New Society

THE NEW SOCIETY

THE

NEW SOCIETY

BY

WALTHER RATHENAU

TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN

LONDON

WILLIAMS & NORGATE
NEW YORK: HARCOURT, BRACE & HOWE

1921

PREFACE

Walther Rathenau, author of Die neue Gesell-
schaft and other studies of economic and social con¬
ditions in modern Germany, was born in 1867.
His father, Emil Rathenau, was one of the most
distinguished figures in the great era of German
industrial development, and his son was brought up
in the atmosphere of hard work, of enterprise, and of
public affairs. After his school days at a Gymnasium ,
or classical school, he studied mathematics, physics
and chemistry at the Universities of Berlin and of
Strassburg, taking his degree at the age of twenty-
two. Certain discoveries made by him in chemistry
and electrolysis led to the establishment of inde¬
pendent manufacturing works, which he controlled
with success, and eventually to his connexion with
the world-famous A.E.G.— Allgemeine Electrizitats-
geselUchaft —at the head of which he now stands.
During the war he scored a very remarkable and
exceptional success as controller of the organization
for the supply of raw materials. He is thus not
merely a scholar and thinker, but one who has lived
and more than held his own in the thick of commercial
and industrial life, and who knows by actual experi¬
ence the subject-matter with which he deals.

VI

PREFACE

The present study, with its wide outlook and its
resolute determination to see facts as they are, should
have much value for all students of latter-day politics
and economics in Europe; for though Rathenau is
mainly concerned with conditions in his own land
the same conditions affect all countries to a greater
or less degree, and he deals with general principles
of human psychology and of economic law which
prevail everywhere in the world. It is not too
much to say that “ The New Society ” constitutes a
landmark in the history of economic and social
thought, and contains matter for discussion, for
sifting, for experiment and for propaganda which
should occupy serious thinkers and reformers for
many a day to come. His suggestions and conclusions
may not be all accepted, or all acceptable, but few
will deny that they constitute a distinct advance in
the effort to bring serious and disinterested thought
to the solution of our social problems, and in this
conviction we offer the present complete and
authorized translation to English readers.

THE NEW SOCIETY

i

Is there any sign or criterion by which we can tell
that a human society has been completely socialized ?

There is one and one only : it is when no one can
have an income without working for it.

That is the sign of Socialism; but it is not the goal.
In itself it is not decisive. If every one had enough
to live on, it would not matter for what he received
money or goods, or even whether he got them for
nothing. And relics of the system of income which
is not worked for will always remain—for instance,
provision for old age.

The goal is not any kind of division of income or
allotment of property. Nor is it equality, reduction
of toil, or increase of the enjoyment of life. It is the
abolition of the proletarian condition; abolition of
the lifelong hereditary serfage, the nameless hereditary
servitude, of one of the two peoples who are called
by the same name; the annulment of the hereditary
twofold stratification of society, the abolition of the
scandalous enslavement of brother by brother, of that

Western abuse which is the basis of our civilization as

7

8

THE NEW SOCIETY

slavery was of the antique, and which vitiates all our
deeds, all our creations, all our joys.

Nor is even this the final goal—no economy, no
society can talk of a final goal—the only full and final
object of all endeavour upon earth is the development
of the human soul. A final goal, however, points out
the direction, though not the path, of politics.

The political object which I have described as the
abolition of the proletarian condition may, as I have
shown in Things that are to Come , 1 be closely
approached by a suitable policy in regard to property
and education; above all, by a limitation of the right
of inheritance. Of socialization in the strict sense
there is, for this purpose, no need. Yet a far-reaching
policy of socialization—and I do not here refer to a
mere mechanical nationalization of the means of
production but to a radical economic and social
resettlement—is necessary and urgent, because it
awakens and trains responsibilities, and because it
withdraws from the sluggish hands of the governing
classes the determination of time and of method,
and places it in the hands that have a better title,
those of the whole commonalty, which, at present,
stands helpless through sheer democracy. For only
in the hands of a political people does democracy
mean the rule of the people; in those of an untrained
and unpolitical people it becomes merely an affair
of debating societies and philistine chatter at the

1 Von Kommenden Dingen, by Walther Rathenau. Berlin.
8. Fischer,

THE NEW SOCIETY

9

inn ordinary. The symbol of German bourgeois
democracy is the tavern; thence enlightenment is
spread and there judgments are formed; it is the
meeting place of political associations, the forum of
their orators, the polling-booth for elections.

But the sign that this far-reaching socialization has
been actually carried out is the cessation of all
income without work. I say the sign, but not the
sole postulate; for we must postulate a complete
and genuine democratization of the State and public
economy, and a system of education equally accessible
to all: only then can we say that the monopoly of
class and culture has been smashed. But the cessa¬
tion of the workless income will show the downfall of
the last of class-monopolies, that of the Plutocracy.

It is not very easy to imagine what society will be
like when these objects have been realised, at least
if we are thinking not of a brief period like the present
Russian regime, or a passing phase as in Hungary,
but an enduring and stationary condition. A
dictatorial oligarchy, like that of the Bolshevists,
does not come into consideration here, and the well-
meaning Utopias of social romances crumble to
nothing. They rest, one and all, on the blissfully
ignorant assumption of a state of popular well-being
exaggerated tenfold beyond all possibility.

The knowledge of the sort of social condition
towards which at present we Germans, and then
Europe, and finally the other nations are tending in
this vertical Migration of the Peoples, will not only

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THE NEW SOCIETY

decide for each of us his attitude towards the great
social question, but our whole political position as
well. It is quite in keeping with German traditions
that in fixing our aims and forming our resolves we
should be guided not by positive but by negative
impulses—not by the effort to get something but to
get away from it. To this effort, which is really a
flight, we give the positive name of Socialism, without
troubling ourselves in the least how things will look—
not in the sense of popular watchwords but in actual
fact—when we have got what we are seeking.

This is not merely a case of lack of imagination;
it is that we Germans have, properly speaking, no
understanding of political tendencies. We are more
or less educated in business, in science, in thought,
but in politics we are about on the same level as the
East Slavonic peasantry. At best we know—and
even that not always—what oppresses, vexes and
tortures us; we know our grievances, and think we
have conceived an aim when we simply turn them
upside down. Such processes of thought as “ the
police are to blame, the war-conditions are to blame,
the Prussians are to blame, the Jews are to blame,
the English are to blame, the priests are to blame,
the capitalists are to blame ”—all these we quite
understand. Just as with the Slavs, if our good¬
nature and two centuries of the love of order did not
forbid it, our primitive political instincts would find
expression in a pogrom in the shape of a peasant-war,
of a religious war, of witch-trials, or Jew-baiting.

THE NEW SOCIETY

11

Our blatant patriotism bore the plainest signs of such
a temper; half nationalism, half aggression against
some bugbear or other; never a proud calm, an
earnest self-dedication, a struggle for a political
ideal.

We have now a Republic in Germany; no one
seriously desired it. We have at last established
Parliamentarianism: no one wanted it. We have
set up a kind of Socialism : no one believed in it.
We used to say : “ The people will live and die for
their princes; our last drop of blood for the Hohen-
zollerns ”—no one denied it. “ The people mean to
be ruled by their hereditary lords; they will go
through fire for their officers; rather death than
yield a foot of German soil to the foe.” Was all this
a delusion? By no means; it was sincere enough,
only it did not go deep. It was the kind of sincerity
which depends on not knowing enough of the alter¬
native possibilities.

When the alternatives revealed themselves as
possible and actual, then we all turned republican,
even to the cottagers in Pomerania. When the
military strike had broken down discipline, the
officers were mishandled; when the war was lost,
the fleet disgraced, and the homeland defiled, then
we began to play and dance.

But was this frivolity ? Not at all; it was a childish
want of political imagination. The Poles, a people
not remotely comparable to the German in depth of
soul and the capacity for training talent, have for a

12

THE NEW SOCIETY

century cherished no other thought than that of
national unity, while we passively resign our territories.
No Englishman or Japanese or American will ever
understand us when we tell him that this military
discipline of ours, this war-lust, did not represent a
passion for dominion and aggression, but was merely
the docility of a childish people which wants nothing,
and can imagine nothing, but that things should go
on as they happen, at the moment, to be.

We Germans know but little of the laws which govern
the formation of national character. The capacity of
a people for profundity is not profundity, either of
the individual or of the community. It may express
itself in the masses as mere plasticity and softness of
spirit. The capacity for collective sagacity and
strength of will demands from the individual merely
a dry intelligence in human affairs, and egoism. It
would be too much to say that our political weakness
may be merely the expression of spiritual power, for
the latter has not proved an obstacle to success in
business. Indolence and belief in authority have
their share in it.

But have we not been the classic land of social
democracy, and have we not become that of Radical¬
ism ? Well, we have been, indeed, and are, with our
submissiveness to authority and our capacity for
discipline, the classic land of organized grumbling;
and the classic land, too, of anti-semitism which
deprived us of the very forces we stood most in need
of—productive scepticism and the imagination for

THE NEW SOCIETY

13

concrete things. Organized grumbling is not the
same thing as political creation. A Socialism and
Radicalism poorer in ideas than the post-Marxian
German Socialism has never existed. Half of it was
merely clerical work, and the other half was agitators’
Utopianism of the cheapest variety.

Nothing was more significant than the fact that the
mighty event of the German Revolution was not the
result of affection but of disaffection. It is not we
who liberated ourselves, it was the enemy; it was our
destruction that set us free. On the day before we
asked for the armistice, perhaps even on the day
before the flight of the Kaiser, a plebiscite would
have yielded an overwhelming majority for the
monarchy and against Socialism. What I so often
said before the war came true: “He who trains his
children with the rod learns only through the rod.”

And to-day, when everything is seething and
fermenting—no thanks to Socialism for that—all
intellectual work has to be done outside of the ranks
of social-democracy, which stumbles along on its
two crutches of “ Socialization ” and “ Soviets.” 1
Orthodox Socialism is still a case of the “ lesser evil,”
what the French call a pis aller. “ Things are so bad
that any change must be for the better.” What is
to make them better we are told in the socialist
catechism; but how it is to do so, how and what
anything is to become, this, the only question that
matters, is regarded as irrelevant. It is answered by
1 Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils.

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THE NEW SOCIETY

some halting and insincere stammer about “ surplus
value ” which is to make everybody well off—and which
would yield all round, as I have elsewhere shown, just
twenty-five marks a head. Fifteen millions of grown
men are pressing forward into a Promised Land
revealed through the fog of political assemblies and
in the thunder of parrot-phrases—a land from which
no one will ever bring back a bunch of grapes.

