Praktischer Idealismus — “Practical Idealism,” subtitled “Nobility – Technology – Pacifism” — is a book of cultural and political philosophy by Richard Nikolaus von Coudenhove-Kalergi, written in German and published in Vienna in the mid-1920s. Its three long essays, on the noble and the future elite, on technology as a world mission, and on a reformed pacifism, argue that ideals are not ornaments of politics but its engine: only those who believe in values higher than pleasure will fight and suffer for them. The book moves from a diagnosis of European unfreedom toward a program — technical conquest of nature, a coming aristocracy of spirit, and a Europe organized for peace.
“Praktischer Idealismus ist Heroismus; praktischer Materialismus ist Eudamonismus.”
The premise is stated in the foreword and never abandoned. Coudenhove-Kalergi sets “practical idealism,” which he calls heroism, against “practical materialism,” which he calls eudaimonism — the philosophy that recognizes only pleasure as a value and pain as an evil. Heroism presupposes faith in the ideal, the conviction that there are higher goods than pleasure and worse evils than pain. This divide, he insists, runs deeper than theism versus atheism: Epicurus believed in gods, the Buddha was an atheist, and the real question is belief in values, not in deities. Materialism is the more consistent position, idealism the more creative and the more dangerous one — often entangled in nonsense and madness, yet humanity owes it its greatest works and deeds.
Heroism Against Comfort
Coudenhove-Kalergi opens with a declaration of allegiance. Practical idealism, he writes, is heroism; practical materialism is eudaimonism, the philosophy of pleasure. Whoever does not believe in ideals has no ground to act ideally, to fight and suffer for them—such a person recognizes only pleasure as value and pain as evil. Heroism presupposes belief in the ideal, the conviction that there are higher values than pleasure and greater evils than pain. This opposition runs through all of human history as the struggle of Epicureans and Stoics, and it cuts deeper than theism versus atheism: Epicurus himself believed in gods, and Buddha was an atheist idealist. What matters is belief in values, not gods. Materialism is the more presuppositionless position, but also the more unimaginative and uncreative; idealism is always problematic, often entangled in nonsense and madness, yet humanity owes it its greatest works and deeds.
Heroism, he continues, is aristocracy of disposition, just as materialism is akin to the democratic ideal—democracy too believes more in number than in value, more in happiness than in greatness. Political democracy can bear fruit only if it shatters the pseudo-aristocracy of name and gold so that an aristocracy of spirit and disposition can be born ever anew. The last meaning of political democracy is spiritual aristocracy: it wants to create enjoyment for materialists and power for idealists. The leader should replace the ruler, noble sense replace the noble name, the rich heart replace the rich pocket—any other meaning would be cultural suicide. It is no accident that Plato was at once prophet of spiritual aristocracy and of socialist economy, and father of the idealistic worldview, since aristocracy and socialism are both practical idealism.
The ascetic idealism of the South revealed itself as religion; the heroic idealism of the North as technology. Northern nature was a challenge to man. Other peoples submitted; the European accepted the fight until he was strong enough to subjugate the earth and force nature into his service. This struggle bred heroism: for Europe the hero became what the saint was for Asia, and hero-worship supplemented saint-worship. It counted as greater to fight for an ideal than to suffer for it. Europe grasped this mission fully only in modern times, when its technical age—its liberation war against winter—began, and this technical age is also the age of work. The worker is the hero of our time; his opposite is not the bourgeois but the parasite. The worker’s goal is creating, the parasite’s enjoying. Technology, then, is modern heroism, and the worker a practical idealist.
The political and social problem of the twentieth century is to catch up with the technical progress of the nineteenth—made harder because technology develops faster than man. The danger can be averted either by slowing technical progress or by accelerating social progress; otherwise humanity loses its balance and overturns. The World War was a warning. Technology poses the alternative: suicide or understanding. The coming decades will bring unprecedented development, and the present disproportion between technical and social organization will lead either to annihilating catastrophes or to political progress surpassing all historical models. Since technology shows human momentum and heroism new paths, war begins to play out its historical role; its heir is work. Humanity will one day organize to wrest from the earth what it still withholds; then every war will be civil war and every murder murder, and the age of war will seem as barbaric as cannibalism does today. This will come if we believe in it and fight for it—clear-sighted, neither short-sighted nor over-far-sighted, joining clear knowledge of coming struggles with the heroic will to overcome them. Only this optimism of the will complements and defeats the pessimism of cognition. Rather than dream idly within the fetters of an untimely present, we should participate actively in world development through practical idealism.
