The Nation as Idea Vs. The Nation as Ideal
Oswald Spengler's 'The Hour of Decision' Series - Part 4
Spengler continues Part 2 of The Hour of Decision by distinguishing two concepts of nationhood: the nation as an idea, and the nation as an ideal. According to Spengler, the nation as an idea is a primordial phenomenon of social being. It is emergent, not created. The nation as ideal, on the other hand, is a rationalist creation of political rather than social origin.
Spengler cites Goethe’s understanding of ideas as not created through reason. They exist before reason and defy being constrained in definition. Spengler states, “They are the obscure urge which attains form in human life and soars fatefully and directionally over the individual existence: thus the idea of Romanness, the idea of the Crusades, the Faustian idea of striving after the infinite.” (page 23) These are not concepts dreamed up through rationality applied to phenomena in the world. Rather, they are phenomena that exist out in the world that reason can only attempt to approximate.
The nation as an idea is an actual external thing, while the nation as an ideal born of rationalism is a disorganized mass that comes about as a result of theorizing. The theorizing that gives birth to the nation as an ideal comes about due to the confusion of the mother tongue with written language and the universalization of literacy, which makes the populace susceptible to propaganda and discourse from newspapers which furthers the idea of rights in the liberal sense.
Post-1789 liberalism understands the nation as a formless mass, of which authority and order are not inherent. This formless mass understanding of the nation glosses over and erases the folk-life, traditions, customs, and culture of the people because those necessarily recognize some form of authority. In this era of liberalism, however, rationalism replaces authority with the ideal of equality. Equality puts quantity in the place of quality and number in the place of talent.
A nation cannot actually rule itself. A people with healthy instincts will recognize the need for and seek embodied authority. In the case of representative government, representatives/politicians fill in the power void. They utilize the new disorganized form of government to serve their own ends. They oppose state oversight, restriction, and order because those limit the activity of the representative.
Democracy in the 19th century and onwards is the negation of authority. Instead, it is the institution of constitutional anarchy in Spengler’s view. The government is not fixed, everything can be changed, and the changeableness of the system is written into the constitution itself. Very few requirements must be met for one to enter into a position of authority. Legislation, judicial overrule, and the ability to amend the constitution through various means result in an anti-government, a state entirely in flux.
Those in state power do not have responsibility or oversight. There is some oversight brought about by checks and balances and competing forces, but the ability of these systems to restrict the enlargement of states for personal means is dubious if one looks at history. In addition, even if there are seemingly competing state powers, these powers tend to unify with one another because power tends to centralize, as Carl Schmitt describes.
In the original form of democracy, the press was meant to be the organ of public opinion that expressed the views of the people. The function of the press quickly transformed to instead serve the interests of those providing the press’s means of existence: its funding, and to some degree its avenues of dissemination, but this to a large degree is downstream from funding. However, in some cases, the avenues of dissemination can be enabled or granted for ideological reasons. For example, press that ideologically lines up with Facebook's terms of service will be more likely to have longevity on that platform, therefore extending its reach.
In the original form of democracy, the representatives who are elected are meant to serve the interests of the people. However, due to the ease of establishing political parties when political parties are non-existent, the parties are established and now elections are comprised of those approved by the parties, who have tremendous funding and influence, rather than the representatives being elected purely through the organic expression of the popular vote.
In this form of nation, the nation as an ideal born of rationalism which establishes liberalism as the political rule for the existence of state and government, tradition is treated as suspect and restrictive. This is because tradition is at odds with the establishment of formless anti-government, for tradition itself, when it exists, is treated as authoritative for the customs, habits, and cultures of the nation as an idea. Therefore, liberalism and its emissaries are opposed to tradition "on principle and without restraint or thought for the external consequences" (page 24).
Liberal democracy will eventually give birth to dictatorial tendencies due to the power vacuum and the necessity of actual authority that scientifically comes as a consequence of real political dynamics. According to Spengler, liberal democracy is "the anarchic intermezzo" before Caesarism, which takes hold of the dictatorial tendencies as a matter of destiny in the iron laws of history that govern the high cultures.