Richard Nikolaus Coudenhove-Kalergi’s Adel — “Nobility” — is a short, bracing book of social philosophy published in Leipzig in 1922. It is not a history and not a story: it is an essay in types, an attempt to explain Europe’s political and spiritual conflicts by tracing them back to two opposed kinds of human being, the rustic and the urban, and to the two aristocracies each produced. Coudenhove-Kalergi writes as a schematist who knows his schemas are half-truths, and the book’s force lies in how far he pushes them anyway.
“Jedes Schema ist ein Zwitter aus Wahrheit und Unwahrheit: während es Wesentliches trifft, vergewaltigt es Unwesentliches.”
Two Poles of Human Existence
The Countryman and the Cityman
The book opens with a reservation. Every schema, Coudenhove-Kalergi warns, is a hybrid of truth and untruth: it seizes what is essential while doing violence to what is not. Nature knows no pure types, only transitions and approximations; concept and science are dead things that try to express the living, and can only ever partly succeed. The divisions that follow, he says, rest on aesthetic rather than mathematical truth. Having disarmed the objection, he proceeds to draw his antithesis as sharply as he can.
Land and city are the two poles of human existence, and they produce psychological antipodes. Peasants of the most distant regions often resemble one another spiritually more than they resemble the city-dwellers of the nearest metropolis. Between land and land, city and city, lies space; between city and land lies time. European rustic humanity still contains representatives of every age from the Stone Age to the Middle Ages, while only the great Western world-cities represent modern civilization — so that centuries or millennia separate a metropolis from the flat land around it.
The urban mind is abstract, mechanical, rational; the rural mind concrete, organic, irrational. The city-dweller is a rationalist, a skeptic, an unbeliever; the countryman an emotionalist, believing, superstitious. The countryman’s thought crystallizes around nature — he lives in symbiosis with the animal, God’s living creature, grown together with his landscape and dependent on weather and season. The urban soul crystallizes around society, living in symbiosis with the machine, man’s dead creature, and making itself as independent as possible of time, space, and climate. One believes in nature’s power over man, the other in man’s power over nature. The rustic is conservative like nature, the urban progressive like society; all progress proceeds from cities. The city-dweller is typically the product of a revolution within a rural lineage that broke with tradition, moved to the metropolis, and began life on a new basis.
The metropolis robs its inhabitants of natural beauty and compensates with art: theaters, concerts, and galleries are surrogates for the landscape, offering beauty in concentrated form after a day of ugliness. Nature is the extensive form of beauty, art the intensive. Hence the city-dweller feels nature romantically, as longing, while for the rustic it is constant fulfillment, and he feels it classically. Social, Christian morality, Coudenhove-Kalergi argues, is an urban phenomenon, a function of human coexistence; the typical city-dweller combines Christian morality with irreligious skepticism and mechanistic atheism, and the resulting worldview is socialism, the modern metropolis religion. For Europe’s rustic barbarian, Christianity is scarcely more than paganism with a new mythology; his true religion is faith in nature, power, and fate. Cityman and countryman do not know each other, and so they distrust and misunderstand each other, living in veiled or open enmity under slogans: Red and Green International, industrialism and agrarianism, progress and reaction, Jewry and antisemitism. All cities draw their strength from the land; all land draws its culture from the city. Cities grow and die; the land is eternal.
The Junker and the Literatus
The flower of the rustic is the landed nobleman, the Junker; the flower of the urban is the intellectual, the literatus. Here will-nobility confronts spirit-nobility, blood nobility confronts brain nobility. The typical Junker combines a maximum of character with a minimum of intellect; the typical literatus a maximum of intellect with a minimum of character. Coudenhove-Kalergi concedes that this has not always held: in modern England, and in Germany of the Minnesinger era, the blood nobility was an outstanding cultural element, while the Catholic intellectual nobility of the Jesuits and the Chinese Mandarins in their bloom proved as much character as spirit. But in Junker and literatus the opposites of rustic and urban culminate — the Junker’s typical profession is the officer’s, and the literati caste has its own corresponding type.
The Jewish Roots of European Ethics
From the anatomy of types the book turns to history, and to a striking claim. Three peoples conquered the ancient cultural world, each in its own way: the aesthetically and philosophically minded Greeks in Hellenism, the practically political Romans in the Imperium, and the ethically religious Jews in Christianity. Christianity, prepared ethically by the Jewish Essenes and intellectually by the Jewish Alexandrians, was regenerated Judaism. Insofar as Europe is Christian it is, in the ethico-spiritual sense, Jewish; insofar as Europe is moral it is Jewish. Almost all European ethics is rooted in Judaism. The champions of Christian morality, religious or irreligious — Augustine, Rousseau, Kant, Tolstoi — were “elect Jews” in the spiritual sense; Nietzsche is the only non-Jewish, the only pagan ethicist of Europe. The most convinced representatives of Christian ideas in their modern rebirth, pacifism and socialism, are Jews. In the East the ethical people par excellence is the Chinese; in the West, the Jewish. For the ancient Jews God was head of state, the moral law a civil code, sin a crime.
