Richard Nikolaus von Coudenhove-Kalergi published The Totalitarian State Against Man in London in 1938, with an introduction by the journalist and historian Wickham Steed and a translation by Sir Andrew McFadyean. Its twelve chapters move from first principles about the state and the individual through a history of freedom, an anatomy of dictatorship, and an account of the class forces of the age, ending with a call for what the author calls a fraternal revolution. Coudenhove-Kalergi was an Austrian count of Flemish, Greek and Japanese descent, founder of the Pan-Europe movement, and he addresses the book to “all men and peoples seeking an answer to the riddle of destiny.”
“Man is an end and not a means.”
The book’s central claim is stated in its opening sentence and never abandoned: man is a creature of God, the state a creature of man, and therefore the state exists for man and not man for the state. Everything that follows — the contrast of Athens and Sparta, the dissection of Bolshevism, Fascism and National Socialism, the survey of the five classes — elaborates that single proposition and its corollary, that the deification of the state is the most fatal heresy of the age.
How the Case Against the Idol State Is Built
The Book and Its Author
Wickham Steed opens the volume by recalling a Viennese palace some thirty years earlier, where he met a Japanese lady, the widow of the Austro-Hungarian diplomat Count Heinrich Coudenhove-Kalergi. Later he encountered her two sons in Theresianum uniforms; the elder, Richard, wrote this book. After the war, when Richard was launching his Pan-Europe movement and preparing the Pan-Europe Union of 1923, he came to Steed for help and advice. Steed traces the author’s ancestry: a Flemish family settled in Bohemia, a grandfather married into a noble Cretan house and added the name Kalergi, and his father married a Japanese woman—so Flemish persistence, Greek lucidity and Japanese synthetic expression mingle in him. His education was mainly German, and German his dominant language. Steed read the German original and was asked to introduce an English version; he feared a translator would make a hash of the style but admired McFadyean’s rendering of terms like Rechtstaat and Machtstaat. He calls the author a philosopher and artist as well as a man of action, quotes Porson’s jibe that German scholars dive deeper and come up muddier, and allows that the author’s clearness and fondness for syllogism may lead him to over-generalise.
The Idolatry of the State
The book, Steed says, combats the deification of the State and demolishes Hegel’s conception of it as an end in itself—Hegel’s declaration that the State is “the ultimate end which has the highest right against the individual, whose highest duty is to be a member of the State.” Steed calls Hegel the foster-parent of the Totalitarian idea and the parent of the modern reaction against freedom, tracing to his influence Russian Bolshevism, Italian Fascism and German Nazism; Mussolini’s dogma that “the State is an Absolute” echoes Hegel’s error. He then quotes the book’s doctrine at length: man is a creature of God, the State a creature of man; man an end, the State a means; the State a machine or tool, not an organism. It becomes an idol, an intermediary between God and man, a servant parading as master. The “new idolators” argue that the State is many men, therefore more than a man, a demigod; man merely a means, organ, building material, atom or cell. Coudenhove-Kalergi answers that the least of men is immeasurable and infinite, a true child of God; ten million human beings remain ten million separate worlds; the State as a collective being is a myth and a dangerous lie—an insurance company raised to an idol by its beneficiaries. We fight the idolatry, not the insurance company. Steed praises the chapters “Right and Might,” “Athens and Sparta” and “The Crisis of Freedom,” warning that the light Athens kindled—freedom, personality, Western civilisation—risks extinction. He welcomes the book but disagrees with the author’s belief that the Italian Fascist Corporative State represents a practical return to democracy, and closes with a Kipling quotation on fetters breaking.
The Author’s Preface
Born of a European father and a Japanese mother, the author has cared since childhood for questions transcending differences of civilisation and race. As a philosopher he seeks the primitive forms and forces beneath phenomena; as founder-leader of the movement for a federation of the States of Europe he has spent fifteen years wrestling with the problems that unite or divide human beings, discussing fundamental questions with men of every people and class—Europeans, Asiatics, Americans; kings and presidents, dictators and democratic statesmen; industrialists and workmen, peasants and academics; Liberals and Fascists, Conservatives and Communists. The book distils these studies, aiming to bring clarity into the confusion of demagogy and lying that obscures the grave problems of the age, and to point men of good will a way into a better future. It is meant for all men and peoples seeking an answer to the riddle of destiny.