A dedication follows: “Adel 1920,” to the memory of the author’s father, Dr. Heinrich Graf Coudenhove-Kalergi, in reverence and gratitude.
Land Man and City Man
The first section of the book proper, “Vom rustikalen und urbanen Menschen,” begins with land and city as the two poles of human existence, breeding the rustic and urban types—psychological antipodes. Peasants of the most varied regions often resemble each other spiritually more than the city-dwellers of the neighboring metropolis. Between land and land, city and city lies space; between city and land lies time. Among European rustic humans live representatives of all ages from the Stone Age to the Middle Ages.
Spirit and Character
The greatness of a spirit lies in its extensiveness—its capacity to grasp and encompass everything; the greatness of a character lies in its intensity—its capacity to will strongly, concentratedly, steadfastly. Wisdom and energy of action are thus, in a certain sense, contradictions. The more pronounced a person’s inclination to see things from all sides and adopt every standpoint without prejudice, the weaker his impulse to act decisively in one direction: every motive is opposed by counter-motives, every belief by skepticism, every deed by insight into its cosmic insignificance. Only the limited, one-sided person can be energetic. There is an unconscious, naive narrowness, but also a conscious, heroic narrowness. The heroically narrow man—and all truly great men of action belong to this type—voluntarily switches off all sides of his being except the one determining his deed; before or after the deed he can be objective, critical, skeptical, superior, but during the deed he is subjective, believing, one-sided, unjust. Wisdom inhibits energy; energy disavows wisdom. The strongest will is ineffective if directionless; a weak will achieves the strongest effect if one-sided. There is no life of action without injustice, error, guilt; whoever shrinks from bearing this odium should remain in the realm of thought, contemplation, passivity. True people are always silent, since every assertion is in a sense a lie; pure-hearted people are always inactive, since every deed is in a sense an injustice. But it is braver to speak at the risk of lying, to act at the risk of doing wrong.
Inbreeding and Crossing
Inbreeding strengthens character and weakens spirit; crossing weakens character and strengthens spirit. Where the two meet under fortunate auspices, they produce the highest human type, combining strongest character with sharpest spirit; under unfortunate auspices they create degeneration types with weak character and dull spirit. The human of the distant future will be a hybrid. Present races and castes will fall victim to the increasing overcoming of space, time, and prejudice. The Eurasian-Negroid future race, outwardly similar to the ancient Egyptian, will replace the multiplicity of peoples with a multiplicity of personalities. By the laws of heredity, diversity of ancestors increases diversity of descendants; uniformity of ancestors increases uniformity. In inbred families one child resembles another, all representing the common family type; in hybrid families children differ more strongly, each forming a novel variation of diverging parental and ancestral elements. Inbreeding creates characteristic types—crossing creates original personalities. The forerunner of the planetary human of the future in modern Europe is the Russian, a Slavic-Tatar-Finnish hybrid; because he has the least race among European peoples, he is the typical many-souled man with the wide, rich, all-encompassing soul. His strongest antipode is the insular Briton, the highly bred one-souled man whose strength lies in character, will, the one-sided, the typical; to him modern Europe owes the most closed, most perfect type: the gentleman.
Pagan and Christian Mentality
Two soul-forms struggle for world dominion: paganism and Christianity. With the confessions bearing these names, those soul-forms have only very external relations. Shift the emphasis from the dogmatic to the ethical, from the mythological to the psychological, and Buddhism transforms into ultra-Christianity while Americanism appears as modernized paganism. The Orient is the main bearer of Christian, the Occident of pagan mentality: the “pagan” Chinese are better Christians than the “Christian” Germans. Paganism places energy at the top of the ethical value scale, Christianity love. The Christian ideal is the loving saint, the pagan ideal the victorious hero.
