State Morphology and the Revolutionary Era

"The truth - the deplorable truth - is that eagerness to hold public office and to live off tax receipts is not a malady peculiar to one party; it is a serious and permanent infirmity of the nation itself. It is the joint product of a democratically constituted civil society and an excessively centralized government. It is the hidden ill that gnawed away at all past governments and will continue to gnaw at all future ones."

"When a revolution is the result of popular emotion, it is generally desired but not premeditated. Those who boast of conspiring to bring it about actually just take advantage of it. Revolutions are the spontaneous result of a general malady of men's minds brought suddenly to a crisis by a fortuitous circumstance no one foresaw. The alleged instigators and leaders of these revolutions instigate and lead nothing. Their merit is like that of an explorer who discovers a previously unknown land: they have the courage to press on when the wind is favorable."

- Tocqueville

Before The Great War there were worldwide uprisings, not only in nihilist and anarchist insurrections, but the police forces as well. Violent conflicts of order and disorder. This is not entirely separate from the bourgeois and aristocratic desire for adventure that Jünger spoke of.

In the war itself one sees a continuation of this, especially with the new world volunteers. On the one hand there was a struggle against the rigid and dogmatic structure of command. Many of the Canadian soldiers in particular took it as a contest, not simply to prove oneself but as a very unnatural and enslaved sense of being. At the same time one was more concerned with the night's meal than death - infiltration of the enemy lines developed as a type of adventure perhaps even more than any strategy. What one sees in this is a natural development of war character, an elemental order necessitated by the conditions of the war. The new world soldiers were freed into the new form of warfare, but also a revolution against the very structure of military command and the old methods of war. The Germans only approached something similar for a short period in 1917.

Monarchies were discarded as an obsolete type. Not only as a form of government but as a figure of man and all his elements. Jünger suggests a weakening and even the shortcomings of the old regime to measure up to the brutality required of the era. One sees this clearly in the antiwar character so prominent in the allied nations, a character which was willing to destroy entire nations as a means to end war. What this suggests is a brutal relation to being and law in which war cannot be enough.

As governmental types we can say that the form arises, much like Plato's state eras, along with the strength of the elements. It is not only a weakening of the elemental order which causes a shift in the governmental type, the government itself may be fated to metamorphosis in the shift of the elements. Tyche, Nomos, and Pomerium - ideas and forces entirely foreign to us today, but which nonetheless speak to an order beyond the limitations of time and era.

Tocqueville's comments are very much in agreement with Xenophon: democracy arises along with the great movements of centralisation, especially where a single man can no longer command the order necessary within the elemental shift. What comes after this shift in the nomos, in the morale of citizenry, is never entirely certain.

If chance is written into the governmental types then we must say that the end may already be written into the beginning. One may not presume that monarchism is better than democracy, even if this thinking presents itself as correct within particular eras. There are conditions in which tyranny may even be, if not a positive form of government, a necessity in reordering, of harmonizing the legal state to the highest laws; this is particularly true where elemental strength has dissipated to the highest degree.

Within this condition one may begin to see the possibility of monarchism as democracy in a state of unfavourable conditions - democracy made sick. They are one, formed of one another. Again, this becomes more clear when we see the democractic character of the late monarchies, those which approached absolute power only at the end of their age. This is contrary to what monarchy is as an idea form: cultivation of the Golden-Souled within the Age of Iron, laws of the highest order where tyranny threatens absolutely, or is even the only possibility.

This is an old way of thinking, one in which tyranny appears as memory of the greatest form of government (one should note the difference between early definitions of tyranny and what Plato describes). There is an order akin to that of anarchism of the highest men, of men who attack the gods in a completely opposite spirit to that of atheism. One may sense in this Nietzsche's reasoning, if unconscious, in his attack on Homer: that he was responsible for the downfall of the Greeks, the first instance of pan-hellenism and its constitution which would gnaw at the form its law against time. This is perhaps an echo of Pindar's attack on Homer, only weakened and humanised, but nonetheless there are signs in it of a higher order of the state.

To a degree the end of state forms is also the highest possibility, one which we cannot see due to weakness and diffusion of the elements. But one must say that modern times also approached a state of near perfection, the greatest example of which is the founding of the new world, a paradise which began the end of historical time, even the possibility of order being birthed anew. What is so devastating for us is this closeness to perfection, the order which just escaped our grasp, and the ultimate sacrifice which in the end did not pay off because we did not realise a new state of being.

All of this is in the end of monarchy, it is not only a defeat which necessitates pessimism. The great sacrifice to the guns, destruction of entire territories, borders, and laws was a measure of this possibility - it is only unfortunate for us that we have lived at the worst moments of defeat, the absolute reign of nihilist law.

Even in this there remains potential for a new order. It even gathers strength with each step against the old laws, however the danger increases in keeping with this movement. This may be the reason for Jünger's focus on the myth of the titans and gods. We cannot resign ourselves to the moral will of governmental types, what we have before us is the possibility of a much stronger order, one which is not constrained by historical time and the necessity of a state which not only limits itself to its era but also ossifies into the next.

The limits of liberalism, and more importantly humanism, may be best understood when situated within this possibility