Man the End, the State the Means
The opening chapter lays down its foundation: man is a creature of God, the State a creature of man; hence the State exists for man, not man for the State. Men without states are conceivable; states without men are not. The State’s value equals the value of its services to human beings—good insofar as it develops man, evil insofar as it hinders him; it can be friend or enemy of humanity according as it stimulates or hinders man’s freedom, security and development. The State is neither living thing, organism nor organ, but a machine, a mechanism. The claim that the State is the sum of its citizens is false: it is only their instrument, the form of their organisation, not their substance. Citizens belong first to themselves, their sects, families, professions and parties; citizenship fulfils only a fraction of their being, so they are neither building material, atoms nor cells—they dwell in the State but do not constitute it. Each man is a separate world; love, friendship and loyalty bind but never fuse individuals. Hence the State as collective being, superman or God is an invention, a myth and a dangerous lie. The author would fight the idolatry, not the insurance company—against the deification of the State, “the most fatal heresy of our age.”
Right and Might
The second chapter notes that Recht means both right and law. The State is no superman or demigod but the greatest creation of man, giving security against fellow men and natural catastrophes and pointing the way from anarchy to personal freedom; it is precious for man’s sake, not its own. Through the State man rose above the beasts and gained leadership over the earth; two generations of statelessness would destroy civilisation, science and culture, returning man to Ice Age conditions. Talk of abolishing the State is ridiculous until humanity is a community of saints; anarchy means the struggle of each against all, the worst of states better than statelessness. The State produces two things—right and might; both serve security, right protecting the individual and might the community. Right states rest on laws and judges; Might states on arms and soldiers. In the Right state the judge is highest authority and justice the highest virtue; in the Might state the war lord commands and physical courage ranks highest. The Right state uses might to secure right; the Might state uses right to maintain its might. In the Right state every human being is a subject of right; in the Might state an object of might. The judicial state grew from the family, the military state from the tribe; tribes became states by adding a system of right to might, and monarchy and state spring from the combination. Complete fusion has never been achieved—the army remains a state within the state, and conflicts lead to revolutions and coups. The modern state, like an ellipse, has two centres, judge and soldier, and should be symbolised by scales and sword. England most nearly approaches the extreme judicial state, Germany the extreme military state, explained by geography. Both rest on order: justice, which is organic and promotes freedom, versus discipline, which is mechanical and conflicts with freedom. The totalitarian state substitutes discipline for justice. The dualism is eternal, rooted in power versus form. Right rests on equilibrium. Might without right, and right without might, both lead to arbitrariness; the League of Nations failed for lacking might; dictatorships lacking new principles of right fell; the Roman Empire exemplified the union of both. Power politics sees the world biologically and dynamically; law politics architecturally and statically. In the Right state peace is natural; in the Might state war is natural. The Might state is imperialistic, the Right state pacifist; the Right state individualist, the Might state collectivist. The Right state’s ideal is totalitarian man; the Might state’s is the totalitarian state.
The Democratic Logic of Socialist Demands
Socialists set out to finish what political equality had begun by adding economic equality to it: the abolition of bourgeois domination, the dispossession of the rich and the distribution of their property among the poor, the socialization of the means of production, and equal schooling for all. Coudenhove-Kalergi insists these demands deserve the name democratic, because they flow from the equality of all men before the law and before property, and from the principle that in a democratic state a minority of “haves” should no longer command and exploit a majority of “have-nots.” Industrial workers organized under the banner of Marxism to pursue exactly this: universal suffrage, and the unity of all the dispossessed in the industrial proletariat against the possessing class, so that the parliamentary balance might be reversed and the ruling majority dispossessed in its turn.
