social judgments presuppose a system of recognized values. The
+values of Christian ethics have never penetrated deeply into the
+collective judgment of mankind; even in the mediaeval bloom of
+Christian, or rather of ecclesiastical, culture the moral conceptions
+of Christianity remained the possession of a few chosen spirits and
+communities; society in general accepted the mythical element, did
+homage to the hierarchy, and remained ethically pagan, the upper
+classes being guided by a code of honour resting on the worship of
+courage. The Churches never made any serious effort to shape an
+ethical code; they were preoccupied with the teaching of dogmas of
+faith which carried them ever farther and farther from the groundwork
+of the Gospels, and they devoted whatever surplus energies they had to
+politics, and to accommodations with the ruling powers of the world.
+
+The cult of courage imposed on and exercised by the ruling classes,
+and symbolically imaged in their code of honour, took an effective
+shape in the banning of cowardice and of cowardly crime. So far as
+positive values go, the ethics of nobility degenerated into smartness,
+the claim for "satisfaction" and the exclusiveness of rank; a Prussian
+and Kantian abstraction, the conception of duty, a conception at
+bottom unproved and incapable of generating conviction, became a rule
+of life, made effective by training and control. The ruling powers and
+their controls have given way, and their dry brittleness is revealed.
+
+We have not succeeded in finding a substitute for social ethics in an
+idealized type of national character. The imagination of the Western
+nations, like those of antiquity, has shaped ideal types which they
+believe or would wish themselves to resemble; they know what they mean
+by "esprit gaulois," or "English character," or "American Democracy,"
+while, in accordance with the problematic character of our being, we
+Germans, except for the statuesque heroes of legendary times, or
+certain historic but inimitable figures, have conceived or poetically
+created no character of which we can say that it embodies the
+collective spirit of Germany.
+
+The super-ethical doctrine of the being, the growth and the empire of
+the soul has been laid down by us, but there are as yet few into whose
+consciousness it has penetrated; the transformation of thought and
+feeling which must proceed from it will not lay hold of the masses
+directly, but will filter continually from one social stratum to
+another.
+
+The recognized values of social judgment! It sounds so abstract, so
+remote from practice, that one might well believe we were landed again
+in the cloudland of festal oratory and the emotions of the leading
+article. The voluntary recognition of an invisible authority! And this
+after we have shattered the visible, and are living in the midst of
+intellectual anarchy and moral Nihilism! And yet moral valuations,
+simple, binding, and on the level of social judgment, are near enough
+to be within our grasp.
+
+Are not all the four quarters of the world to-day talking about
+Democracy? Have not we ourselves got tired of this word, forbidden
+till a year ago--tired, even in circles where the modest word
+"Liberal" was never pronounced without a frown? And what does
+Democracy mean? Do we take it in the merely negative sense, that one
+is no longer obliged to put up with things? Or in the meagre sense,
+that responsibility goes by favour, and that the majority must decide?
+Or the dubious sense, that we are yearning to make our way through a
+sham Socialism to the Dollar Republic?
+
+It is not the form of government, it is the form of society, that
+determines the spirit of a land. There is no democratic form of
+society, for democracy can be in league with capitalism, with
+socialism, or even with the class of clubs and castes. The unspoken
+fundamental conception which gives significance and stability both to
+the forms of a democratic constitution and to those of an organic
+society is called Solidarity--that is to say, cohesion and the sense
+of community. Solidarity means that each man does not come first in
+his own eyes, but before God and State and himself each man must stand
+and be answerable for all, and all for each.