If one would interrogate not the agitators, but their
hearers, and find out what they instinctively con¬
ceive this land to look like, we should get the answer,
timid and naive but at the same time the deepest
and shrewdest that it is possible to give—that it is
a land where there are no longer any rich.

A most true and truthful reply! And yet a
profound error silently lurks in it. You imagine,
do you not, that in a land where there are no more
rich people there will also be no more poor ? “ Why,

of course not! How can there be poor people when
there are no more rich ? ” And yet there will be. In
the land where there are no more rich there will be
only poor, only very poor, people.

Whoever does not know this and is a Socialist,
that man is merely one of the herd or he is a dupe.
He who knows it and conceals it is a deceiver. He
who knows it, and in spite of that, nay, on account of
that, is a Socialist, is a man of the future.

Though the crowd be satisfied with some dim feeling
that this, anyhow, is the tendency of the times and
that with this stream one must swim; though the more

THE NEW SOCIETY

15

thoughtful contemplate the evils of the time and
decide to put up with the pis aller ; the responsible
thinker is under the obligation of investigating the
land into which the people are being led. We must
know what it looks like, where there are no rich
people and where no one can have an income without
working for it, we must understand what we call the
“ new society ” so as to be able to shape it aright.

II

The question is not very urgent.

As surely as the hundred years’ course of the social
World-Revolution cannot be arrested, so surely can
we prophesy that the process cannot maintain all
along the line the rapid movement of its beginning.
The victorious and the defeated countries will have
to work out to the end the changes and interchanges
of their various phases, for in the historical develop¬
ments which we witness to-day, we find mingled
together the phenomena of organic growth and of
disease; already we see that the Socialism of the
healthy nations is different from that of the sick ones.
It is in vain that those who are sick with the Bolshe¬
vist disease dream that they can infect the world.

The small daily and yearly movements in our
realm of Central Europe cannot be determined
beforehand, because they depend upon small,
accidental, local, and external forces. The great
and necessary issues of events can be predicted, but
it would be folly to discuss their accidental flux and
reflux. When an unguarded house is filled with
explosives from the cellar to the roof, then we know

that it will one day be blown up; but whether this

16

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17

wilFhappen on a Sunday or a Monday, in the morning
or in the evening, or whether the left door post will
be left standing or no, it would be idle to inquire.

From the historical point of view it is of no con¬
sequence whether Radicalism may make an inroad
here and there, or whether here and there the forces
of reaction and restoration may collect themselves for
a transitory triumph. The great movement of
history, as we always find when a catastrophe has
worked itself out, grows slower, and this retardation
in itself looks like reaction. We, who are not
accustomed to catastrophes, and who did not produce
this first one, but rather suffered it, we, who easily
get sea-sick after every rapid movement—think, for
instance, of the former Reichstag—we shall certainly
experience, as the first deep wave of the Revolution
sinks into us, an aristocratic, dynastic, and pluto¬
cratic Romanticism, a yearning for the colour and
glitter of the time of glory, a revolt against the
spiritless, mechanical philanthrophy of unemployed
orators of about fourth-form standard intellectually;
against the monotonous and insincere tirades of paid
agitators and their restless disciples; against laziness;
ignorance, greed, and exaggeration masquerading as
popular scientific economy; and against the brutal
and extortionate upthrust from below. And so we
shall arrive at the reverse kind of folly, an admiration
and bad imitation of foreign pride and pomp, an
arrogant individualism and a hardening of our human

feeling. The intellectual war profiteers, who are
B

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all for radicalism to-day, will soon be wearing
cornflowers 1 in their button-holes.

For the third time we shall see an illustration of
the naive shamelessness of the turn-coat. The
spiritual process of conversion is worth noticing;
Paul was converted to be a converter. But the
scurrying of the intellectual speculator from the
position which has failed into the position which has
won, with the full intention of scurrying back again
if necessary, and always with the claim to instruct
other people, is an expression of the alarming fact
that life has become not an affair of inward conviction,
but of getting the right tip.

The turn-coat movement began when a short¬
sighted crowd, incapable of judgment, and with their
minds clouded with a few cheap phrases, expected
from a quick and victorious war the strengthening
of all the elements of Force, and feared to be left
stranded. Even the most threadbare kind of liberal¬
ism appeared to be compromising, they clamoured
for “ shining armour.” The most wretched victims
in soul and body, who were obliged to flee forwards
because they could not flee in any other direction,
were called heroes, and the manliest word in our
language, a word of which only the freest and the
greatest are worthy, was degraded. One who has
experienced the hate and fury of the turn-coats who
poured contempt upon every word against the war
and the “ great days,” is unable to understand how
1 The emblem of the Hohenzollerns.

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19

a whole people can throw its errors overboard without
shame and sorrow—or he understands it only too
well. At this day we are being mocked and preached
at by the turn-coats of the second transformation,
and to-morrow we shall be smiled at by those of the
third.

But it does not matter. The moving forces of
our epoch do not come from business offices nor from
the street, the rostrum, the pulpit, or the professorial
chair. The noisy rush of yesterday, to-day and
to-morrow is only the furious motion of the outermost
circle, the centre moves upon its way, quietly as the
stars.

We have in our survey to leap over several periods
of forward and backward movement and we shall
earn the thanks of none of them. What is too con¬
servative for one will be too revolutionary for another,
and the aesthete will scornfully tell us that we have no
fibre. When we show that what awaits us is no fools’
paradise, but the danger of a temporary reverse of
humanity and culture, then the facile Utopianist will
shout us down with his two parrot-phrases , 1 and
when we, out of a sense of duty, of harmony with the
course of the world and confidence in justice at the
soul of things, tread the path of danger, precipitous
though it be, then we shall be scorned by all the
worshippers of Force and despisers of mankind.

1 The reference, apparently, is to the argument that any
change must be for the better, and to the reliance on surplus
value. See pp. 13, 14.

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But we for our part shall not pander either to the
force-worshippers or to the masses. We serve no
powers that be. Our love goes out to the People;
but the People are not a crowd at a meeting, nor a
sum-total of interests, nor are they the newspapers
or debating-clubs. The People are the waking or
sleeping, the leaking, frozen, choked, or gushing well
of the German spirit. It is with that spirit, in the
present and in the future, as it runs its course into
the sea of humanity, that we have here to do.

Ill

The criterion which we have indicated for the
socialized society of the future is a material one.
But is the spiritual condition of an epoch to be
determined by material arrangements ? Is this not a
confession of faith in materialism ?

We are speaking of a criterion, not of a prime
moving force. I have no desire, however, to avoid
going into the material, or rather we should say
mechanical, interpretation of history. I have done
it more than once in my larger works, and for the sake
of coherence I may repeat it in outline here.

The laws which determine individual destinies are
reproduced in the history of collective movements.
A man’s career is not prescribed by his bodily form,
his expression, or his environment; but there is in
these things a certain connexion and parallelism,
for the same laws which determine the course of his
intellectual and spiritual life reflect themselves in
bodily and practical shape. Every instant of our
experience, all circumstances in which we find our¬
selves, every limb that we grow, every accident that
happens to us, is an expression or product of our

character. We are indeed subject to human limita-

21

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THE NEW SOCIETY

tions; we arc not at liberty to live under water or in
another planet; but within these wide boundaries
each of us can shape his own life. To observe a man,
his work, his fate, his body and expression, his
connexions and his marriage, his belongings and his
associations, is to know the man.

From this point of view all social, economic and
political schemes become futile, for if man is so
sovereign a being there is no need to look after him.
But these schemes re-acquire a relative importance
when we consider the average level of man’s will¬
power, as we meet it in human experience—a power
which, as a rule, shows itself unable to make head
against a certain maximum of pressure from external
circumstances. And again, these schemes are really
a part of the expression of human will, for through
them collective humanity battles with its surround¬
ings, its contemporary world, and freely shapes its
own destinies.

The inner laws of the community harmonize with
those of the individuals who compose it. The fact ,
that certain national traits of will and character are
conditioned or even enforced by poverty or wealth,
soil and climate, an inland or maritime position, tends
to obscure the fact that these external conditions are
not really laid on the people but have been willed by
themselves. A people wills to have a nomadic life,
or wills to have a sea-coast, or wills agriculture, or
war; and has the power, if its will be strong enough,
to obtain its desire, or failing that to break up and

THE NEW SOCIETY

23

perish. It is the same will and character which
decides for well-being and culture, or indolence and
dependence, or labour and spiritual development.
The Venetians did not have architecture and painting
bestowed upon them because they happened to have
become rich, nor the English sea-power because they
happened to live on an island: no, the Venetians
willed freedom, power and art, and the Anglo-Saxons
willed the sea.

There is a grain of truth in the popular political
belief that war embodies a judgment of God. At
any rate character is judged by it; not indeed in the
sense of popular politics, that one can “ hold out ” in
a hopeless position, but because all the history that
went before the war, the capacity or incapacity of
politics and leadership is a question of character—
and with us it was a question of indolence, of political
apathy, of class-rule, philistinish conceit and greed
of gain. Nowhere was this conception of the judg¬
ment of God so blasphemously exaggerated as with us
Germans, when the lord of our armed hosts, at the
demand of the barracks greedy for power, of the
tavern-benches, the state-bureaus and the debating
societies was summoned, and charged with the duty,
forsooth, of chastising England—England, which they
only knew out of newspaper reports ! To-day this ex¬
aggeration is being paid for in humiliation, for God
did not prove controllable, and His naive blasphemers
must silently and with grinding teeth admit that their
foes are in the right when they, in their turn, appeal

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THE NEW SOCIETY

to the same judgment to justify, without limit,
everything they desire to do.

After these brief observations on the psycho¬
physical complex, Spirit and Destiny, we hope we
shall not be misunderstood when for the sake of
brevity we speak as if the spirit of the new order
were determined by its material construction, while
in reality it incorporates itself therein. The structure
is the easier to survey, and we therefore make it the
starting-point of our discussion.

IV

All civilisations known to us have sprung from
peoples which were numerous, wealthy and divided
into two social strata. They reached their climax
at the moment when the two strata began to melt
into one.

It is not enough, therefore, that a people should
be numerous and wealthy; it must, with all its wealth
and its power, contain a large proportion of poor and
even oppressed and enslaved subjects. If it has not
got these, it must master and make use of other
foreign cultures as a substitute. That is what Rome
did; it is what America is doing.

It is terrible, but comprehensible. For up to this
point the unconscious processes of Nature, the law
of mutual strife, has prevailed. So far, collective
organizations have been beasts of prey; only now
are they about to cross the boundaries of the human
order.