The Bourgeois Counter-Offensive
The bourgeoisie mobilized everything it had to prevent a democratic workers’ victory, having, as the book puts it, not fought for democracy in order to be ruined by it. It defended private property by financing anti-socialist newspapers and parties, by preaching nationalism, imperialism and national hatred in place of class hatred, by allying with crown, church, nobility, bureaucracy and peasantry, and by weaving social and business associations through governments and parliaments. The anti-Marxist front drew in many have-not intellectuals—artists, scholars, professors, students—who opposed Marxism from conviction and from fear that abolishing private property might destroy Western civilization, since the Marxian classless order had no precedent in world history. Capitalism broke up any single parliamentary front of the have-nots with ecclesiastical and national slogans; nobility and priesthood, whose leaders belonged to the possessing class, swallowed their distaste for the bourgeoisie and joined the campaign against Marxism.
Marxism’s Fatal Error and the Split in Freedom’s Army
Marxism made its own fatal mistake by waging ideological war on Christianity under the flags of materialism and atheism, instead of linking arms with primitive Christian tendencies. That drove the Christian peasantry and most of the agricultural labouring class into the enemy camp. Marxism thus became only the party of industrial workers—a strong minority everywhere, a majority nowhere—and lost the parliamentary game even with universal suffrage. Meanwhile the army of freedom split. The liberal bourgeois camp held private property to be a sacrosanct right of man and the Palladium of freedom against an omnipotent state socialism, citing the Declaration of the Rights of Man on property as inviolable and sacred. Socialists denied that property was a right at all, seeing its disappearance as the condition of real freedom and justice. Freedom paled before the property question: socialists would trade democratic freedom for socialist equality, while the possessing classes preferred a reactionary regime that safeguarded property to a democratic one that confiscated it. Generations raised in freedom took it for granted, and freedom’s front broke apart.
Lenin and the Bolshevik Break with Democracy
Before the War the bourgeois camp was democratic and democratic tendencies predominated within socialism, though some currents distrusted democracy and sought power by revolution. The World War split the social democrats, allied with bourgeois parties in the national struggle, from the revolutionary communists who aimed at an international dictatorship of the proletariat and the extermination of the bourgeoisie. Lenin broke with democracy because socialism had lost the parliamentary game; his Russianness was decisive. Russia’s industrial proletariat was small against a conforming agrarian population, any democratic regime would be agrarian, and democracy was problematic where most people were illiterate—hence a tool of plutocracy and reaction. Russia lacked Europe’s two thousand years of the cult of freedom. Defeats of the Tsar’s armies and the failures of Kerensky’s republic created the conditions for Lenin’s victory; his peace-at-any-price programme and immediate expropriation of the large landowners won him soldiers and peasants, though he based his power on a small minority ready to stick at nothing. He demanded revolution by naked force, pronounced bourgeois democracy deformed by capitalism, and set out to destroy bourgeoisie, nobility, church, capital, large landholdings, bureaucracy and the bourgeois intelligentsia in a bloody revolution, raising the classless state’s democracy on their ruins with the class-conscious proletariat as vanguard. The dictatorship of the proletariat appeared the indispensable preliminary to socialism.
The Dictatorship of the Proletariat as Personal Tyranny
After his coup d’état Lenin showed open contempt for personal freedom and human rights, erecting a dictatorship of power and terror; the extermination of opposing forces through murder, robbery, torture and extortion was his declared aim, turned also against disobedient proletarian and socialist elements. The “dictatorship of the proletariat” was in form the Communist party’s dictatorship and in fact the personal dictatorship of Lenin and his closest collaborators—a return to absolutism with different mottoes but greater cruelty, arbitrariness and violence. Having abandoned freedom for equality, his remark that freedom is a bourgeois prejudice was more than a witticism: the kernel of the Bolshevist revolution was the struggle against individualism, personality, freedom and the “gentleman” ideal—against the totalitarian man—replaced by a totalitarian state of unlimited power, master of bodies, souls and property, a collective organism before which the individual stood impotent and outlawed. Freedom was transferred to the future: after an undefined proletarian dictatorship and the extermination of bourgeois culture, the state would be demolished and personal freedom built; meanwhile equality, dictatorship and terror served, with freedom banished to a future paradise. Lenin substituted soviets—factories and local areas as cells of a council hierarchy culminating in the Soviet government—for parliament, never through free elections, merely a facade for the dictatorship of Lenin and the Communist party. He proclaimed world revolution: the proletariat was to gather round the Communist International, overthrow bourgeois governments on the Russian model, and enter the Soviet Union. Many younger, active labouring elements and proletarian intellectuals answered the call.