+
+In this sense of solidarity the dominion of the majority over the
+minority is not an object to be striven for but an evil to be avoided;
+the true object of a solid democracy is the dominion of a people over
+itself, not by reckoning up the relative strength of its various
+interests, but by virtue of the spirit and of the will which it sets
+free. In this sense of solidarity no society can be based on
+hereditary monopolies either of capital or of cultivation; nor can it
+be delivered over to the terrorism of vocations and unions which,
+under the leaderships of shouters, claim the right whenever they
+please, to strangle indispensable industries; nor can it be based on
+demagogic flattery of excitable mobs. Every born man must from his
+cradle onwards have the same right to existence; he must be sheltered
+and fostered as he grows up, and be free to choose his lot. Every
+occupation must be open to him, except that he must not encroach on
+the sphere of another man's liberty. The standard of his activity is
+not to be fixed by birth or privilege or force or cunning or the glib
+tongue, but again, by spirit and by will.
+
+To-day, while cultivation of the spirit is still a class-monopoly, it
+cannot form any standard of creative capacity. And yet it has been
+demonstrated that so powerful is the passion for culture in a spirit
+which is in any degree qualified for it, that even to-day it is
+capable, by self-education, of surmounting some of the artificial
+barriers. There was not, to my knowledge, any illiterate among the
+Prussian or German Ministers of the new era, and the one of them who
+excused his deficiencies of language with the class-monopoly of
+education was in the wrong, for any man of normal capacity might in
+ten years' practice of popular oratory have learned the elements of
+syntax.
+
+When access to the cultivation of the German spirit has become a
+common right of the whole people, Culture will become, if not the sign
+at least the presupposition of creative activity. The proof of
+capacity will then cease to be settled either between agitators and
+the masses, or in the dimness of privileged chanceries, but in the
+productive competition of men of high intellectual endowment.
+
+Society will not be divided by classes and castes, it will not be
+graded according to pedigree or possessions, it will not be ruled by
+separate interests; by ideas or by the masses; it will be an ordered
+body--ordered by spirit, by will, by service and responsibility.
+
+Any one who does not accept this self-created and self-renewing order,
+and who at the same time rejects the old, is simply working for the
+dominion of force and chance. A society can no more remain permanently
+without order than the staff of a factory or the crew of a ship. Only
+instead of an organic order we may have an accidental and arbitrary,
+an order of the personal type, springing from the dexterity shown in
+some favourable moment, maintaining itself by force, and seeking to
+perpetuate itself in some form of hereditary oligarchy.
+
+An order of the priestly and hierarchical type is no longer thinkable
+to-day, nor can one of the peasant type come into question in a land
+of urban industry. Whoever wishes to see an organic self-determining
+and self-regenerating order of society, has therefore to choose
+between the military order, resting upon disciplined bodily capacity,
+or the mercantile and capitalist order which rests upon business-sense
+and egoistic alertness, or the demagogic order which rests upon the
+rhetorical domination of the masses, and does not last long as it soon
+turns to violence and oligarchy, or finally the order of culture,
+resting upon spirit, character, and education.
+
+This last is not merely the only suitable one for us and the only one
+which is worthy of our past; it will also in time become the general
+order of society prevailing over all the world. In the vision of this
+order we recognize the mission that Prussia neglected, though it lay
+within its grasp for a hundred years; what it neglected and the rock
+on which it foundered.
+
+The greatness of Prussian policy since 1713 lay in its premonition and
+appreciation of the principle of mechanism even before it became
+common to all the world. Organization and improvement, the war machine
+and money, science, practicality and conscientiousness--all this is
+clearly mechanization seen from the political side.
+
+The early application of these principles was a stroke of genius far
+in advance of the then condition of the world. Seen from this
+standpoint, all the rest of the continental world, not yet mechanized,
+and burdened with the relics of mediaevalism, Caesarism and clericalism,
+seemed torpid and lost in illusions: arbitrary, inaccurate and
+slovenly. With short interruptions this Prusso-central point of view
+was maintained until the middle of the World-War; and not quite
+unjustly, for Prussia remained in every respect ahead of other powers
+in the department of mechanization.
+
+For a hundred years the Prussian principles had a monopoly of success;
+elsewhere they were scarcely understood and much less imitated. Then
+came Napoleon.