Judaism has kept faith through millennia with this theocratic idea that identifies politics and ethics, and Christianity and Bolshevism are both attempts to establish a kingdom of God. Two thousand years ago the early Christians, not the Pharisees and Sadducees, were the heirs of the Mosaic tradition; today it is neither the Zionists nor the Christians but the Jewish leaders of socialism — for they too wish, with the highest self-denial, to erase the original sin of capitalism and turn the atoned world into an earthly paradise. For these prophets of the present the ethical is primary in everything: politics, religion, philosophy, art. From Moses to Weininger, ethics was the main problem of Jewish philosophy. In this ethical basic attitude lies a root of the Jewish people’s unique greatness — and also a danger: Jews who lose their faith in ethics sink into cynical egoism, whereas people of other mentalities retain a wealth of chivalric values and prejudices, the honorable man, the gentleman, the cavalier, that protect them from the fall into value-chaos. What chiefly separates Jews from average city-dwellers is that they are an inbreeding people. Strength of character combined with sharpness of mind predestines the Jew, in his most outstanding specimens, to lead urban humanity — false as well as genuine spiritual aristocrat, protagonist of capitalism as of revolution.
Crisis of the Nobility
Gunpowder, Printing, and the Fall of the Sword
The second part opens with a sweeping periodization. Our democratic age, Coudenhove-Kalergi writes, is a pitiful interlude between two great aristocratic epochs: the feudal aristocracy of the sword and the social aristocracy of the spirit. Feudal aristocracy is in decline, spiritual aristocracy in the making; the in-between time calls itself democratic but is truly ruled by the pseudo-aristocracy of money. In the Middle Ages the rustic knight ruled over the urban burgher, pagan mentality over Christian, blood nobility over brain nobility; the knight’s superiority rested on bodily strength, power, and courage. Two inventions conquered the Middle Ages and opened the modern era: gunpowder ended knightly rule, printing began spiritual rule. Firearms made bodily strength and courage non-decisive and made spirit the decisive weapon; printing gave spirit unlimited scope, moved writing humanity into the center of reading humanity, and raised the writer to spiritual leader of the masses. Gutenberg gave feathers the power that Schwarz took from swords; with printer’s ink Luther conquered a greater realm than all German emperors. Under enlightened despotism rulers obeyed ideas that came from thinkers, and writers formed a spiritual aristocracy of Europe. Absolutism’s victory over feudalism meant the city’s first victory over the country and the first stage in the spiritual nobility’s triumph. The medieval dictatorship of country over city was replaced by the modern dictatorship of city over country. With the French Revolution began the second epoch of the spirit’s emancipation. Democracy rests on the optimistic premise that a spiritual nobility can be recognized and elected by the popular majority. We now stand at the threshold of a third epoch: socialism, based on the urban class of industrial workers and led by the spiritual urban aristocracy of revolutionary writers. The influence of blood nobility sinks, that of spiritual nobility grows. This development, and with it the chaos of modern politics, will end only when a spiritual aristocracy seizes society’s means of power — powder, gold, printer’s ink — and uses them for the common good. A decisive stage toward this is Russian Bolshevism, where a small band of communist spiritual aristocrats rules the land and consciously breaks with the plutocratic democratism ruling the rest of the world. Plutocracy is a spiritual pseudo-aristocracy, itself a stage on the way from sword nobility to spiritual nobility: individualist brain nobility rather than socialist spiritual nobility, a precursor of a coming rule whose leaders will combine the plutocrat’s energy and intelligence with social responsibility and idealism. The struggle between capitalism and communism over the inheritance of the defeated blood nobility is a fratricidal war of the victorious brain nobility — individualist against socialist, egoist against altruist, pagan against Christian spirit.