The Totalitarian State as a Permanent War Camp
Bolshevism arose from the struggle with capitalism, fascism from the struggle with Marxism; their parties are civil-war armies that keep their military character after victory, defending the party state by force against overthrow and unable to demobilize while class war may flare up again—in Russia through a bourgeois restoration attempt, in Germany and Italy through a Marxist rising. Internal mobilization alone cannot justify the totalitarian state, so the whole nation must feel continuously threatened from outside, requiring a permanent war psychosis to rally all patriots behind the leadership even when they disapprove of its internal policy, directing every thought from childhood toward war and defence, so that the individual sacrifices personal freedom on the altar of the nation. The totalitarian state becomes a single camp of barracks; the dictator becomes a field-marshal with absolute power. War’s outbreak is not in its interest, though it starts ahead of non-totalitarian states; defeat risks breaking it apart like the empires of the two Napoleons. It needs a warlike foreign policy, a permanent atmosphere of war without war, as in Europe since the World War; organized permanent peace would deprive it of its raison d’être, so it must be militarist, imperialist, anti-pacifist. The moral state of war produces a war economy—autarky, hostility to free trade as dependence on foreigners—with military requirements preceding social ones. Its political ethic holds that the supreme law is maintaining and enhancing the power of state, party and dictator; Machiavellianism is its declared state ethic; good and evil give way to advantageous and injurious for party and state; the end justifies the means; justice is replaced by discipline, freedom by authority, conscience by obedience; opposition is mutiny, criticism treachery; the man who places honour above state interest and conscience above party is a criminal; denouncing a friend becomes a sacred duty; every good patriot is a volunteer police reservist; duties to God, neighbour and one’s own soul pale before duty to the deified state.
The Omnipotent State and the One-Party Regime
Being a war state, it requires unification of powers—a return to the most primitive state form, with all powers in one hand: war-lord and high priest, judge and lawgiver, head of administration and police, master of property and consciences.
The Five Classes and the Shape of Modern Politics
The book turns to the social map that underlies everything it has argued about the state. Five classes shape modern politics: the bourgeoisie, the proletariat, the peasantry, the heirs of nobility and priesthood (the conservative and clerical forces), and an intermediate class. The age is dominated by the war between the first two. The bourgeoisie holds almost the whole state apparatus; the leaders of Liberal, Conservative, Clerical, Fascist, Socialist and Agrarian parties are drawn mainly from its ranks. Its spirit finds purest expression in liberalism, which fights on two fronts—against feudalism and clericalism on one side, socialism and fascism on the other—allying with conservatives on economic questions and with socialists on cultural ones. Evolutionary by temperament, liberalism is the enemy of both reaction and revolution, bent on consolidating the power the bourgeoisie won in the French Revolution.
The proletariat is the fourth class, carved out of the third by the technical age: machines demanded more hands, and the industrial proletariat was born. It is defined by the lack of property. With no capital reserves it must earn its daily bread with its hands, which means extreme insecurity and an economic want of freedom—life in distress or on its edge. To expect it to be satisfied with its share, or to abandon the struggle for a richer one, is absurd. It first hoped in democracy, but bourgeois society offered the ballot with one hand and wielded the whip of hunger with the other, driving workers back into economic slavery. Hence its hatred of the conservative forces, the nobility and the priesthood, and its hatred and envy of the bourgeoisie and capitalism. Marxism gave that hatred economic shape, deepening the gulf with a materialist and atheist worldview and lending class war the savour of a religious war between Christians and the godless. Its aim: destroy capitalism, bourgeois society and Western culture, and build a collectivist world without exploitation or class divisions.