Comprehensible and explicable. For all creations
of culture hold together; one cannot pursue the
cheaper varieties while renouncing the more costly.
There is no cheap culture. In their totality they
demand outlay, the most tremendous outlay known

25

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THE NEW SOCIETY

to history, the only outlay by which human toil is
recompensed, over and above the supply of absolute
necessaries.

The creations of civilisation, like all things living and
dead, follow on each other—plants, men, beasts and
utensils have their sequence generation after genera¬
tion. Men must paint and look at pictures for ten
thousand years before a new picture comes into
existence. Our poetry and our research are the fruit
of thousands of years. This is no disparagement to
genius in work and thought, genius is at once new,
ancient and eternal, even as the blossom is a new
thing on the old stem, and belongs to an eternal
type. When we hear that a native in Central Africa
or New Zealand has produced an oil-painting we know
that somehow or other he must have got to Paris.
When a European artist writes or paints in Tahiti,
what he produces is not a work of Tahitian culture.
When civilisation has withered away on some sterilized
soil, it can only be revived by new soil and foreign seed.

The continuity of culture, even in civilized times,
can only, however, be maintained by constant outlay,
just as in arid districts a luxuriant vegetation needs
continuous irrigation. The flood of Oriental wealth
had to pour itself into Italy in order to bring forth the
bloom of Renaissance art. Thousands of patricians,
hundreds of temporal and spiritual princes, had to
found and to adorn temples and palaces, gardens,
monuments, pageants, games and household goods in
order that art and science, schooling, mastership,

THE NEW SOCIETY

27

discipleship and tradition might grow up. The
worship of foreign culture which characterized Ger¬
many in the seventeenth and half of the eighteenth
centuries only meant that our soil was grown too poor
to yield a crop of its own. The culture of the Middle
Ages remained international only so long as the
population of Europe was too sparse and the oppor¬
tunities of work too scanty to occupy local energies;
even in the thinly populated, Homeric middle-ages of
Greece, the builder and the poet were not settled in
one place, they were wandering artists. If to-day
the Republic of Guatemala or Honduras should want
a senate-house or a railway-station they will probably
send to London or Paris for an architect.

Even technique in handicraft and industry, that
typical art of civilization, cannot dispense with a
great and continuous outlay on training, commission¬
ing and marketing in order to maintain itself.
Although it has not happened yet, there is no reason
why a Serb or a Slovak should not make some im¬
portant discovery if he has been trained at a European
University and learnt the technical tradition. That
will not, however, give rise to an independent and
enduring Serbian or Slovakian technique, even though
the costliest Universities and laboratories should be
established in the country and foreign teachers called
to teach in them. After all that, one must have a
market in the country itself; expert purchasers,
manufacturers, middle-men, a trained army of
engineers, craftsmen, masters, workmen and a foreign

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THE NEW SOCIETY

market as well—in short, the technical atmosphere—
in order to keep up the standard of manufacture and
production.

A poor country cannot turn out products of high
value for a rich one; it has not had the education
arising from demand. In products relating to sport
and to comfort, for instance, England was a model,
but in France these products were ridiculously mis¬
understood and imitated with silly adornments,
while on the other hand French products of luxury
and art-industry were sought for by all countries.
German wares were considered to be cheap and nasty,
until the land grew rich, and brought about the
co-operation of its forces of science and technique,
production and marketing, auxiliary industries and
remote profits, finance and commerce, education and
training, judgment and criticism, habits of life and
a sense of comparative values.

But human forces need the same nurture, the same
outlay and the same high training, as institutions and
material products. Delicate work demands sensitive
hands and a sheltered way of life; discovery and
invention demand leisure and freedom; taste demands
training and tradition, scientific thinking and artistic
conception demand an environment with an unbroken
continuity of cultivation, thought and intelligence.
A dying civilisation can live for a while on the
existing humus of culture, on the existing atmosphere
of thought, but to create anew these elements of life
is beyond its powers.

THE NEW SOCIETY

29

Do not let us deceive ourselves, but look the facts
in the face ! All these excellent Canadians, with or
without an academic degree, who innocently pride
themselves on a proletarian absence of prejudice,
are adoptive children of a plutocratic and aristocratic
cultivation. It is all the same even if they lay aside
their stiff collars and eye-glasses; their every word
and argument, their forms of thought, their range of
knowledge, their strongly emphasized intellectuality
and taste for art and science, their whole handiwork
and industry, are an inheritance from what they
supposed they had cast off and a tribute to what
they pretend to despise. Genuine radicalism is only
to be respected when it understands the connexion
of things and is not afraid of consequences. It must
understand—and I shall make it clear—that its rapid
advance will kill culture; and the proper conclusion
is that it ought to despise culture, not to sponge on
it. The early Christians abolished all the heathen
rubbish and abominations, the early Radicals would
have hurried, in the first instance, to pick out the
plums.

Culture and civilization, as we see, demand a con¬
tinuous and enormous outlay; an outlay in leisure,
an outlay in working power, an outlay in wealth.
They need patronage and a market, they need the
school, they need models, tradition, comparison,
judgment, intelligence, cultivation, disposition, the
right kind of nursery—an atmosphere. One who
stands outside it can serve it, often more powerfully

30

THE NEW SOCIETY

with his virgin strength than one who is accustomed
to it—but he must be carried along and animated
by the breath of the same atmosphere. Culture and
civilization require a rich soil.

But the richness of the soil is not sufficient; culture
must be based upon, and increased by, contrast.
Wealth must have at its disposal great numbers of
men who are poor and dependent. How otherwise
shall the outlay of culture be met? One man must
have many at his disposal; but how can he, if they
are all his equals? The outlay will be large, but
it must be feasible; how can it, if the labour of
thousands is not cheap? The few, the exalted, must
develop power and splendour, they must offer types
for imitation: how can they do that without a
retinue, without spectators, without the herd? A
land of well-being, that is to say, of equally dis¬
tributed well-being, remains petty and provincial.
When a State and its authorities, councils of solid
and thrifty members of societies for this or that,
take over the office of a Maecenas or a Medici, with
their proposals, their calculations, their objections,
their control, then we get things that look like war-
memorials, waiting-rooms, newspaper-kiosks and
drinking-saloons. It was not always so? No; but
even in the most penurious times it was kings who
were the patrons.

But if culture is such a poison-flower, if it flourishes
only in the swamp of poverty and under the sun of
riches, it must and ought to be destroyed. Our

THE NEW SOCIETY

31

sentiment will no longer endure the happiness and
brilliance of the few growing out of the misery of the
many; the days of the senses are over, and the day
of conscience is beginning to dawn.

And now a timid and troubled puritanism makes
itself heard : Is there no middle way ? Will not
half-measures suffice? No, it will not do; let this
be said once for all as plainly as possible, you cham¬
pions of the supply of “ bare necessities ” who talk
about “ daily bread ” and want to butter it with the
“ noblest pleasures of art.” It will not do !

No, half-measures will not do, nor quarter-measures.
They might, if the whole world, the sick, the healthy
and the bloated all together were of the same mind
as ourselves. In Moscow it is said that people are
expecting the world-revolution every hour, but the
world declines to oblige. Therefore, if culture and
civilization are to remain what they were, is there
nothing for it but with one wrench to tear the poisoned
garment from our body ? Or—is there then an “ or ” ?
Let us see. We have a long way before us. First
of all we must know how rich or how poor we and !
the world are going to be, on the day when there
will be no income without working for it and no
rich people any more.

If our economic system made us self-supporting
we might arrange matters on the model of the Boer
Republic which had all it needed, and now and then
traded a load of ostrich feathers for coffee and hymn
books. But we, alas 1 in order to find nourishment

32

THE NEW SOCIETY

for twenty millions 1 have to export blood and
brains. And if, in order to buy phosphates, we offer
cotton stockings and night-caps as the highest
products of our artistic energies, and declare that
they are all the soundest handwork—for in our
“ daily bread ” economy we shall have long forgotten
how to work such devil’s tools as the modern knitting-
machine—then people will reply to us : in the first
place we don’t want night-caps, and if we did we
can supply them for one-tenth of the cost; and our
cotton goods will be sent back to us as unsaleable.

A world-trade, even of modest dimensions, can
only be carried on upon the basis of high technical
accomplishment, but this height of accomplishment
cannot be attained on the basis of any penny-wise
economy. Whoever wills the part must also will
the whole, but to this whole belongs not merely the
conception of a technique, but of a civilization, and
indeed of a culture. One might as well demand of
a music-hall orchestra which plays ragtime all the
year round that once in the year, and once only,
on Good Friday, it should pull itself together to
give an adequate performance of the Passion Music
of Bach.

1 By this figure the author seems to be referring to the
population of the impoverished Germany of the future if the
course of Socialism proceeds on wrong lines.

V

For some decades Germany will be one of the
poorest of countries. How poor she will be does not
depend on herself alone, but on the power and the
will for mischief of others—who hate us.

However, poverty and wealth are relative terms;
Germans are still richer on the average than their
forefathers; richer than the Romans or Greeks. The
standard of well-being is set by the best-off of the
competitors, for he it is who determines the current
standard of technique and industry, the methods of
production, the minimum of labour and skill. We
cannot, as we have already seen, keep aloof from
world-competition, for Germany needs cheap goods.
We must therefore try to keep step so far as we can.

Even if we shut our eyes and take no more account
of our debt to foreign lands than we do of the war-
tribute, we must admit that the average standard of
well-being in America far surpasses the German.
Goods are not so dear as with us, and the wages of
the skilled worker amounts to between seven and
ten dollars a day—more than 100 marks in our money;
and many artisans drive to their workshops in their
own automobiles.

If, now, we ask our Radicals how they envisage
c 33

34

THE NEW SOCIETY

the problem of competition with such a country,
which in one generation will be twenty- or thirty-fold,
as rich as we are, they will blurt out a few sentences
in which we shall catch the word “ Soviet system,”
“ surplus value,” 1 “ world revolution.” But in
truth the question will never occur to them—it is
not ventilated at public meetings.

Among themselves they talk, albeit without much
conviction, about “ surplus value ”—which has
nothing whatever to do with the present question,
and in regard to which it has been proved to them
often enough that so far as it can be made use of
at all, it only means about a pound of butter extra
per head of the population.

The economic superiority of the Western powers,
however, goes on growing, inasmuch as to all appear¬
ance they are getting to work seriously to establish
the new economy (which we have buried) in the
form of State Socialism. A healthy, or what is to-day
the same thing, a victorious economy, does not leap
over any of its stages; it will work gradually through
the apparently longer, but constant, movement from
Capitalism to Sttate Socialism and thence to full
Socialism; while we, it seems, want to take a short¬
cut, and to miss out the intervening stage. And we
lose so much time and energy in restless fluctuations
forward and backward, hither and thither, that this
leap in advance may fall short.

