Arthur Moeller van den Bruck Quotes

Schiller long ago formulated the idealist conception of history, which secs in man a free moral agent, controlling nature. The materialists never got beyond the positivist point of view which confines history to an attempt to understand conditions, describe their phenomena and analyse their components. There is, however, another point of view possible: a metaphysical, which includes the physical, an intellectual, which includes the scientific: a point of view which recognizes the sublimity and rises above the degradation of man: the only point of view from which an answer is possible to the question: Who created the circumstances? It is no answer to reply that the circumstances created themselves. Marx never allowed himself to speculate whether perhaps materialism might not be merely a transition to some greater principle behind. He clung to the assertion that men make their own history, not as free agents, but under the compulsion of given circumstances. Again we ask: but who created the circumstances? There can only be one answer: Man himself is the datum.

Our enemies have their present success. The moment is in their favour, but everything else is against them. The secret, however, must not be revealed before its time. What we can, however, already detect is a regrouping of men and nations. All anti-liberal forces are combining against everything that is liberal. We are living in the time of this transition. The change is taking place most logically from below and attacking the enemy where his power began. There is a revolt against the age of reason.

The liberal is inspired by the ambition of the would-be great man who does not want to take the lower seat, the anxiety of the inadequate person to miss nothing. Jealousy of power explains this hate of genius, of anyone who is great, who does, singlehanded, things which can never be done by the many. Jealousy of power explains this hate of the dynasties with their hereditary prestige and privilege; this hate of the Papacy with its traditional authority transmitted to the wearer of the tiara; the hostility to Louis XIV's and to Pius IX's doctrines of infallibility. This jealousy of power explains no less that passion for constitutions which make power dependent on elections; this craze for parliaments to take control of the state; this mania for republics in which the parties divide the power and party leaders draw the pay and the electors enjoy the party patronage; or the preference for a limited monarchy that has resigned all real power but still lays claim to grace.

Revolutions are only interludes in history.
Marx called them the steam engines of history. We might rather call them the collisions of history: immense railway accidents which take their toll of sacrifice; which may be pregnant of consequences, but which have something of the banality of accidental catastrophes. [...]
At best catastrophes have the virtue of calling attention with a terrible emphasis to existing faults, to which custom and stupidity and self-sufficiency have blinded us. The necessary salvage work after a revolution must, however, be handed over to some experienced person conversant with the whole administration who can set the wrecked, overturned engine in motion again. Life of its own weight resumes its equilibrium, and the conservative principle on which all life is based is vindicated.

Who is the liberal chameleon: democracy?
Who is this Moloch who devours the masses and the classes and the trades and the professions and all human distinctions?
Who is this Leviathan? We must not let either the rhetoric or the bonhomie of the democrat deceive us about the true nature of the monster.

The German nation is astir. Its path is blocked. It has lost its bearings. It seeks space. It seeks work: and fails to find it. We are becoming a nation of proletarians.

The principle of liberalism is to have no fixed principle and to contend that this is in itself a principle.

The morning's dollar level became the substitute for morning prayer. We are still thinking of nothing but the miseries of to-day: the capitalist and proletarian think of nothing else. We have sunk to a depth which man never reached before: the materialist conception of history has reached its zenith<p>Can this last for ever? We know that it cannot. Disgust at materialism, at ourselves, has seized us. Reaction has set in, a reaction against socialism itself. Socialism can only help if it can purge itself of its materialism, its rationalism andwhat has been the most fatal thing of all-its liberalism.

The Revolution can never be un-made.
A revolution may be combated while there is yet time while there is yet faith that help may be found for the nation in its need. Such help will most readily be found in the government which has hitherto been the nation's best protector. But once a revolution has become a fact, there is nothing left for the thinking man but to accept it as a new datum, a new starting-point.

The population problem is THE problem of Germany: a socialist problem if you will, but more exactly a German problem. Since access to the outer world is forbidden us we must look for its solution within our own borders; and since it cannot there be solved, a day must come when we shall burst our frontiers and seek and find it outside. [...]<p>The victors have no population problems. Their countries give a home to all who speak their tongue. In addition they possess other lands to which their people may migrate. They have divided up the globe between them. Since the word 'annexation' has acquired an ugly ring, and 'sphere of influence' is no less suspect, they have invented the idea of the mandate and conferred it on themselves through the League of Nations. They have now not enough people to take possession of these countries and administer them to full advantage, or to bring them up to that level of progress which they consider it their peculiar privilege to promote. The population problem of the victors is that of declining populations.

A Policy may be reversed: History cannot.

The liberal professes to do all he does for the sake of the people; but he dl'stroys the sense of community that should bind outstanding men to the people from which they spring. The prnple should J1aturally regard the outstanding man, not as an enemy bul as a representative sample of themselves. Liberalism is the party of upstarts who have insinuated Liberalism is the party of upstarts who have insinuated themselves IJclwecn the people and its big men. Liberals feel themselves as isolated individuals, responsible to nobody. They do not share the nation's traditions, they are indifferent to its pasl and have no ambition for its future. They seek only their own personal advantage in the present. Their dream is the great International, in which the differences of peoples and languages, races and cultures will be obliterated. To promote this they are willing to make use, now of nationalism, now of pacificism, now of militarism, according to the expediency of the moment. Sceptically they ask: "What are we living for?" Cynically they answer: Just for the sake of living!

Every people has its own socialism.

The materialist outlook is anthropomorphic. It does not lift man metaphysically above and beyond himself, but rationalistically drags him down to what it conceives to be his real self. It was the rationalist age of enlightenment that saw the birth of this philosophy. Up to that time man's thought had always been cosmic; it had found its justification in the divine justice and the divine holiness. It was conscious of a spiritual immanence. The rationalist's pride was to see only the animal in man. The humanist had stressed the mystic tie that binds the creature to the Creator. The rationalist created l'homme machine, a living automaton, a miracle of mud. Creation was explained not through the Creator but through the creature, and the creature was reduced to the sum of the matter of which he was composed and on which he was nourished. Rousseau's vegetative ideal, which aimed at being philanthropic, only added a sentimental touch. The French Revolution put these theories politically to the test and demanded " rights" for the enlightened man, expressly based on his "physical needs."<p>German thought rebelled against this degradation of man. German minds took heed of the spiritual as well as the bodily needs of man and evolved the conception of the "Education of the Human Race," by which all that had been lost might be re-won. Their interpretation of universal history had nothing to do with a mechanical "Progress," but passionately sought to recapture for man the ideals he had abandoned. Our escape from rationalism to idealism was signalized by the attention's being directed not to human rights but to human dignity.

The reactionary's reading of history is as superficial as the conservative's is profound. The reactionary sees the world as he has known it; the conservative sees it as it has been and will always be. He distinguishes the transitory from the eternal. Exactly what has been, can never be again. But what the world has once brought forth she can bring forth again.