The Nordic Spirit and the Oriental Contrast
Coudenhove-Kalergi turns to the character of European culture and finds it mixed in blood but overwhelmingly Nordic in spirit. Set against the European stands the Oriental, who surpasses him in goodness and wisdom yet falls short in energy and cleverness. European honor is a heroic value; Oriental dignity is a harmonious one. Enduring struggle hardens the heart, enduring peace softens it, and so the Oriental grows milder. The social past of Indians, Chinese, Japanese and Jews is many times older than that of the Germanic peoples, who were still living in anarchy two thousand years ago; Asians therefore had the time and the quiet to develop social virtues further. Goodness of heart answers to wisdom of the spirit, and wisdom rests on harmony while cleverness rests on sharpness of mind. Wisdom is a fruit of the maturer South, rare in the North; even Europe’s philosophers are seldom wise and its ethicists seldom good. Antiquity was richer in wise men whose whole personality bore the stamp of clarified spirituality—a type nearly extinct in modern Christian Europe. This the author ties to the cultural youth of the Germanic peoples and the passionate intensity of the European spirit. In the Christian Middle Ages the monasteries were the only asylums for contemplative wisdom, where the wise withdrew and died as victims of the vow of chastity. European images of Christ look grave and sad while Buddha statues smile; Europe’s thinkers are deeply serious while Asia’s wise men smile, living in harmony with themselves, society and nature rather than in struggle, beginning every reform with themselves instead of others, working more by example than by books, recovering their childlikeness beyond thought while Europe’s thinkers grow old early. Yet Europe is equally great in its own way, and its greatness lies neither in goodness nor wisdom but in energy and inventive spirit. Europe is the hero of the earth, at the head of the peoples on every battle front of humanity: in hunting, war and technology the European has achieved more than any historical culture people before or beside him. He has exterminated almost all dangerous animals in his lands, defeated and subjugated almost all dark-colored peoples, and through invention and labor, science and technology won such power over nature as was never thought possible. Asia’s world mission is the redemption of humanity through ethics; Europe’s is the liberation of humanity through technology. Europe’s symbol is not the wise man, saint or martyr but the hero, fighter, victor and liberator.
Europe’s Technical World Mission
With the modern age, Europe’s great cultural mission begins. Europe’s essence is the will to change and improve the world through deeds; it strives consciously from the present into the future, in a state of constant emancipation, reformation, revolution; it is addicted to novelty, skeptical, irreverent, and struggles with its habits and traditions. In Jewish mythology the European spirit corresponds to Lucifer, in Greek to Prometheus, the light-bringer who carries the divine spark to earth, rebels against heavenly-Asiatic harmony and the divine world order, the prince of this earth, father of struggle, technology, enlightenment and progress, leader of man in his struggle against nature. Europe’s spirit has broken political despotism and the violent rule of natural forces; the European does not resign himself to fate but seeks to master it through deed and spirit, as activist and rationalist.
Hellas as Pre-Europe
Hellas was Europe’s forerunner, first feeling the essential difference between itself and Asia and discovering its activist-rationalist soul. Its Olympus was not a paradise of peace but a site of struggle; its highest god was an irreverent rebel. Hellas overthrew its kings and gods and put in their place the state of the citizen and the religion of man. This European period of Greece began with the overthrow of the tyrants and ended with the Asiatic despotism of Alexander and the Diadochi; it found a short continuation in republican Rome before being finally lost to the Roman Empire. Alexander the Great, the Hellenistic kings and Roman emperors were heirs of the Asiatic idea of great kingship; the Roman Empire differed in no essential respect from the oriental despotisms of China, Mesopotamia, India and Persia. In the Middle Ages Europe was a spiritual cultural province of Asia, ruled by the Asiatic religion of Christ; Asiatic were its religious culture, mystical basic mood, monarchical state form and the dualism of popes and emperors, monks and knights. Only with Europe’s emancipation from Christianity, beginning with Renaissance and Reformation, continuing in the Enlightenment and culminating in Nietzsche, did Europe come to itself again and separate spiritually from Asia. European culture is the culture of the modern age.
Europe’s Technical Foundations
The world of Philip II means in no essential respect a cultural advance over the world of Hammurabi—neither in art, science, politics, justice nor administration. In the three and a half centuries between us and Philip the world has changed more thoroughly than in the preceding three and a half millennia. It was technology that woke Europe from its Asiatic Sleeping Beauty sleep of the Middle Ages. It defeated knighthood and feudalism through the invention of firearms, papacy and superstition through the invention of printing; through compass and ship technology it opened the foreign continents to the European, who then conquered them with the help of gunpowder. The progress of modern sciences cannot be separated from the development of technology: without telescope no modern astronomy, without microscope no bacteriology. Modern art too is most closely connected with technology: modern instrumental music, architecture and theater rest partly on a technical basis. Photography’s effect on portrait painting will intensify: since photography is unsurpassable in reproducing facial forms, it will force painting to withdraw to its own proper field and capture the essence, the soul of man. A similar effect to photography on painting could be exercised by cinematography on theater. Modern strategy has changed thoroughly under technology’s influence.