Politics as an Inherited Art
Politics in Europe was for centuries an aristocratic privilege. The high nobility formed an international political caste in which diplomatic talents were bred; for generations it lived in a political atmosphere from which the bourgeoisie was deliberately kept away. On its estates the nobility learned the art of governing and handling people; in leading state posts at home and abroad, the art of handling peoples. Politics is an art, not a science; its center of gravity lies more in instinct than in reason, more in the unconscious than the conscious. Political talent can be awakened and trained, never learned. Genius breaks all rules, but in political talents the nobility is far richer than the bourgeoisie, because acquiring knowledge needs only a single life while breeding instincts requires many generations. In the sciences and fine arts the bourgeoisie surpasses the nobility; in politics the relation is reversed. Hence European democracies often entrust foreign policy to descendants of their high nobility, since it is in the state’s interest to make the hereditary mass of political talent useful to the general public. The high nobility’s political abilities owe much to its strong blood mixture, which widens its horizon and counteracts the bad effects of caste inbreeding. Most inferior aristocrats combine the disadvantages of mixture with those of inbreeding — characterlessness with poverty of mind — while in the rare peaks of the modern high nobility the advantages of both meet: character with spirit.
Brothers at the Extremes
Intellectually there is a vast difference between the extreme Right, the conservative blood nobility, and the extreme Left, the revolutionary intellectual nobility; in character these apparent extremes touch. Everything intellectual and conscious lies on the surface; everything characteristic and unconscious in the depths of personality. Cognitions and opinions are easier to form and reshape than character traits and directions of will. Lenin and Ludendorff are antagonists in their political ideals but brothers in their will-attitude: had Ludendorff grown up in the revolutionary milieu of Russian students and early witnessed his brother’s execution by imperial hangmen, we would probably see him at the head of red Russia; had Lenin been raised in a Prussian cadet school, he might have become an Über-Ludendorff. What separates these related natures is intellectual level — Lenin’s narrowness seems heroic-conscious, Ludendorff’s naive-unconscious; Lenin is a spiritualized Ludendorff. The same parallel holds between Friedrich Adler and Graf Arco, both murderers from idealism, martyrs of their conviction: had Adler grown up in the militarist-reactionary milieu of the German blood nobility and Arco in the socialist-revolutionary milieu of the Austrian intellectual nobility, probably Arco’s bullet would have hit Minister-President Stürgkh and Adler’s Minister-President Eisner. They too are brothers, separated by instilled prejudices, joined by common heroic, selfless character; whoever praises one’s character may not disparage the other’s, as daily happens from both sides.
Blood Nobility and Future Nobility
Where intensified life-force is, there is future. The flower of the peasantry, the landed nobility, has — insofar as it kept itself healthy — gathered and stored a fullness of vital forces in thousand-year symbiosis with living, life-giving nature. If a modern education succeeds in sublimating part of these heightened life energies into the spiritual, then perhaps the nobility of the past could take a decisive part in building the nobility of the future.
The main bearers of the corrupt as well as the genuine brain nobility — of capitalism, journalism, and the literati — are Jews, and the superiority of their spirit predestines them to be a main factor of future nobility. A glance at Jewish history explains their lead in the struggle for the leadership of humanity. Two thousand years ago Jewry was a religious community composed of ethically and religiously disposed individuals of all nations of the ancient cultural circle, with a national-Hebraic center in Palestine; even then the binding, primary element was not the nation but the religion. During the first millennium proselytes from all peoples entered this community of faith, lastly king, nobility, and people of the Mongolian Chazars, lords of South Russia. Only from then on did the Jewish religious community close itself into an artificial people-community and shut itself off from all other peoples.
Then came the selection. For a thousand years Christian Europe tried through unspeakable persecutions to exterminate the Jewish people. The result was that all Jews who were weak-willed, unscrupulous, opportunistic, or skeptical had themselves baptized to escape the torments; and under these aggravated conditions all Jews perished who were not skillful, clever, and inventive enough to survive the struggle for existence in its most difficult form. From all these persecutions there finally emerged a small community, steeled by heroically endured martyrdom for the idea and purified of all weak-willed and spiritually poor elements. Instead of annihilating Jewry, Europe unwillingly ennobled it through that artificial selection and educated it into the leader-nation of the future. No wonder this people, sprung from the ghetto dungeon, developed into a spiritual nobility of Europe — and here the surviving text breaks off, mid-sentence, on the thought of a gracious Providence.
What the Book Is Doing
Adel is best read as a crisis-book of the early 1920s: an aristocrat’s attempt to salvage the idea of nobility by transferring it from blood to spirit, and to explain the catastrophes of his moment — revolution, class war, antisemitism — as symptoms of a transition between ruling castes. Its method is the paired type, rustic against urban, Junker against literatus, sword against brain, and its most original move is to treat the extremes of Right and Left as characterological twins. The book’s treatment of Jews is the part a modern reader will find hardest and most revealing: persecution is recast as a brutal engine of selection that produced a spiritual elite, and antisemitism is folded into the same typological machinery as agrarianism and reaction. It is a document of its era’s habits of thought as much as an argument, and its portrait of a coming rule by a spiritual aristocracy that seizes powder, gold, and printer’s ink reads today as both prophecy and warning.