+
+He took over the mechanistic principle and handled it as never a man
+had done before; he became the mechanizer of the world. At the same
+time he was something mightier than that: he was the heir of the
+French idea of spiritual and popular liberty.
+
+Prussia fell, and would have fallen, even if its mechanism had not
+grown rusty. Its leaders learnt their lessons from France and England,
+they set on foot a liberation of the people by departmental authority
+and a liberation of the spirit by the people; they put new life into
+the mechanism, and they conquered with the help of England as we have
+lately seen France conquer with the help of America.
+
+But here came a parting of the ways. It was possible to pursue either
+the way of mechanization or that of the liberation of the spirit.
+Prussia did neither; it stood still. In the place of the liberation of
+the spirit came the reaction; in the place of mechanization came the
+bureaucracy. On the rest of the Continent, too, the movement for
+political mechanization was stifled, the force that stifled it being
+the uprising economic movement.
+
+Bismarck was aware of the untried forces that lay in the system of
+political mechanization. The world, as we looked at it from our
+Prussian window, seemed as loose and slovenly as ever, and it was so.
+Once again, with a mighty effort, the Prussian mechanism was revived
+and the movement of the bourgeoisie towards liberty and the life of
+the spirit was repressed. This was called "realism" in politics, and
+the estimate was a just one. There was no progress to be made with
+professional Liberalism; but with Krupp and Roon one organized
+victories. As in Frederick's time the slovenly Continent had to give
+way, Prussia mounted to the climax of her fortunes, and won Germany.
+
+And again there was a parting of the ways; but this time there was no
+one to stand for civic and spiritual freedom. People believed they had
+all they wanted of it; democracy was discredited and broken, the
+professors were political realists, success followed the side of
+mechanization, which was rightly supposed to be linked with the
+dynasty, and mechanization in the economic sphere drew to its side the
+hope of gain.
+
+Bismarck died in the midst of anxieties, but to the end he had no
+scruples. The two systems of mechanization were at their zenith, and
+the other countries looked, in political affairs, as slovenly as ever.
+One was wearing itself out in parliamentary conflicts, another had no
+battle-cruisers, another was lacking in cannon, or in recruits, or in
+railways, or in finances; the trains never came in up to time,
+everywhere one found public opinion or the Press interfering in
+process of law or in the administration, everywhere there were
+scandals; in Prussian Germany alone was everything up to the mark.
+
+Only one thing was overlooked. The mechanization of economics had
+become a common possession for everybody. Starting from this and with
+the methods and experiences attached to it, it was possible also for
+other countries, if necessary, to mechanize their politics or, as we
+say now, to militarize them. And this could be done with even more
+life and vigour than in Prussia, whose organization was there
+believed to be inimitable and where the principle of mechanism was, as
+it were, stored up in tins and in some places was obviously getting
+mouldy. In the matter of Freedom, however, the other peoples were
+ahead of us, and to the political isolation of Prussia spiritual
+isolation was now added.
+
+In the encircling fog which prevailed on economic developments there
+was not a single statesman who recognized that Prussian principles had
+ceased to be a monopoly, or an advantage, not to mention a conception
+of genius. This lack of perception was the political cause of the war.
+Instead of renewing ourselves inwardly through freedom and the spirit,
+and carrying on a defensive policy as quietly, discreetly, and
+inconspicuously as possible, we took to arming and hurrahing. Worse
+than any playing of false notes was the mistake we made in key and in
+tempo: D major, _Allegro_, _Marcia_, _Fortissimo_, with cymbals and
+trumpets!
+
+To-day we have no longer a choice before us, only a decision. The
+period of mechanical Prussianization is over for us, the period of the
+mechanical policy of Force is over for all the world, although the
+heliographs of Versailles seem to reflect it high above the horizon.