While the two city classes fight over the future, the peasantry’s power grows. A few generations ago it lay without right or might in the semi-slavery of serfdom; the ideas of the Enlightenment first liberated it, and universal education and easier transport and association gave it political power. Its first gains came at the nobility’s expense—the feudal lords were the real slave-owners of the serfs—and the break-up of large estates was a second blow to the same order. In that struggle the peasantry allied with bourgeoisie and proletariat; but a satisfied peasantry has become in part the heir of feudal conservatism: preserver of tradition, defender of private property, protector of religion, representative of the land against city domination. The peasant lives in symbiosis with nature, with animals and plants; his tempo is the slow tempo of the seasons, his attitude organic rather than mechanical, his temper neither idealist nor materialist but realist. Mistrustful of town culture with its changing slogans, he keeps a cold calm and sound commonsense against large-town hysteria. With stronger nerves and internal stability he is the great reserve of the future amid a world threatened with madness. Organised economically in agricultural co-operatives and politically in agrarian parties, he is courted by every camp—Conservative, Clerical, Liberal, Socialist, Fascist—because he is wedded to no independent ideology and lets practical class interest direct his policy.
Each class, the book notes, has a summit of power outside parliament often mightier than a minister: the generalissimo for the military caste, the highest prince of the church for the clerical, the governor of the central bank for the bourgeoisie, the general secretary of the trade unions for labour, the general secretary of the agricultural co-operatives for the peasants. Most of these organisations are international—army staffs linked only between allied states, though officers’ corps feel a universal sympathy even across hostile frontiers; the churches split between the centralising Roman world church and the world union of Christian churches; national banks centred on the Board of the Bank for International Settlements in Basle; trade unions in Amsterdam; agricultural co-operatives in Paris. Classes, like states, have their world connections, analogous to the League of Nations.
Bolshevism depends on the proletariat and strives to invest it with dictatorship. Fascism rests on none of the five classes but on the intermediate class created after the World War, when large sections of the bourgeoisie were converted into proletarian elements. War, inflation and economic crisis made millions of bourgeois existences lose their bearings—bourgeois in culture, proletarian in economics, wishing to have been bourgeois, reluctant to accept Marxism or merge with the class-conscious proletariat, clinging to the illusion of a lost existence. Doubly pitiable, they unite bourgeois claims with proletarian distress, filled with resentment against capitalism, socialism and the liberal democratic order that let them be ruined, since in the struggle for existence they equal neither the propertied bourgeoisie nor the organised working class. Mostly half-educated, understanding only their mother tongue, they fall victim to extreme nationalism.
The Closed Circle and the Crisis of Social Democracy
The old parliamentary semi-circle has become a closed circle: communists and fascists meet in their totalitarian ideology and in their fight against political individualism. Their historic opponents, liberals and conservatives, have joined to save democracy and personal freedom—to preserve liberalism. This individualist bloc often stretches left to socialists and right to nationalists, but must reckon with socialists deserting to the communists and nationalists to the fascists. Social democracy occupies a curious place, seeking to reconcile socialism with democracy, equality with freedom, and so falling into paradox: it calls for the overthrow of the existing order on Marxist lines but without revolution or terror; it wavers between alliance with liberals to maintain democracy and with communists to realise socialism; it rejects the dictatorship of the proletariat yet strives to secure the proletariat a position of domination. It refuses to recognise that a war has broken out between freedom and equality, that Lenin was the loyal executor of the Marxist testament, and that his revolutionary programme has stood the test better than the parliamentary one. It refuses to see that class warfare has entered a phase making socialism by parliamentary means impossible, since every increase in Marxist power automatically increases fascist counter-forces, so the decision rests outside parliament. The socialist who follows this to its conclusion faces alternatives: subscribe to revolutionary Marxism, or break with Marxist ideology and convert social democracy into a social reform party on the English Labour model. Given communism promoted by the Soviet Union, revolutionary social democracy has no reason to exist. Its path leads from upheaval to reform, representing working-class interests as agrarian parties represent the peasants.
The crisis of social democracy poses the crisis of the social question: whether the struggle against inequality or against distress is central. Until now the revolution to establish equality was Marxism’s principal aim; to despoil the capitalist was as essential as to enrich the proletariat; retributive justice was as intense as distributive justice; resentment and envy drove alongside the desire for justice and human dignity. The poor were to be indemnified and the rich punished; the mere existence of riches appeared a moral offence. This mobilisation of hatred and revenge strengthened Marxism and erupted in the Russian Revolution in floods of unprecedented cruelty. Yet the revolution abolished wealth, not distress; capitalist democracies such as Switzerland and Scandinavia came nearer that goal than Bolshevist Russia.