The Burden of European Poverty
The burden of feeding and warming too many Europeans is great, while Europe’s rough, insufficiently fertile land yields relatively little. Even with the fairest distribution, each European would face much work and little reward. Under current technology, life in a socialist Europe would dissolve into a double activity: working to eat and eating to work. The ideal of equality would be achieved, but freedom, leisure, and culture would be further away than ever. To liberate people, Europe is on one hand too barbaric, on the other too poor. The wealth of the few rich, distributed among all, would vanish without a trace: poverty would not be abolished but generalized.
Socialism alone cannot lead Europe from unfreedom and misery to freedom and prosperity. Neither ballots nor shares could compensate the coal worker for spending his life in caves and shafts. Most slaves of oriental despots are freer than this free worker of a socialized factory. Socialism misjudges the European problem by seeing the root evil of the European economy in unjust distribution rather than insufficient production. The root of European misery lies in the necessity of forced labor, not in the injustice of its distribution. Socialism errs in seeing capitalism as the ultimate cause of the terrible forced labor under which Europe groans; in truth only a very small part of European labor flows to capitalists and their luxury: the greatest part serves to transform an infertile part of the world into a fertile one, a cold one into a warm one, and to sustain on it a population it could not naturally feed. Winter and overpopulation of Europe are harsher and crueler despots than all capitalists: but it is not politicians who lead the European revolution against these ruthless tyrants—but inventors.
The Technical World Revolution
Colonial imperialism and socialism are palliatives, not cures, for the European disease; they can alleviate need, not banish it; postpone catastrophe, not prevent it. Europe must choose either to reduce its population and commit suicide—or to recover through generous increase of production and perfection of technology. Only this path can lead Europeans to prosperity, leisure, and culture, while social and colonial rescue paths end in dead ends. Europe must realize that technical progress is a liberation war of the greatest scale against the harshest, cruelest, most ruthless tyrant: northern nature. On the outcome of this technical world revolution depends whether humanity uses the once-in-aeons opportunity to become master over nature, or lets it pass unused, perhaps forever.
The Case for a Political Pacifism
The decade just past, the argument opens, has been the worst in European history since the Völkerwanderung—a stronger indictment of war than any pacifist could compose. Yet the accused has been punished in neither freedom, honour, nor life. War is celebrated everywhere as a triumphator, dictates European politics, and prepares to fall upon the peoples of Europe again to annihilate them. With the advances in war technology—above all poison manufacture and aviation—the next European war would not merely weaken the continent but destroy it. Every European must therefore take a position: if the danger is unavoidable, the only logical consequence is emigration to another continent; if it is avoidable, the duty is to fight the war danger and its bearers. Remaining European is at once a fate and a responsible task on whose solution the future of all depends.
Pacifism, the text insists, is the only Realpolitik in Europe; hoping for salvation from war is romantic illusion. Most European politicians and the overwhelming majority of Europeans wish for peace—but this cannot reassure pacifists, since the same was true in 1914, when war broke out against their will through an international coup d’état of war-friendly minorities against peace-friendly majorities, long prepared, exploiting a favourable occasion, overrunning unsuspecting peoples with slogans. The World War came through the militarists’ determination and the pacifists’ weakness; while that relation persists, a new European war can break out daily, since a small but energetic war minority faces a large but energyless peace majority—playing with war instead of destroying it, appeasing warmongers instead of overthrowing them. Pacifism forgets that one wolf is stronger than a thousand sheep, and that numbers decide in politics and strategy only when well led and organized. Its powerlessness lies in this: many wish peace but few will it; many fear war but few fight it.
The Critique of Pacifism
European pacifism, the book charges, bears passive war guilt: its poor leadership, weakness, and characterlessness encouraged the warmongers. Those who in 1914 did not stand up for their ideal in time and strongly enough are co-responsible for the war’s outbreak; persisting in passivity now loads a heavier guilt by indirectly promoting future war. A rich pacifist who does not finance peace is a half-warmonger; so is a pacifist journalist who does not propagate peace; a voter who chooses a candidate from domestic motives, unconvinced of his peace-will, signs a half death sentence for himself and his children. Each pacifist’s duty is to prevent the threatening future war within his possibilities.