+It is not a capitalistic Peace of God as imagined by the international
+police which has now begun; it is the social epoch. In this epoch the
+people will live and will range themselves according to the strength
+of the ideas which they stand for.
+
+It is not enough for us to become Germans instead of Prussians; not
+even if, as it were to be desired, we should succeed in rescuing from
+the collapse of Prussia her genuine virtues of practicality, order and
+duty. It is not enough to brew some soulless mixture out of the
+worn-out methods of the Western bourgeoisie and the unripe attempts of
+Eastern revolutionaries. It is not enough--no, it will lead us to
+destruction quicker than any one believes--to blunder along with the
+disgusting bickerings of interests and the complacent narrowness of
+officialism, talking one day of the rate of exchange, another of our
+debts, and the next of the food question, plugging one hole with the
+stopping of another and lying down at night with a sigh of relief:
+Well, something's got done; all will come right.
+
+No, unthinking creatures that you are; nothing will come right until
+you drop your insincere chatter, your haggling, your agitating and
+compromising, and begin to think. Here is a people that has lost the
+basis of its existence, because, in its blind faith in authority, it
+staked that existence on prosperity and power; and both are gone. Do
+you want to stake _our_ existence, on ships, soldiers, mines,
+trade-connexions, which we no longer possess, or upon the soil, of
+which we have not enough, or upon our broken will to work? Are we to
+be the labour-serfs and the serfage stud-farm of the world? Only on
+Thoughts and Ideals can our existence be staked. Where is your
+thought? Where is the thought of Germany?
+
+We can and must live only by becoming what we were designed to be,
+what we were about to be, what we failed to become: a people of the
+Spirit, the Spirit among the peoples of mankind. That is the thought
+of Germany.
+
+This thought is shaping the New Society--the society of the spirit and
+the cultivation of the spirit, the only one which can hold its ground
+in the new epoch, and which fulfils it.
+
+This is why we have been endowed with a character whose will is weak
+in external things and strong in inward responsibility; why depth and
+understanding, practicality and uprightness, many-sidedness and
+individuality, power of work and invention, imagination and aspiration
+have been bestowed upon us, in order that we may fulfil these things.
+For what do these qualities, as a whole, betoken? Not the conqueror,
+not the statesman, not the worldling, and not the man of business; it
+is a narrow and trivial misuse of all faculty for us to pretend to
+represent these types among the nations. They betoken the labourers of
+the spirit; and far as we are from being a nation of thinkers and
+poets, it is nevertheless our right and our high calling to be a
+thinking nation among the nations.
+
+But on what, you may ask with scorn, is this thinking nation to live?
+With all its wisdom, will it not be reduced to beggary and starvation?
+
+No--it will live. That people which amid a century of world-revolution
+is able to form for itself a stable, well-balanced, ordered and highly
+developed form of society will be one that works and produces. All
+around there will be quarrelling and conflict, there will be little
+work and little production. For the next decade the question will be,
+not where is the demand but where is the supply?
+
+The countries are laid waste, as Germany was after the Thirty Years'
+War; only we do not as yet recognize it, so long as the fever lasts we
+do not notice the decline.
+
+Production, thought-out and penetrated with spirit, on the part of a
+highly developed society, and combined with labour-fellowship, is more
+than valuable production or cheap production; it is something
+exemplary and essential. And this applies not only to production
+itself but to the methods of production, to the technique, the
+schooling, the organization, the manner of thinking.
+
+It is a petty thing to say that we were destroyed out of envy. Why did
+not envy destroy America and England? The world regarded us at once
+with admiration and with repulsion; with admiration for our systematic
+and laborious ways, with repulsion for our tradesman-like
+obtrusiveness, the brusque and dangerous character of our leadership
+and the ostentatious servility with which we endured it. If it had
+been possible anywhere outside of our naked, mercantile and national
+egoism to discover a German idea, it would have been respected.