1 By surplus-value ( Mehrwert) the author means all that is
produced above and beyond the bare necessities of life.

THE NEW SOCIETY

35

If anything could be more stupid and calamitous
than the war itself it was the time when it broke
out. There was one thing which the big capitalism
of the world was formed to supply, which it was
able to supply, and, in fact, was supplying: the
thing which not only justified capitalism, but showed
it to be an absolutely necessary stage in the develop¬
ment of a denser population. This was the enrich¬
ment of the peoples, the rapid, and even anticipatory
restoration of equilibrium between the growing
population and the indispensable increase in the
means of production; in other words, general well¬
being. The unbroken progress of America, and the
almost unbroken progress of England will demon¬
strate that in one, or at most two, generations the
power of work and the output of mechanism would
have risen to such a pitch that we could have done
anything we liked in the direction of lightening human
labour and reconciling social antagonisms.

Alas, it was in vain! The rapid advance to
prosperity of the people of Central Europe, who had
been accustomed to thrift and economy, went to their
heads ; they fell victims to the poison of capitalism
and of mechanism; they were unable, like America
in its youthful strength, to make their new circum¬
stances deepen their sense of responsibility; in their
greedy desire to store as much as possible of the
heavenly manna in their private barns they aban¬
doned their destinies to a superannuated, outworn
feudal class and to aspiring magnates of the bour-

86

THE NEW SOCIETY

geoisie; they would not be taught by political cata¬
strophes, and at last, in the catastrophe of the war,
they lost at once their imaginary hopes, their tradi¬
tional power and the economic basis of their existence.

Those who are now pursuing a policy of desperation
arc unconsciously building their hopes on the break¬
down which brought them to the top : they are
avowedly making the hoped-for revolution in the
West the central point of their system. If the West
holds out, they will be false prophets; but it will
not only hold out, it will in the beginning at all
events, witness a great and passionate uprising of
imperialistic and capitalistic tendencies. If there is
any one who did not understand that a policy based
on hopes of other peoples’ bankruptcy is the most
flimsy and frivolous of all policies, he might well
have learned it from the war.

Germany must forge her own destinies for herself,
without side-glances at the good or ill fortune of
others. Had time only been given us to pass naturally
from the stage of a prolonged and corrupted childhood
into that of a manly responsibility, our ultimate
recovery would be assured. But we have to accom¬
plish in months what ought to be the evolution of
decades ; our national training has left us without
convictions, we have no eye for the true boundaries
of rights, claims and responsibilities, and we hesitate
as to how far we must or ought to go. Unprepared,
weakened, impoverished and sick, we are required,
at the most unlucky moment, to work out a new

THE NEW SOCIETY

37

and unprecedented order of life. Before even the
educated classes are capable of forming a judgment
on the question, the most incapable masses of the
rawest youth, of the lowest classes of society, are let
loose, and sit upon the judgment-seat.

It is not only that we have been rich and have
become very poor, but we were always politically
immature, and are so still. If the order of Society is
to be that of root-and-branch Socialism, it will mean
the proletarian condition for all of us, and for a long
time to come. There is no use in flattering ourselves
and painting the future better than it is; the truth
must be spoken with all plainness. If we work hard,
and under capable guidance, each of us will at most
have an effective income of 500 marks in pre-war
values, or, say, 2000 marks for the family. This
average will be higher if we proceed on the principles
of the New Economy, 1 but again will be reduced by
the necessity for allowing extra pay for work of
higher value. If to-day the average income avail¬
able is markedly higher than the above, the reason
is that we are living on our capital; we are living
on the products of work which ought to be reserved
for the maintenance and renewal of the means of
production; in other words we are exhausting the

1 Die Neue Wirtschaft, by Walther Rathenau (S Fischer).
In this brief study, Rathenau urges (1) the unification and
standardization of the whole of German industry and commerce
in one great Trust, working under a State charter, and armed
with very extensive powers; and (2) a great intensification of
the application of science and mechanism to production.

38

THE NEW SOCIETY

soil and slaughtering our stock. We are also consum¬
ing what foreign countries give us on credit; in other
words, we are living on borrowed money.

It is childish lying and deception to act on the
tacit assumption that thoroughgoing Socialism means
something like a garden-city idyll, with play-houses,
open-air theatres, excursions, picturesque raiment
and fire-side art. This in itself quite decent ideal
of the average architect, art-craftsman and art-
reformer if expressed in dry figures would, “ at the
lowest estimate ” as they say, demand about fivefold
the capacity for production attainable by the utmost
exertions and with a ten hours’ day before the war —
before the downfall of our economy and our exploita¬
tion by the enemy.

To place one-third of our working-class in decent,
freehold dwellings would alone, if the material and
means of production sufficed, require the whole
working-capacity of the country for two years. Even
after the last manufacturer’s villa-residence, the last
palace-hotel, have long been turned into tenements,
the solution of the most urgent part of the housing-
question will still be an affair of decades. For the
sake of the last remnant of our self-respect we must
finally tear asunder that web of economic falsehood,
woven out of ignorance, mental lethargy, conceal¬
ment and illusion, which has taken the place of the
political. Let us see any one attempt to prove that
Germany can carry on, I do not say a well-off, but
even a petty tradesman’s kind of existence, unless our

THE NEW SOCIETY

39

means of production can by some stroke of magic be
multiplied tenfold—on paper it can be done with ease
—or unless the production value (not turn-over), which
an adult working-man can with the utmost exertion
bring into being in the course of a year does not many
times exceed the average value of 2000 marks.

No doubt the young folk of our big cities promise
themselves a merry time for six weeks when they
have got power, the shops, the wardrobes and the
wine-cellars into their hands. For the leaders, it
may last a little longer than for the rank-and-file.
And then, for those of the former who have any
sense of honesty, will come a question of conscience,
which may be delayed by printing paper-money,
but cannot be solved by any appeal to the people.

If Bolshevism were the contrary to what it is—
if it were a success, a thing not absolutely impossible
in a peasant-State, we might understand the self-
assurance of those who, in opposition to our forecast,
expect everything from the will of the people, the
Soviet system and the inspirations of the future. We
do understand it in the case of the drawing-room
communists, and the profiteer-extremists who are
out not for the cause, but for power, and perhaps only
for material objects.

I know that by these observations I am favouring
the cause of those sorry dignitaries of a day, the
Majority Socialists, but I cannot help that. The
truth is not false because it favours one party, nor is
falsehood truth because it harms the other. The

40

THE NEW SOCIETY

Socialism now in power is doing the right thing,
although it is doing it out of ignorance and helpless¬
ness—it is waiting, and getting steam up. It is
better to do the right thing out of error than to
do the wrong thing out of wisdom. Out of error:
for besides omitting to do what ought not to be
done it also omits the things it ought to do—among
others, the introduction of the New Economy. 1 It
is like mankind before the Fall; it does not know
good from evil, what is useful and what is noxious,
what can be done and what cannot. Well—let it
take its time; it shall have time enough.

This time must be turned to good account. When
we have come to the end of these observations we
shall understand what a huge task lies between us
and the realization of the new social order. In this
case the longest way round is the shortest way home.
And even if Germany should choose the mountain
road with its broad loops and windings, we shall
stray often enough, and go backward now and
then; while if, in impatient revolt, we try to climb
straight up, we shall slip down lower than where
we started. Let us never forget how mysteriously
our social and political immaturity seems to be
bound up with our once lofty and even now remark¬
able intellectuality and morality. 2 We have not

1 See p. 37, note.

a Morality, SittlichTceit, a word of broader meaning than
“ morality,” for it comprehends not only matters of ethical
right and wrong, but the general temper and habit of mind
of a people as expressed in social life.

THE NEW SOCIETY

41

won our liberties, they have fallen into our laps;
it was by the general break-down, by a strike, by a
flight, that Germany and her former rulers have
parted company. These liberties, social and political,
are not rooted in the soil, they can hardly be said to
be prized among the treasures of life, it is not their
ideal, but their material side which attracts us. Those
who used to shout Hurrah ! now cry “ All power
to the Soviets ! ” and the day will come when they
will again shout Hurrah I Then we shall witness a
real sundering of our different visions of the world,
visions now buried under a mass of interests and
speculations.

In any case, whether the change is to be cata¬
strophic or evolutionary, the journey will be a long
one, and every attempt to hurry it will only prolong
it further; it will throw us back for years, or it may
be decades. Above all things, we must know whither
we are going. In order to adapt ourselves to a new
form of society we must know what it may look like,
what it ought to look like, and what it will look like.
We shall find that Germany is not going to be landed
in an earthly Paradise, but in a world of toil, and
one which for a long period will be a world of poverty,
of a penurious civilization and of a deeply-endangered
culture. The unproved, parrot-phrases of a cheap
Utopianism will grow dumb—those phrases which
offer us entrance into the usual Garden of Eden with
its square-cut, machine-made culture and gaudy,
standardized enjoyments—phrases which assure us

42

THE NEW SOCIETY

that when we have introduced the six-hours’ working
day and abolished private property, the cinema horrors
will be replaced by classical concerts, the gin-shops by
popular reading-rooms, the gaming-hells by edifying
lectures, highway robberies by gymnastic exercises,
detective novels by Gottfried Keller, bazaar-trifles and
comic vulgarities by works of refined handicraft; and
that out of boxing contests, racecourse betting, bomb
exercises, and profiteering in butter, we shall see the
rise of an era of humility and philanthropy.

In the Promised Land as we conceive it, the classes
which are now the bearers of German culture will lose
almost everything, while the gain of the proletariat
will be scarcely visible. And yet for the sake of this
scarcely visible gain we must tread the stony path
that lies before us. Willingly and joyfully shall we
tread it; for out of this, at first, dubious conquest of
equal rights for all men will grow the might of justice,
of human dignity, of human solidarity and unity.

That is truly work for a century, and yet for that
very reason the hard path will lead to its reward.
We must learn to know it, and to understand that it
is a path of sacrifice. We must not accept the invita¬
tion of fools to a Christmas party—fools who will make
the welkin ring with their outcries when they find out
their self-deception. Let us tread our path of suffer¬
ing with a pride which disdains to be consoled by
illusions.

VI

In order to throw some light into the obscurity of
that social dreamland which no one seriously dis¬
cusses because no one honestly believes in it, let us,
as it w'ere, cut out and examine a section from the
fully socialized Germany of the future. Let us sup¬
pose that certain economic and social conditions have
lasted for a generation or so, and have therefore
become more or less stabilized. At a normal rate of
progress this state of things should be reached about
the end of this century.