The Bolshevik Experiment and Its Bankruptcy
In the pre-Bolshevik epoch the abolition of wealth through equality seemed identical with the abolition of poverty through just distribution. Marxists could compare the socialist dream with capitalist actuality, always favourably, as living men compare with idealised romantic figures. Bolshevism first made the dream reality: one-sixth of the world’s surface became a crucible—not a small poor state but a world power endowed by nature on the richest scale, led by convinced, intelligent Marxists under Lenin. Two decades passed; leaving out the first years, half a generation of constructive socialist work remained—time to build factories, railways, canals and streets for a state of immeasurable wealth, partly on pre-revolutionary economic work, with capitalist inventions and methods, inexhaustible raw materials and a population of 160 million. The first result was the bankruptcy of communism as a principle of equality.
The Totalitarian Man and the Totalitarian State
The pair of terms in the title is not a slogan but a technical distinction, and the whole book turns on it. The totalitarian state absorbs the whole man into the state’s purposes; the totalitarian man is the whole man, developed in body, character and mind, who uses the state as an instrument. Coudenhove-Kalergi finds the first in Sparta, which produced no art, no science and no genius, and the second in Athens, which made man the measure of all things and left behind a light still burning after twenty-five centuries. His account of freedom is equally deliberate: freedom is not arbitrariness but development according to form, the inner law of the crystal or the tree, and personality is to the free man what the crystal is to the stone. The state that suppresses freedom therefore does not merely commit an injustice; it defeats its own purpose, since a state exists to develop man and cannot develop him by compressing him.
Against this standard the dictatorships of the 1930s are measured and found alike in method though different in doctrine. Bolshevism, National Socialism and Fascism all rest on the party, the police and the permanent threat of war; all replace justice with discipline, conscience with obedience, and the rule of law with the will of a leader. Coudenhove-Kalergi is careful to distinguish degrees: he calls Fascism a political method rather than a religion, credits Mussolini’s corporative state with a partial return to representation, and argues that in a Bolshevist world a Fascist Italy would be an asylum for freedom. But the machinery he describes — the one-party monopoly, the underground opposition, the torture of captured conspirators, the falsified statistics, the artist turned propagandist — is presented as a single type, and the type is the enemy.
What the Book Is Arguing With
Two intellectual adversaries run through the argument. The first is Hegel, whom Steed in his introduction calls the foster-parent of the totalitarian idea for teaching that the state is an end in itself and has the highest right against the individual. The second is Marx, or rather the Marxist conviction that the abolition of private property is the road to freedom. Coudenhove-Kalergi’s treatment of the class war is the most original and least predictable part of the book. He grants the proletariat’s misery and the justice of its demands, and he does not defend capitalism as such; but he argues that the Russian experiment has bankrupted communism as a principle of equality, since the Soviet Union was forced to reintroduce inequality of income and the authority of the factory manager, becoming state capitalistic in all but name. The abolition of wealth, he concludes, is not the abolition of poverty — the small capitalist democracies came nearer that goal than Bolshevist Russia did. His remedy is not revolution but the reformist road of the English Labour party, and his social ideal is the gentleman, whom he presents as the modern heir of chivalry and of the Stoic sage, a whole man formed by honour, conscience and good form rather than by the state’s command.
A Polemic of Its Moment
The book belongs unmistakably to the late 1930s. Its pages on the Aryan myth, on the coming campaign against Russia, and on the choice between Sparta and Athens read as a warning written while the warning was still possible, and Steed’s introduction seconds it in the plainest terms. Some of its judgments have not worn well — the estimate of the corporative state, the confidence that dictatorships are short-lived, the faith that a European federation could be built on the model of the Pan-Europe movement. What survives is the argument’s spine: that a state which claims to be a god ends by treating men as building material, and that the least of men is immeasurable and infinite. Coudenhove-Kalergi wrote as a philosopher who had spent fifteen years talking with kings and presidents, dictators and workmen, and the book carries the mark of those conversations — impatient with demagogy, fond of the syllogism, and certain that clarity itself is a political weapon.