Pacifism has learned nothing from the war and is essentially the same as in 1914; if it does not recognize its faults and change, militarism will again march over it. Its main faults are catalogued: it is unpolitical, too many enthusiasts and too few politicians among its leaders, building on illusions and drawing false conclusions from false premises; it is boundless, wanting everything at once; it is far-sighted—reasonable in goal but unreasonable in means—directing its will at the future while abandoning the present to militarists’ intrigues; it is planless, wanting to prevent war without replacing it, lacking a positive program of active world politics; it is fragmented, having sects but no church, groups working isolated without unified leadership; it cultivates appendages rather than being the centre of political programs, its centre a domestic-political attitude while its pacifism is more tactical than principled; it is inconsistent, ready to retreat before a “higher ideal”—a clever slogan—as in 1914. The greatest evil of pacifism is the pacifists, though the best and most significant men of the time among them are exempted. Most are fantasists who despise politics and its means, so are not taken politically seriously; many believe they can change the world by preaching instead of acting, compromising political pacifism with religious and metaphysical speculations. Mostly fear of war is pacifism’s mother; when this fear extends to other life, it prevents exposure for the peace idea. Pacifists’ courage and willingness to sacrifice are rarer than militarists’; many recognize the war danger but few bring personal or material sacrifices—they are deserters, not fighters, of pacifism. Many are gentle natures who shy from the fight against war; most are weak in conviction, unable to defy mass suggestion at the decisive moment—pacifists in peace, militarists in war. Only a firm organization led by a strong will can durably force them into peace’s service.
Religious and Political Pacifism
A distinction follows between religious pacifism, which fights war as immoral, a crime, seeking to abolish it by changing man, and political pacifism, which fights war as unprofitable, a stupidity, seeking to prevent it by changing conditions. Both are good and justified separately; only their mixture harms. They should consciously support each other: the political pacifist may use ethical arguments, and the religious pacifist should back pacifist politics in decisions. But practical pacifism must emancipate itself from ethical pacifism in methods, since Machiavellian methods have proven better than Tolstoyan ones, which had to capitulate in 1914 and 1919. To win, pacifism must learn from its opponents and pursue Tolstoyan goals with Machiavellian means—learn from robbers how to deal with robbers; whoever throws away his weapon among robbers is lost.
Borders, Russia, and the Social Irredenta
On borders, the “revolutionary element” is the gradual removal of borders in strategic, economic and national respects, which destroys the seeds of future wars. Securing borders while dismantling them preserves Europe’s formal structure while changing its essence, securing present and future peace and Europe’s economic and national development.
The other European war danger is Russian. Russian militarization springs on one side from fear of an anti-Bolshevist invasion supported by Europe, on the other from the will to wage aggressive war against Europe under the sign of social liberation. European pacifism must therefore secure Russia against a European attack and Europe against a Russian one—the first only through honest will for peace, the second through military superiority, achievable without increased armaments through a pan-European defensive alliance. This superiority must not degenerate into an arms race but become the basis of Russo-European disarmament and understanding. Europe cannot change the political attitude of Russia’s rulers, whose system is expansive; since it cannot persuade them to peace, it must compel them. Where one neighbour is peaceful and another warlike, pacifism demands that military superiority lie with peace; reversing this means war. It is an error of many pacifists to see unilateral armament limitation as the sure road to peace: peace sometimes demands disarmament, sometimes armament. Had England and Belgium had strong armies in 1914, the English mediation proposal just before the catastrophe would have had more prospect of acceptance. A people practising conscientious objection while a neighbour waits to attack invites war; a people arming and provoking a peaceful neighbour to compete likewise invites war. Each peace problem needs individual treatment: peace with England, whose policy is stable and pacifist, can rest on treaties; peace with Russia, in revolution and not disavowing war plans against the European system, needs military guarantees. It would be equally unpolitical to rely on treaties with the Soviets as on the fleet with England; but pacifism must be ready to face a pacifist, disarming Russia as it faces pacifist England.