To begin with, let us make two very optimistic
assumptions—first, that technical progress in Germany
shall have developed to a point at which we are no
longer impossibly outclassed and distanced by foreign
nations, and, secondly, that by a timely and far-
reaching reform of education and culture (the lowest
cost of which must be set down at about three
milliards of marks) the complete breakdown of civilisa¬
tion may be averted. This reform is one which
must be taken in hand very early, for after the event
its adoption is improbable. A third, less optimistic
but on that account more probable assumption may
be added to this—namely, that the Western countries

shall have progressed towards Socialism more steadily

43

44

THE NEW SOCIETY

and therefore more slowly, and that at the period of
our comparison America shall find itself at the stage
of State-Socialism, not of full socialization. We know
that in making this assumption we are smoothing the
way for attack to our professional opponents, un¬
critical and self-interested, who with one blast of the
fanfare of world-revolution can scatter our further
observations to the winds.

Full Socialism is characterized, as we have seen, by
the abolition of all incomes that are not worked for,
and the fact that there are no more rich. But this
criterion must be limited in its application, for it can
never be fully realized.

According to the theory and the laws every one
must hold some appointment and be paid for his work,
or for not working. What he is paid, however, he can
at will utilize, or waste, or hoard up, or give, or gamble
away, or destroy. He cannot invest it, or get interest
on it or turn into capital, because these private under¬
takings or means of production will no longer exist.

Now each of these assumptions is so shaky that
not only must trifling divergences and shortcomings
be winked at, but the meshes of the system are so
wide that only a rough approximation to the ideal is
possible.

It is true that every one can be made to hold some
appointment and be paid for some minimum of work,
but no one can be prevented from devoting his leisure
hours to some work of rare quality and turning it into
value for his own purposes. He can make himself

THE NEW SOCIETY

45

useful by subsidiary employment of an artistic,
scientific or technical character, by rendering services
or assistance of various kinds, by advising, or enter¬
taining, or acting as a guide to strangers, or going on
employment abroad, and no law can prevent him from
turning his services into income even if he was merely
paid in kind. Gaming and betting will flourish and
many will grow rich by them. A man who has lost
his money and who has exhausted his rights to an
advance from the public institutions for that object
will have recourse to lenders who will supply him with
bread and meat and clothes, and who will make money
by it. Similarly with people who are tempted to
make acquisitions beyond their standard remunera¬
tion. On every side we shall see private stores of
goods of all kinds, which will take the place of pro¬
perty as formerly understood.

There will be an enormous temptation to smuggling
and profiteering which will reach a height far surpass¬
ing all scandals of the war and revolution periods.
Foreigners and their agents, who look after the export
trade “ from Government to Government,” will help
hoarders and savers to turn their goods to account.
Suppose citizens are attacked because their senseless
expenditure is a mockery of their legal remuneration,
they will say : I got this from friends—that I got by
exchange—this came from abroad—my relatives in
America sent me that. Law, control, terrorism, are
effective just so long as there is not a blade of grass
in the land—once remove the fear of hunger and they

46

THE NEW SOCIETY

are useless. Great properties will arise, drawing
interest both abroad and at home, and they will grow
by evasions and bribery. The profiteer, the true child
of the “ great days,” will not perish from the land,
on the contrary, he will grow tougher the more he is
persecuted, he will be the rich man of the future, and
he will form a constant political danger if he and his
fellows combine.

So long as we have not acquired an entirely new
mentality, one which detaches men from possessions,
which points them towards the Law, which binds the
passions, and sharpens the conscience, so long will the
principle of “ No rich people and no workless income ”
have to be contracted into the formula, “ There ought
to be none.”

Without this profound alteration of mentality, even
the legally prescribed incomes will exhibit quite
grotesque variations, and will adapt themselves to the
rarity-value of special gifts, to indispensable qualities,
to favouritism, with a crudity quite unknown to-day.
A scarcity of Ministers, a Professor’s nourishment,
and soldiers’ supplies, will then as now be met accord¬
ing to the law of supply and demand. Consider what
ten years’ practice in the war for wages and strike-
management, with the public in it as partisans, will
bring with it in the way of favouritisms, celebrities,
and indispensabilities. Popular jockeys, successful
surgeons, managers of sports’ clubs, tenors, demi-
mondaines, farce-writers and champion athletes could,
even to-day, if they were class-conscious and joined

THE NEW SOCIETY

47

together to exploit their opportunities, demand any in¬
come they liked. Even as a matter of practical political
economy, the cinema-star (or whatever may succeed
her) will be able to prescribe to the Government what
amount of adornments, drawn from Nature or Art,
are necessary for her calling, and what standard of life
she must maintain in order to keep herself in the proper
mood.

Organizers, popular leaders, authors and artists will
announce and enforce their demands to the full limit
of their rarity-value. At a considerable distance below
these come the acquired and more or less transferable
powers and talents. The Russians for the first few
months believed in a three-fold order of allowances,
rising within a limit of about one to two. If the ideas
now prevailing have not undergone a radical change,
then we may, in the society of the future, look for
divergences of income in the limit of one to a
thousand.

Therefore the principle that there shall be no more
rich people must again be substantially limited. We
must say, “ There will be people receiving extra¬
ordinary incomes in kind to which must be added
the claims to personal service which these favoured
persons will lay down as conditions of their work.”

In its external, arithmetical structure, the fabric
’ of life and its requirements in the new order will
resemble that of to-day far more closely than most
of us imagine—on the other hand, the inward
and personal constitution of man will be far more

48

THE NEW SOCIETY

different. Already we can observe the direction of
the movement.

Extravagance and luxury will continue to exist, and
those who practise it will be, as they are to-day, and
more than to-day, the profiteers, the lucky ones, and
the adventurers. Excessive wealth will be more
repulsive than it is now; whether it will be less
valued depends upon the state of public ethics, a topic
which we shall have to consider later. It is probable
that in defiance of all legislation wealth will turn itself
into expenditure and enjoyment more rapidly and
more recklessly than to-day.

But the relics of middle-class well-being will by
that time have been consumed; the families which for
generations have visibly incorporated the German
spirit will less than others contrive to secure special
advantages by profiteering and evading the laws; as
soon as their modest possessions are taxed away or
consumed they will melt into the general mass of
needy people who will form the economic average of
the future.

The luxury which will exhibit itself in streets and
houses will have a dubious air; every one will know
that there is something wrong with it, people will spy
and denounce, and find to their disgust that nothing
can be proved; the well-off will be partly despised,
partly envied; the question how to suppress evasions
of the law will take up a good half of all public dis¬
cussions, just as that of capitalism does now. The
hateful sight of others’ prosperity cannot, even at

THE NEW SOCIETY

49

home, not to mention foreign countries, be withdrawn
from the eyes of the needy masses; capitalism will
have merely acquired another name and other repre¬
sentatives.

The fact that the average of more or less cultivated
and responsible folk are plunged in poverty will not
be accepted as the consequence of an unalterable
natural law, nor as a case of personal misfortune; it
will be set down to bad government, and the rising
revolutionary forces of the fifth, sixth and seventh
classes will nourish the prevailing discontent in favour
of a new revolt. For the greater uniformity of the
average way of life and its general neediness will not
in itself abolish the division of classes. I have already
often enough pointed out that no mechanical arrange¬
ments can avail us here.

At first there will be three, or more probably four
classes who, in spite of poverty, will not dissolve in the
masses, and who, through their coherence and their
intellectual heritage are by no means without power.
The Bolshevist plan of simply killing them out will
not be possible in Germany, they are relatively too
numerous; persecution will weld them closer together,
and their traditional experiences, habits of mind, and
capacity, will make it necessary to have recourse to
them and employ them again and again.

The first of these classes is that of the feudal
nobility. Their ancient names cannot be rooted out
of the history of Germany, and even in their poverty
the bearers of these names will be respected—all the,.

D

50

THE NEW SOCIETY

more if, as we may certainly assume, they maintain
the effects of their bodily discipline, and the visible
tradition of certain forms of life and thought. They
will be strengthened by their mutual association, their
relationship with foreign nobility will give them
important functions in diplomacy; these are two
elements which they have in common with Catholicism
and Judaism. They will retain their inclination and
aptitude for the calling of arms and for administra¬
tion; their reactionary sentiments will lead now to
success, now to failure, and by both the inner co¬
herence of the class will be fortified. Finally, the
inevitable reversion to an appreciation of the romantic
values of life will make a connexion with names of
ancient lineage desirable to the leading classes, and
especially to the aristocracy of officialism.

This aristocracy of officialism forms the second of
the new strata which will come to light. The first
office-bearers of the new era, be their achievements
great or small, are not to be forgotten. Their descen¬
dants are respected as the bearers of well-known
names; in their families the practice of politics, the
knowledge of persons and connexions are perpetuated;
fathers, in their lifetime, look after the interests of
sons and daughters and launch them on the same
path. From these, and from the first stratum, the
representatives of Germany in foreign lands are
chosen, and in this way a certain familiarity with
international life and society will be maintained.
They will have the provision necessary for their

THE NEW SOCIETY

51

position abroad, and will also find ways and means to
keep up a higher standard of life at home. Persons
in possession of irregular means of well-being will offer
a great deal to establish connexions with these circles,
which control so many levers in the machine of
State.

The third group consists of the descendants of what
was once the leading class in culture and in economics.
Here we find a spirit similar to that of the refugees,
tmigrts and Huguenots of the past. The lower they
sink in external power, the more tenaciously they hold
to their memories. Every family knows every other
and cherishes the lustre of its name, a lustre augmented
by legendary recollections, all the more when the
achievements of their class are ostentatiously ignored
in the new social order. People spare and save to
the last extremity in order to preserve and hand down
some heirloom—a musical instrument, a library, a
manuscript, a picture or two. A puritanical thrift is
exercised in order, as far as possible, to maintain
education, culture and intellectuality on the old level;
to this class culture, refinement of life as an end in
itself, the practice of religion, classical music, and
artistic feeling will fly for refuge. No other class
understands this one; it holds itself aloof, it looks
different from the rest in its occupations, its habits,
its garb and its forms of life. It supplies the new
order with its scholars, its clergy, its higher teaching
powder, its representatives of the most disinterested
and intellectual callings. Like the monasteries of the

THE NEW SOCIETY

Middle Ages, it forms an island of the past. Its
influence rises and falls periodically, according to the
current ideas of the time, but its position is assured
by its voluntary sacrifices, by its knowledge and by
the purity of its motives.

