What Happens When Economic Thinking Takes Over State and War?
Oswald Spengler's 'The Hour of Decision' Series - Part 5
Spengler continues Part 2 of The Hour of Decision with continued investigation of the dynamics of the Rationalist age. In last week’s issue, we investigated Spengler’s conceptions of the Nation as an Idea and the Nation as an Ideal which illuminated some aspects of the state in the late 19th and early 20th century. Spengler continues by going over the transformation of the state’s relationship to economics and warfare in the period before World War I. He argues that the zeitgeist’s perspective on the place of economic thinking and standing armies had changed substantially.
Economic thinking is the guiding force of the state within the Nation as an Ideal. It displaces political and historical thinking and prioritization, which are the proper ways of thinking for good governance. The state is understood to serve first the economic interests of the nation, which, paradoxically, comes at the cost of all aspects of the nation, including the economic aspect.
Within the Nation as an Idea, politics and economics are inextricably intertwined with one another. However, it is proper for the statesman, rather than an economic leader, to be in charge of governing. From our modern perspective, it seems as though economic leadership takes precedence as a result of the downfall of state power since World War I. Still, Spengler would argue that the trend of economic leadership was already present in the golden age of progress from the 1870s to World War I. Economic leadership only appears to tower above political leadership due to the historical conditions.
This condition only seems to have worsened in recent decades. Due to the vacuous nature of state leadership, economic leadership has become deeply embedded within the state apparatus. From Lockheed Martin to Monsanto to Blackrock, the line between state and corporate interests becomes increasingly blurry, so much so that it is dubious if there are even state interests anymore. Many believe that most members of Congress are entirely beholden to special interests, and many certainly are, but the true extent of the impact of business influence on lawmaking is impossible to know. This is because it is both possible to hide and profitable to do.
Spengler argues that "Without a strong policy there has never and nowhere been a healthy economic system, although materialistic theories teach the contrary" (page 25). Adam Smith, an English pioneer of laissez-faire economics, argued that this was not the case and that freer markets lead to an increase in prosperity. However, England’s economic domination came about as a result of colonialism, which was a project of statesmen.
The domination of economic thinking over political thinking was furthered by the advent of Marxism. In the Marxist framework, the material aims of the workers were the grounds on which further political projects stood. Spengler sees similarities between the outlooks of both Karl Marx and Adam Smith due to their materialism and economics-first worldview.
Spengler argues that the Great Depression came about not as a result of the economic toll of World War I, but rather as a consequence of the decline of state power. Economics and the direction of the economy in the natural order of authority are the result of political focus and power. Even on a Viking ship, Spengler argues, the decision to raid (an economic decision) comes down from the leader of the ship, the political captain himself. Similarly, England's conquest of the seas was a Faustian striving, the same Faustian striving towards the seas that took hold of Europe after the fall of Constantinople. It was England’s domination of the seas that enabled its economy to grow so large. This striving towards the sea came about from political interest, the impulse to empire, rather than purely economic interests.
The transformation of the state’s relationship to standing armies also transformed throughout the 19th century. The idea of the standing army came about as a result of the egalitarianism of the French Revolution. Under liberalism, where the people rule themselves as equal parts of the social body, anyone can contribute to the military force. This contrasts with the noble view of warriors existing in previous ages. Within the standing army, Spengler argues, even the most Rationalist societies found themselves filled with the ancient desire for blood and war.
Consciously, such standing armies led to the enforcement of equality, because universal conscription held that there could be no difference in rank before joining the armed forces. Everyone was conscripted from the same mass of the citizenry. The enforcement of egalitarianism came into friction with tradition. Traditional outlooks were particularly present in the officer corps, which was what guaranteed the strength of a standing army. Strong leadership is indispensable for a strong army, such as in the case of political leadership.
The officer corps, holding onto tradition, was the only conservative aspect of the world in the 19th century. As the other institutions of Western society slipped into liberalism, egalitarianism, and rationalism, it was the standing army that held it all together in the face of the Constitutional anarchy described in my previous essay.
Large standing armies should be credited with the peace Spengler describes, that existed between 1870 and 1914. During this period, war was not waged directly due to the casualties that many feared would be amassed should these armies be mobilized. Instead, European nations engaged in disguised wars against each other by proliferating arms. Proliferation relied on a strong industrial economy.
Because the economy was so important for this period of disguised warfare, war and economy became deeply interlinked. This led the political power, which was quickly slipping into liberal parliamentarianism at the time, to devote increasing efforts to securing future industrial output. This led to economic development and created a production loop. The tools of war need development, so the nation’s warfare capabilities are used to secure the means for economic development. During this period, weapons of war developed rapidly in their sophistication and power. Spengler describes this as development "at a feverish pace” (page 29).
Large standing armies were finally used to their fullest extent in the First World War. They were "used up" in the trenches, and "quantity triumphed over quality, mechanism over life” (page 29). It was the feverish and rapid economic development in the preceding period that enabled the extreme scale of the war.
Spengler describes two great transformations in the manner in which warfare is conducted. The first was around 1000 BC when horses were utilized as a military technique. The second was the time that Spengler was writing, in which horses were being replaced with horsepower and organic possibilities were overthrown by the possibilities of the inorganic machine. This intensifies and expands mobility in warfare. Spengler believed that the new machines, like tanks and planes, would create new openings for heroism. If he was correct, he was not correct for long, because it is hard to see any heroism in today’s wars. Footage of cheap drones dropping grenades on troops in the Ukraine-Russia conflict comes to mind. Technics have resulted in extremely impersonal warfare, a far cry from the heroism exemplified by the combatants in Homer’s Iliad.
The change-up in the composition of military officers brought about by the First World War caused the progressive tyranny that had encompassed the rest of the state to finally infect the standing armies. This in turn resulted in a loss of the traditional understanding of authority in the standing armies, which led to a disheartening and demoralization of the troops. Spengler was concerned that this would result in an inability for nations to raise armies at all. This decline in the position of armed forces is a tendency of the great Cultures, and another one of the steps toward Caesarism:
In all the Cultures – consider, for instance, the substitution of paid professional armies for the conscripted Roman peasant armies after Marius, and the consequences – this has been the way to Caesarism and is at bottom the instinctive revolt of the blood, of the reserve of race-instinct, of the primitive will-to-power, against the material forces of money and intellect, anarchist theories, and the speculation which exploits them – the way from democracy to plutocracy (page 31).
During the golden period before World War I, economic warfare was taken up as the primary form of warfare due to the interests of the statesmen in economic matters before political ones. This was England's mechanism of combat for a long time, seeking to overthrow international enemies via economic rivalry. Beginning in 1916, the Treaty of Versailles was not meant to be a peace treaty but a continued form of warfare that hamstrung the German economy and sought to undermine any potential industrial growth. It was meant to be a "permanent burden on German industry until it should collapse” (page 32).
Economic warfare is a zero-sum game, probably because it relies on the ideas of mercantilism which already views international economic relations as a zero-sum game. Once the economic means of warfare have been exhausted, however, nations will have to once again resort to military means, which will restore the state as the authority and the economy as secondary.
Next week’s issue will wrap up Part 2 of HoD and explore Spengler’s conception of the relationship between Faustian civilization and Russian Communism.