Pacifists must never forget that Russia arms in the name of social liberation and that millions of Europeans would regard a Russian invasion as a war of liberation; the more this conviction spreads, the more threatening the war. As national war dangers are banished only by dismantling national oppression, this social danger is banished only by dismantling social oppression. Europe’s social irredenta will fall away from the Moscow Internationale only when it is practically shown that the workers’ situation and future are better in democratic countries than in Soviet ones; if Communism proves the contrary, no foreign policy can save Europe from revolution and union with Soviet Russia.
The Argument Beneath the Three Essays
The book’s unifying claim is that freedom, not happiness, is the goal of human development. Coudenhove-Kalergi defines the end of all earthly existence as unfolding — the rock’s wish to crystallize, the bud’s to bloom, the human’s to live out his drives — and freedom as growth according to one’s own inner law. Pleasure is only a symptom; the animal feels pleasure because it satisfies an instinct, not the reverse. On this measure the culture-European is a stunted creature: crowded into cities, bound by society’s countless rules, forced into lifelong labor by a harsh northern climate. Two tyrants hold him — society and climate — and world history is the record of attempts to escape them: backward through emigration, upward through power, inward through ethics, forward through technology. The book’s three essays are three answers to that same imprisonment.
The second cross-cutting idea is that aristocracy and socialism are not opposites but twin expressions of idealism. Political democracy, Coudenhove-Kalergi argues, has meaning only if it shatters the pseudo-aristocracy of name and money so that an aristocracy of spirit and disposition can be born again; its last meaning is spiritual aristocracy. Plato, prophet of the spiritual elite and father of socialist economy at once, is his witness. From this follows the book’s most provocative move: the nobleman and the revolutionary are allies. The old blood nobility, insofar as it kept its health in the countryside and escaped the corruption of court air, and the Jewish brain-nobility, insofar as capital did not corrupt it, form the core of a future elite — and the pairing of Lenin, the man from rural petty nobility, with Trotsky, the Jewish man of letters, becomes a symbol of character and spirit reconciling into a revolutionary aristocracy.
A third thread is the reinterpretation of technology as ethics. The inventor, Coudenhove-Kalergi writes, is a greater benefactor of humanity than the saint; the machine is matter overcome by spirit, and the technical age is a liberation war against the harshest tyrant of all, northern nature. The worker is the hero of the age, and his opposite is not the bourgeois but the parasite — the one who enjoys without creating. This is why he treats the Buddhist and Tolstoyan retreat from industrial civilization as a kind of treason: to abandon technology just before victory would throw the world back into what he calls the Asian cultural cycle. The ethics of work, with its new honor grounded in labor and its new shame attached to laziness, is presented as the heir of knightly ethics — both masculine, both Nordic, both active.
Running through all of it is a philosophy of time. The European lives in Heraclitus’s world of becoming, the Oriental in Parmenides’s world of being; the European sees the present as a bridge between past and future, and therefore values his own age only from the standpoint of the one to come. Hence the “child-cult” he finds in both capitalist America and communist Russia — fathers working themselves to death so that their grandchildren inherit a freer world. The present generation, in his image, are slaves not of their contemporaries but of their descendants.
A Book Between Its Catastrophes
The book belongs unmistakably to the years after the First World War, and it reads the war as a warning: technology had outrun social organization, and the disproportion would produce either annihilating catastrophes or political progress beyond any historical precedent. Coudenhove-Kalergi’s pacifism grows from that fear — he argues that the next European war, with aviation and poison gas, would not weaken the continent but annihilate it — and his program is deliberately unsentimental. Pacifism, he writes, must learn from its opponents and pursue Tolstoyan goals with Machiavellian means; peace with a stable England can rest on treaties, while peace with a revolutionary Russia requires military guarantees, and a pan-European defensive alliance should make war between European states impossible. His name is now most often attached to the Pan-Europa movement he founded, and this book is its philosophical groundwork.
Much of the vocabulary here — the talk of blood nobility and brain-nobility, of quality-races and the “Eurasian-Negroid future race,” of the masculine European spirit against the feminine Asian one — belongs to the racial and civilizational idiom of the 1920s, and a reader today will meet it with resistance. What remains legible is the structure of the argument: that ideals require sacrifice to mean anything, that a ruling class without moral and aesthetic authority cannot last, that peace is a political project rather than a mood, and that Europe’s survival depended on catching its social organization up with its machines. The book’s wager — that the technical age of work is only the iron preface to a coming age of culture — is the kind of optimism Coudenhove-Kalergi himself named an optimism of the will, set deliberately against the pessimism of knowledge.