A fourth inexpugnable and influential stratum will
in all probability be formed by the middle-class land-
owners and the substantial peasants. Even though
the socialization of the land should be radically carried
through—which is not likely to be the case—it will
remain on paper. A class of what may be called State-
tenants, estate-managers, or leaders of co-operative
organizations will very much resemble a landowning
class. Its traditional experience and the ties that
bind it to the soil make it a closed and well-
defined body, self-conscious and masterful through the
importance of its calling, its indispensability and its
individualism. It suffers no dictation as regards its
manner of life. Here we shall see the conservative
traditions of the country strongly mustered for defence,
incapable of being eliminated as a political force, and
forming a counterpoise to the radical democracy of
the towns.

Everywhere we find a state of strain and of cleavage.
The single-stratum condition of society cannot be
reached without a profound inward change; politics
are still stirred and shaken by conflicts, and society
by the strife of classes. A very different picture from
the promised Utopian Paradise of a common feeding-
ground for lions and sheep !

THE NEW SOCIETY

53

We are all aggrieved by the illegal opulence of the
profiteers, but we are all liable to the infection. The
feudalistic Fronde awaits its opportunity. The aris¬
tocracy of office endeavours to monopolize the State-
machine. The tmigrSs of culture find themselves
looked askance at, on suspicion of intellectual arro¬
gance, and they insist that the country cannot get on
without them. The agriculturalists are feared, when
they show a tendency to revolt against the towns.
The ruling class, that is to say the more or less educated
masses of the city-democracy, looks in impatient dis¬
content for the state of general well-being which
refuses to be realized, lays the blame alternately on
the four powerful strata and on the profiteers, and
fights now this group now that, for better conditions
of living.

But the conditions of living do not improve—they
get worse. The level of the nation’s output has been
sinking from the first day of the Revolution onwards.
The absolute productivity of work, the relative efficacy
and the quality of the product, have all deteriorated.
With a smaller turnover we have witnessed a falling-
off in the excellence of the goods, in research-work,
and in finish. Industrial plant has been worked to
death and has not yet recovered. Auxiliary indus¬
tries, accessories and raw materials have fallen back.
High-quality workmanship has suffered from defective
schooling, youthful indiscipline and the loss of manual
dexterity. The new social order has lost a generation
of leaders in technique, scholarship and economics.

51

THE NEW SOCIETY

Universities, with all institutions of research and
education, have suffered from this blank. Technical
leadership is gone, and the deterioration in quality
has reacted detrimentally on output. We can now
turn out nothing except what is cheap and easy, and
what can be produced without traditional skill of
hand, without serious calculation and research. For
all innovations, all work of superior quality, Germany
is dependent on the foreigner. The atmosphere of
technique lias vanished, and the stamp of cheap
hireling labour is on the whole output of the
country.

In the weeks of the Revolution street orators used
to tell us that five hundred Russian professors had
signed a statement that the level of culture had never
been so high as under Bolshevism. And Berlin
believed them ! To educate Russia it would take,
to begin with, a million elementary schools with a
yearly budget of several dozen milliards of roubles,
and a corresponding number of higher schools and
universities : if every educated Russian for the next
twenty years were to become a teacher, there would
not be enough of them—not to speak of the require¬
ments of transport, of raw materials and of agricul¬
ture. The fabric of a civilization and a culture cannot
be annihilated at one blow, nor can it grow up save
in decades and centuries. The maintenance of the
structure demands unceasing toil and unbroken tradi¬
tion ; the breach that has been made in it in Germany
can only be healed by the application in manifold

THE NEW SOCIETY

55

forms of work, intellect and will; and this hope we
cannot entertain . 1

But we have not yet done with the question of
social strata and inward cleavage. Revolutionary
threats are causing strife every day. Revolution
against revolution—how is this possible ? We are not
speaking of a reactionary revolution but of the
“ activist.”

In an earlier work I discussed the theory of con¬
tinuous revolution . 2 Behind every successful revolu¬
tionary movement there stands another, representing
one negation more than its predecessor. Behind the
revolt of the aristocracy stood that of the bourgeoisie,
behind that of the bourgeoisie stood Socialism.
Behind the now ruling fourth class 3 rises the fifth,
and a sixth is coming into sight. If a ninth should
represent pure Anarchism, we may see an eleventh
proclaiming a dictatorship, and a twelfth standing
for absolute monarchy.

To-day the Majority Socialists are in power, that
is to say the Right section of the fourth class. This
is composed of the older, trained and work-willing
Trade Unionists, who are amazed at the Revolution,
who do not regard it as quite legitimate, but who

1 Rathenau means that it cannot be entertained except on
the hypothesis of the profound inward change, which is to be
discussed later on.

2 Kritik der dreifachen Revolution. S. Fischer.

3 The classes referred to are (1) the old aristocracy, (2) tho
aristocracy of officialism, (3) that of traditional middle-class
culture; (4) the mass of what is called Socialism.

56

THE NEW SOCIETY

arc determined to defend the status quo in so far as a
certain degree of self-determination and elbow-room
in the material conditions of life still remain to them.

The Left section consists of youths and of persons
disgusted with militarism, ignorant of affairs but
cherishing a certain independence of judgment;
still ready for work but equally so for politics. To
these, as a “ forward ” party, the doctrinaire theorists
have allied themselves. The designation of the party
44 The Independents” is characteristic; its goal,
44 All power to the Soviets,” is a catchword from
Russia.

A fifth class is now emerging—the work-shy.
The others call them the tramp-proletariat, the
disgruntled, the declassed, who set their hopes on
disorder. Their goal is still undetermined—their
favourite expression is 44 bloodhound,” when those
in power, or Government troops, are referred to.

Then comes the sixth class, still partly identified
with the Left of the fourth and embryonically attached
to the fifth. These are the indomitable loafers and
shirkers, physically and mentally unsound, aliens in
the social order, excluded by their sufferings, their
punishments, their vices and passions; self-excluded,
repudiators of law and morality, born of the cruelty
of the city, pitiable beings, not so much cast out of
society as cast up against it, as a living reproach to
its mechanical organization. If these ever come
into the light in politics, they will demand a kind of
syndicalistic communism.

THE NEW SOCIETY

57

That is as far as we can see at present into the
as yet unopened germs of continuous revolutionary
movement. In these are contained the infinite series
of all principles that can conceivably be supported;
and it would be wholly false to see in this series
merely so many successive steps in moral degenera¬
tion, even though the earlier stages should proceed
on a flat denial of ethical principles. Later on will
come revivals and restorations, political, ethical and
religious, and each time we shall see the rising stratum
attaching to itself strays and converts, above all, the
disappointed and ambitious, from those that went
before.

• But the number of revolutions will grow till we
lose count of them, and each, however strenuously it
may profess its horror of bloodshed, will have only
one hope and possibility : that of defending itself by
armed force against its successor. The game is a
grotesquely dishonest one, because every aspirant
movement will cast against its forerunner the charge
of ruling by bloodshed, while it itself is already
preparing its armed forces for the conflict.

It is therefore wholly vain to hope that an advanced
social organization implies stability, that a brother¬
hood mechanically decreed will exclude further
revolutions, and will establish eternally an empire
of righteousness and justice according to any pre¬
conceived pattern.

The fiercest hatred will prevail amongst those who
are most closely associated—for instance, between

58

THE NEW SOCIETY

handworkers and brainworkers, between leaders and
followers; and this hate will be all the more inappeas-
able when it is open to every one to rise in the world,
and none can cherish the excuse that he is the victim
of a social system of overwhelming power. To-day
this hatred is masked by the general class-hatred—
hatred of the monopolists of culture, of position and
of capital.

At the bottom of it, however, lies even to-day the
more universal hatred of the defeated for the victor,
and when those three monopolies have fallen, it will
emerge in its original Cain-like form. It cannot be
appeased by any mechanical device. Human in¬
equality can never be abolished, human accomplish¬
ment and work will always vary, and the human
passion for success will always assert itself.

We have discussed the material foundation and the
stratification of the German people when full social¬
ization has been realized. Let us now forecast the
manner of their existence.

The future community is poor; the individual is
poor. The average standard of well-being corresponds,
at best, to what in peace-time one would expect from
an income of 3000 marks. 1 But the requirements of
the population are not medievally simplified—they
could not be, in view of the density of the population
and the complexity of industrial and professional

1 £150 in pre-war values. By thrift, by co-operation, and
by the cheapness of the public services generally, a surprisingly
high standard of life could be maintained on this kind of
income in pre-war Germany.

THE NEW SOCIETY

59

vocations. They are manifold and diverse, and they
are moreover intensified by the spectacle of extrava¬
gance offered by the profiteering class and the licence
of social life. The traditional garden-city idyll of
architects and art-craftsmen is a Utopia about as
much like reality as the pastoral Arcadianism of
Marie Antoinette.

All things of common use are standardized into
typical forms. It must not be supposed, however,
that they are based on pure designs and models.
The taste of the artist will clash with that of the
crowd, and since the former has no authority to back
him he will have to compromise. The compromise,
however, consists in cheap imitation of foreign models,
for in foreign countries art-industry will exist, and
no legislation can prevent its products from finding
their way (in reproductions or actual examples) into
Germany and being admired there. Our half or
wholly imitative products are turned out as cheaply
as possible, in substitute-materials, and are made as
well or as ill as the relics of our craftsmanship permit,
or as our existing machinery for the purpose is capable
of. Cheapness and ease of manufacture are the prin¬
ciples aimed at, for even with narrow means no one
will want to do without certain things; fashions still
prevail, and will have to be satisfied with things that
do not last, but can be constantly changed.

How far will a new system of education tend to
simplify the needs of men and women and to purify
their taste? Probably very little, for good models

60

THE NEW SOCIETY

will be lacking, poverty is not fastidious, and the
taste of the populace is the sovereign arbiter. But
on this taste it depends whether vulgar ornaments
and gewgaws, frivolities and bazaar-horrors, are to
satisfy the desires of the soul.

Objects of earlier art and industry have been
alienated through need of money or destroyed by
negligence. Here and there one may find an old cup
or an engraving, as we do to-day in plundered terri¬
tories, but these things are disconnected specimens;
all they can do is occasionally to interest an artist.
Whoever wants to procure some object or to get
something done which has not been standardized in
the common range of approved requirements must
gain it by a tedious course of pinching and saving.
Personal possessions in the way of books, musical
instruments, works of art, as well as travel outside
the prescribed routes are rarities; a tree of one’s own,
a horse of one’s own are legendary things.