+
+The German idea of cultivation of the spirit will win something for us
+which we have not known for a century, and the scope of which we
+cannot yet measure; people will freely appreciate us, they will
+further us and follow us on our way. We have no idea what it means for
+a people to have these sympathetic forces at its side, as France had
+in its creation of forms, England and America in civilization and
+democracy, Russia in Slavonic orthodoxy and the neutral States in
+their internationalism.
+
+There is no fear: we shall live, and more than live. For the first
+time for centuries we shall again be conscious of a mission, and
+around all our internal oppositions will be twined a bond which will
+be something more than a bond of interest.
+
+The goal of the world-revolution upon which we have now entered means
+in its material aspect the melting of all strata of society into one.
+In its transcendental aspect it means redemption: redemption of the
+lower strata to freedom and to the spirit. No one can redeem himself
+but every one can redeem another. Class for class, man for man: thus
+is a people redeemed. Yet in each case there must be readiness and in
+each there must be good-will.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote 34: 1918, when the revolution in Germany broke out at Kiel.]
+
+                                THE END
+
+
+
+
+                         THE EUROPEAN LIBRARY
+
+                       Edited by J. E. SPINGARN
+
+
+This series is intended to introduce foreign authors whose works are
+not accessible in English, and in general to keep Americans in touch
+with the intellectual and spiritual ferment of the continent of
+Europe. No attempt will be made to give what Americans miscall "the
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+     "The first organized effort to bring into English a series
+     of the really significant figures in contemporary European
+     literature.... An undertaking as creditable and as ambitious
+     as any of its kind on the other side of the Atlantic."--_New
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+
+THE WORLD'S ILLUSION. By J. WASSERMANN. Translated by Ludwig Lewisohn.
+Two volumes. (Second printing.)
+
+One of the most remarkable creative works of our time, revolving about
+the experiences of a man who sums up the wealth and culture of our age
+yet finds them wanting. The first volume depicts the life of the upper
+classes of European society, the second is a very Inferno of the
+Slums; and the whole mirrors, with extraordinary insight, the beauty
+and sorrow, the power and weakness of our social and spiritual world.
+"A human comedy in the great sense, which no modern can afford not to
+hear."--H. W. Boynton, in the _Weekly Review_.
+
+
+PEOPLE. By PIERRE HAMP. Translated by James Whitall. With an
+Introduction by Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant.
+
+Introducing one of the most significant writers of France, himself a
+working man, who in these stories of the French underworld expresses
+the new self-consciousness of the worker's outlook.
+
+
+THE NEW SOCIETY. By WALTER RATHENAU. Translated by Arthur Windham.
+
+One of Germany's most influential thinkers and men of action presents
+his vision of the new society emerging out of the War.
+
+
+DECADENCE AND OTHER ESSAYS ON THE CULTURE OF IDEAS. By REMY DE
+GOURMONT. Translated by William Aspenwall Bradley.
+
+The first authorized version of the critical work of one of the great
+aesthetic thinkers of France.
+
+
+                           IN PREPARATION
+
+THE PATRIOT. By HEINRICH MANN. Translated by Ernest A. Boyd.
+
+The career of a typical product of militarism, in school, university,
+business, patriotism, and love, told with a biting incisiveness and
+irony.
+
+
+THE REFORM OF EDUCATION. By GIOVANNI GENTILE. With an Introduction by
+BENEDETTO CROCE. Translated by Dino Bigongiari.
+
+A new interpretation of the meaning of education, by one who shares
+with Croce the leadership of Italian thought to-day.
+
+
+A POET'S LOVES: FROM THE UNPUBLISHED MANUSCRIPTS OF VICTOR HUGO. By
+LOUIS BARTHOU. Translated by Daniel Crehange Rosenthal.
+
+A striking, not to say sensational, revelation of the intimate private
+life of a great poet, by an ex-Premier of France.
+
+
+                   HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY
+                   Publishers         New York
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The New Society, by Walther Rathenau
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