Thus luxury in its better aspect has gone to ruin
quicker than in the bad. All outlay devoted to
culture, to beauty, to invigoration has dried up; all
that survives is what stimulates, what depraves and
befouls; frivolities, substitutes and swindles. What
we have arrived at is not the four-square simplicity
of the peasant-homestead, but a ramshackle city
suburb. To some of us it is not easy, and to many it
is not agreeable to picture to themselves the aspect
of a thoroughly proletarianized country, and the
difficulty lies in the fact that the popular mind has.

THE NEW SOCIETY

61

as it were by universal agreement, resolved to con¬
ceive the future on a basis of domestic prosperity
about tenfold as great as it can possibly be. The
leaders and office-holders of the proletariat have an
easy task in convincing themselves and others that
what they approve and are struggling for is the so-
called middle-class existence with all the refinement
and claims of historic culture. Tacitly, as a matter
of course, they accept what plutocracy has to give
them, and imagine that the loans they take up from
the civilization and culture of the past can be redeemed
from the social gains of the future.

The stages at which a nation arrives year by year,
can be estimated by its building. In the new order,
little is being built. Apart from certain perfunctory
garden-cities, which are being erected for the prin¬
ciple of the thing, to meet the needs of a few thousand
favoured households, and which perhaps will never
be finished, we will for decades have to content our¬
selves with new subdivisions and exploitation of the
old buildings; old palaces packed to the roof with
families, will stand in the midst of vegetable gardens
and will alternate with empty warehouses in the
midst of decayed cities. In the streets of the suburbs
the avenues of trees will be felled, and in the cities
grass will grow through the cracks of the pavement.

For a long time it used to be believed that the
passion of the landscape painters of the seventeenth
century for introducing ruins with hovels nestling
among them arose from a feeling for romance. This

62

THE NEW SOCIETY

is not so—they only painted what they saw around
them after the ravages of the Thirty Years’ War.
It must not be supposed, however, that the forecast
in these pages is based on the consequences of the
w ar; these no doubt must darken our picture of the
future; but the shadows, which I have put in as
sparingly as I could, are essentially the expression of
a greatly reduced economic efficiency, combined with
the uniformity produced by the general proletarian¬
ization of life with the absence of any correcting factor
in individual effort of a rational character and of the
influence of higher types.

A brighter trait in the material conditions of life
will be formed by effort of a collective character,
such as even the most penurious community may be
able to undertake. The more severely the domestic
household has to pinch, and the more unattractive it
thereby becomes, the more completely will life be
forced into publicity. Private claims and aspirations,
which cannot be satisfied, will be turned over to the
public. Men w r ill gather in the streets and places of
public resort, and have more mutual intercourse than
before, since every transaction of life, even the most
insignificant, will have to be a subject of discussion,
agreement and understanding. In all the arrange¬
ments of social life, e. g. for news, communica¬
tions, supplies, discussion and entertainment, and
demands will be made and complied with for greater
convenience and comprehensiveness, for popular
aesthetics and popular representation. In these

THE NEW SOCIETY

63

arrangements and in these alone Art will have to
find its functions and its home. Public buildings,
gardens, sanatoriums, means of transit and exhibi¬
tions will be established at great cost. All the
demands of the spirit and of the senses will seek
their satisfaction in public. There will be no lack of
popular performances, excursions, tours and con¬
ducted visits to collections; of clubs, libraries, athletic
meetings and displays. The aspect of this tendency
from the point of view of culture and ethics we have
still to consider; in its social aspect (apart from the
fact that it causes a vacuum in the home and forces
young people to the surface of life, and in spite of
its mechanical effect) it will act as a comforting
reminiscence of the civic commonalty and solidarity
of mediaeval times.

In considering the spiritual and cultural life of a
fully socialized society, we have to start with the
assumption that any one man’s opinion and decision
are as good as another’s. Authority, even in matters
of the highest intellectual or spiritual character, only
exists in so far as it is established, acknowledged and
confirmed either by direct action of the people’s will,
or indirectly through their representatives. Every
one’s education and way of life are much the same;
there are no secrecies, no vague authority attaching
to special vocations; no one permits himself to feel
impressed by any person or thing. Every one votes,
whether it be for an office, a memorial, a law, or a
drama, or does it through delegates or the delegates

64

THE NEW SOCIETY

of delegates. Every one is determined to know the
how and where and why of everything—just as to-day
in America—and demands a plausible reason for it.
The reply, “ This is a matter you don’t understand,”
is impossible.

Everything is referred to one’s own conscience,
one’s own intelligence, one’s own taste, and no one
admits any innate or acquired superiority in others.
In debate, the boundaries between the ideal and the
practicable are obliterated; for on the one hand
every one is too much preoccupied with material needs,
and on the other, too confident, too unaccustomed to
submit himself to what in former days was called a
deeper insight, too loosely brought up to let himself
be taught. We never, therefore, hear such judgments
as : This, although it is difficult, is a book to be read;
this drama ought to have been produced although it
is not sensational; I don’t myself care for this
memorial, but it must remain because a great artist
made it; this is a necessary branch of study, although
it has no practical application; I will vote for this
man on account of his character and ability, although
he has made no election-promises. On the other
hand, the following kind of argument will have
weight: This historic building must be demolished,
for it interferes with traffic; this collection must be
sold, for we need money; we need no chair of philo¬
sophy, but we do need one for cinema-technique;
these ornamental grounds are the very place for a
merry-go-round ; tragedies are depressing, they must

THE NEW SOCIETY

65

not be performed in the State theatres. Let us
recall certain oversea legislation—carried out, be it
noted in countries still swayed by the traditional in¬
fluence of culture—and these examples will not seem
exaggerated.

Where there is no appeal to authority, where none
need fear disapproval or ridicule, where convenience
is prized and thrift rules supreme, there thought and
decision will be short-breathed, and will never look
beyond the needs of the day. Who will then care
for far-off deductions, for wide arcs of thought?
Calculation comes to the front, everything unprac¬
tical is despised; opinions are formed by discussion,
every-day reading and propaganda. Men demand
proofs, success, visible returns. The fewer the aims,
the stronger will be their attraction. People are
tolerant, for they are used to hearing the most varied
opinions, and all opinions have followers, from the
water-cure to Taoism; but the only opinion of any
influence is that whose followers are many.

Public opinion settles everything. The champions
of absolute values have to accommodate themselves
to the law of competition. Religious teaching has to
seek the favour of the times by the same methods as
a new system of physical culture. A work of art
must compete for votes. Only by popularity-hunting
can anything come to life; there will be no doing
without much talking. As in the later days of
Greece, rhetoric and dialectic are the most powerful

of the arts.

£

66

THE NEW SOCIETY

And since manual labour cherishes silently or openly
a bitter grudge against intellectual labour, the latter
has to protect itself by a pretence of sturdy simplicity;
when two teachers are competing for the head-
mastership of a classical school each tries to prove
that he has the hornier hand.

Most things in this new order are decided by weight
of numbers. Advertisement and propaganda are
banished from socialized industry and commerce;
instead, they compete in the service of personal and
ideal aims—in elections, theatres, systems of medi¬
cine, superstitions, arts, appointments, professorships,
churches.

Art has for the third time changed its master—
after the princes, Maecenas, the middle-class market;
after Maecenas, the plebs, and export trade. Whether
by means of representation through gilds, by com¬
pulsion, by patronage, or by favour, Art has become
dependent; it must explain, exhort, contend; it
can no longer rest proudly on itself. It must aim at
getting a majority on its side, and this it can only do
by sensationalism. Like all other features of intel¬
lectual life, it must march with the times. Like all
technique, research, learning and handicraft it suffers
through the loss, for several generations, of tradition
and hereditary skill, but together with this drop there
is also a drop in the character of the demand; quality
has given way to actuality. 1

Certain reactions based on practical experience arc

1 Aktualitat; as, for instance, reference to current topics.

THE NEW SOCIETY

67

not excluded; the constant comparison with the past
and with foreign countries will show the value of
the cultivation of a science, of an art which has no
fixed prepossessions and serves no immediate aims.
Measures are taken, though without much conviction,
by free Academies or the like, to win back something
of this; but the atmosphere is not favourable to such
attempts, and an artificial and sterile discipline is
all that can result.

The general tone is that of an excitable, loquacious
generation, bent on actualities and matters of prac¬
tical calculation, fonder of debate than of work, not
impressed by any authority, prizing success, watching
all that goes on abroad, taking refuge in public from
the sordidness of private life, and passionately hostile
to all superiority. Through the constant secession
of elements to which this tone is antipathetic a kind
of natural selection is constantly taking place, and
the political defencelessness of the transition period
favours disintegrating tendencies of foreign origin.
The carving away of ancient German territories works
in the same direction. Apart from the varying in¬
fluence of the four strata already referred to, the
general tone will be set by the half-Slavonic lower
classes of Middle and North Germany, who have
brought about and who control the existing conditions,
and by the other elements which have been assimi¬
lated to these.

In place of German culture and German intel¬
lectuality wc have a state of things of which a fore-

68

THE NEW SOCIETY

taste already exists in parts of America and of Eastern
Europe. The fully socialized order, repelling all
tutelage through those strata which possess a special
tradition, outlook and mentality, has created its own
form of civilization.

VII

Thoughtful and competent judges to whom I
have submitted the foregoing section of my work
have said to me : This is Hell. That is perhaps
going too far, since those who will live in that genera¬
tion and who have themselves helped it into being
will have become more or less adapted to their
circumstances.

A large part of the proletariat of to-day will
certainly not be daunted by the prospect, but will
regard it as a distinct improvement on their present
situation. That is the terrible fact, a fact for which
we are responsible and for which we must atone,
with what ruin to German culture remains to be seen.

Who, in this Age of Mechanism, who on the side
of the bourgeoisie, who of our statesmen, our pro¬
fessors, our captains of industry, above all who of
our clergy, has pitied the lot of the working-man?
The statesmen, for peace* sake, worked out the
Insurance Laws; the professors, with their emphatic
dislike to the world of finance and their unemphasized
devotion to the monopoly of their own stipends,
preached a doctrinaire socialism; the clergy lauded

the divinely-appointed principle of subordination;

69

70

THE NEW SOCIETY

the great industrialists, wallowing in their own greed
for power, money, favour, titles and connexions,
scolded the workers for wanting anything. The
silent subjugation of our brothers was assured through
the laws of inheritance, our leaders put the socialistic
legislation in fetters, freedom of combination was
thwarted, electoral reform in Prussia was scornfully
denied, demands for better conditions of living,
conditions which to-day we think ridiculously low,
were suppressed by force. And all the time, the cost
of a single year of war, a tiny fraction of the war-
reparations, would have sufficed to banish want for
ever from the land. At last the millions of the
defenceless and disappointed were driven into that
war of the dynasties and the bourgeois, which was
unloosed by the folly of years, the dazzlement of
weeks, the helplessness of hours.

If the state of things I have foreseen is hell, then
we have earned hell. And it ill becomes us to wrap
ourselves in the superiority of our culture, to rebuke
the masses for their want of intellect, their want of
character, their greed, and to keep insisting on the
unchangeability of human character, on the virtues
of rulership and leadership, on the spiritual unsel¬
fishness and intellectual priesthood of the classes born
to freedom. Where was this heaven-nurtured priestly
virtue sleeping when Wrong straddled the land and
the great crime was wrought? It was composing
feeble anthologies and pompous theories, cooking its
culture-soup, confusing, with true professorial want

THE NEW SOCIETY

71

of instinct, 1913 with 1813 1 —and putting itself at
the disposition of the Press Bureau. That was the
hour in which to fight for the supremacy of the spirit.
Now romance comes, as it always does, too late.

What is romance in history? It is sterility. It
is incapacity to imagine, still less to shape, the yet
unknown. It is an inordinate capacity for flinging
oneself with feminine adaptability into anything that
is historically presented and accomplished—from
Michael Angelo to working samplers. Fearing the
ugly present and the anxious future, the romantic
takes refuge with the dear good dead people, and
spins out further what it has learned from them.
But every big man was a shaper of his own time, a
respecter of antiquity and conscious of his inheritance
as a grown and capable man may be; not a youth in
sheltered tutelage, but a master of the living world,
and a herald of the future. “ Modernity ” is foolish,
but antiquarianism is rubbish; life in its vigour is
neither new nor antique, but young.

True it is indeed that we love the old, many-
coloured, concrete, pre-mechanistic world; we cannot
take an antique thing in our hands or read an antique
word without feeling its enchantment. It is a joy
to the heart, and one prohibited to no man, to dream
at times romantic dreams, to live in the past, and to
forget, as we do it, that this very dreaming, this

1 In 1913 all Germany was celebrating with great pomp
and warlike display the centenary of the liberation of the
country from Napoleon, and also paying a huge property tax
for the coming war.

72

THE NEW SOCIETY

very life, owes its charm to the fact that we are of
another age. It is a magic like that of childhood—
but to want to go back to it is not only childish, but
a deliberate fraud and self-deception. We should
realize, as I have shown years ago, that the difference
of our age from that age is the ever-present fact of
the density of our population. Any one who wants to
go back, really wants that forty million Germans
should die, while he survives. It is ignorant, it is
insincere, to put on a frown of offended virtue and
to say : For shame, what are you thronging into the
towns for? Go back to the land; plough, spin,
weave, ply the blacksmith’s hammer, as did our fore¬
fathers, who were the proper sort of people. And
leave the people like us, who think and write poetry
and brood and dream for you, a house embowered
in vines—there will be room enough for that!—Ah,,
you thinkers and brooders, what would you say if
men answered you : No! Go yourself and spin
in a factory, for you have shown clearly enough
that your thinking and brooding are futile. All your
fine phrases amount to nothing but the one dread
monosyllable—Die ! Are you so wicked as that,
and know it ? or so stupid, and know it not ?

Thought is the most responsible of all functions.
He who thinks for others must look after them, and
if they live he may not slay them. It is therefore a
mischievous piece of romantic folly to point us to
the past. We must all pass through the dark gateway,
and the sage has no right to growl: Leave me out—

THE NEW SOCIETY 73

I am the salt of the earth ! The first thing we have
to do is to save humanity; not a selected pair in the
Ark but the whole race, criminals and harlots, fools,
beggars and cripples. We ourselves have cast down
Authority, and there will be a crush, and many things
will look very different from what the sages would
wish and what the romantics dream. And if it is
going to be hell for people like you and me, we must
only accept it in the name of justice, and think of
Dante’s terrible inscription : “I was made by the
Might of God, by the supreme Wisdom and by the
primal Love.” 1

But is it hell ? That depends on ourselves.

1 Fecemi la divina Potestate
La 8omma Sapienza e il primo Amore.

This is part of the inscription over the gates of Hell in the
Inferno, Canto III.

VIII

Our description of the future order of society was
tacitly based on the assumption that our mentality,
our ethics, our spiritual outlook, would remain as
they arc at present.

This assumption is a probable one, but it is not
irrevocably certain. What we have endeavoured to
demonstrate is simply the obvious fact—the fact
which our once so rigid but, since November, 1918,
uprooted and flaccid intellectualism has forgotten—
that our salvation is not to be found in any kind of
mechanical apparatus or institutions. Institutions
do not mean evolution. If institutions run too far
ahead of evolution there will be reaction. When
evolution runs too far, there is revolution.

At this point both groups of our opponents will start
up against us.

The Radicals cry : Ha ! only give us food, give
“ all power to the Soviets,” let us have free-thought
lectures, and mentality, insight, experience and culture
will come of themselves.

The Reactionaries smile : Ho ! this man has never
learned that there is no such thing as evolution;

that human character never changes.

74

THE NEW SOCIETY

75

I shall not answer either of these. They know,
both of them, that they are saying what is not true.

Something of unprecedented greatness can and must
take place; something that in the life of a people
corresponds to the awakening of manhood in the
individual.

In every conscious existence there comes a moment
when the living being is no longer determined but
begins to determine himself; when he takes over
responsibility from the surrounding Powers, in order
to shoulder it for himself; when he no longer accepts
the forces that guide him, but creates them; when he
no longer receives but freely chooses the values,
ideals, aims and authorities whose validity he will
admit; when he begets out of his own being the rela¬
tions with the divine which he means to serve. For
the German people this moment, this opportunity, has
now arrived—or is for ever lost.

We have made a clear sweep of all authorities.
The inherited influences which we accepted uncon¬
sciously have dropped away from us—persons, classes,
dogmas. The persons are done with for the present.
The classes, even though they may^still keep up the
struggle, are broken to pieces together with all the
best that they contained : mentality, sense of honour,
devotion, training, tradition. We can never reanimate
them and never supply their place. Ideas and dogmas
have long ago lost their cogency; the power they
wielded through police and school, the power which
we tried to prop up by a blasphemous degradation

76

THE NEW SOCIETY

of religion and by developing the church as a kind of
factory, is gone, and it would be a piece of mechanical
presumption to suppose that we can breed them again
for the sake of the objects they fulfilled. If we live
and thrive, ideas and faiths will grow up of themselves.

We must of our own free choice lay upon ourselves
a certain life-potency or faculty which we shall freely
obey, and which shall be so broad and so buoyant
that thought and creation can grow out of it. A deed
without precedent only in its voluntary, conscious
self-determination : for other peoples in earlier days
also iaccepted these faculties, not indeed out of con¬
scious choice, but from the hands of prophets, rulers
and classes. Thus theocracy was laid upon Israel;
the caste-system on the Indians; the idea of the city
on the Greeks; empire on the Romans; the Church
on the Middle Ages; commerce, plutocracy, colonial
dominion, on the modern world; militarism on Ger¬
many. For these imposed forces men lived and died;
they had only a mythical conception of where they
came from, and they believed and some still believe
them to be everlasting.

A thunder-stroke of destiny has at once stripped
us bare and has opened our eyes. The tremendous
choice is before us. Are we to reject it, and, blinded
anew, to resign ourselves to the casual and mechanical
laws of action and reaction, of needs and interests,
and the competition of forces? Are we to recover
ourselves, and enter into the intellectual arena of the
nations, to begin a new and enduring life with no

THE NEW SOCIETY

77

other guiding thought than that of self-preservation
and the division of property ? In the harbour of the
nations is our ship to drift aimlessly while every other
knows its course, whether to a near or distant port ?
Is that penurious Paradise which we have described,
the goal of Germany’s hopes and struggles?

Compared with us, the French movement of the
eighteenth century had an easy task. All it had to
do was to deny and demolish. When it had cleared
away the wreckage of feudalism, at once a strong new
class, the bourgeoisie, sprang up from the soil, more
vigorous than its aristocratic forerunner, and it
was able to take care of itself. And the bourgeoisie
was also a class of defined boundaries, and already
trained for its task; it had long ago taken over
French culture, it alone had for a century been the
champion of French ideas, it had acquired enthusiasm
for the nation, for freedom, for militarism and for
money; the aspirations for equality and fraternity
were not indeed fulfilled, but the first mechanized
and plutocratic state of the Continent came into being.

Germany, as we have seen, is not in the same
position. When we are stripped we find no new
stratum of culture growing up below the surface;
society is simply dissolved, and in its place we find
the masses, of which the most hopeful thing we can
sdy is that they are an ordered body. Tradition
has been torn in two. No—we have to build from
the foundations up. But whether we shall build
according to the changing needs of the seasons,

78

THE NEW SOCIETY

according to the casual balance of forces, or according
to an idea and a symbol—that is the question !

Our current Socialism has no qualms about bringing
new nations to birth with the aid of a few simple
apparatus and radical eliminations; it believes that
the right spirit will soon enter in if only institutions
are provided for it. It would be too severe to describe
this way of thinking solely as contempt for or want
of understanding of a spiritual mission. Socialism
in its prevailing form arises indeed simply from
material or so-called “ scientific ” conceptions (as
if there could be a science of ideal aims and values):
but it has, though only as a secondary object, annexed
to itself the values of a spiritual faith—the latter are,
"^as^the language of the market has it, “ thrown in.”
We have seen to what the material domination of
institutions and apparatus is leading us. To national
dignity, or to any mission for humanity, it does not
lead.

What is unprecedented in our problem is not, as
we have said, that a people should beget out of itself
its own idea and mission. From the Jewish theocracy
to the French rationalism, from the Chinese ancestor-
worship to the pioneer-freedom of America, all the cul¬
tured peoples have brought this creative act to pass,
although in formative epochs leading classes and lead¬
ing men have born the responsibility and made it
easy for their countrymen to become aware of their
own unconscious spirit, and through this awareness
and consciousness to isolate and intensify it.

THE NEW SOCIETY

79

What is unprecedented is just this : that the process
should take place as a deliberate act of will, in demo¬
cratic freedom, without pressure and compulsion of
authority, in the consciousness of its necessity, on
our own responsibility. Germany is not at present
growing leaders and prophets, we are not in a formative
stage, all authority has been scattered to the winds.
It is true that we have one stratum of society which
is capable of understanding the meaning of the task,
but it is deeply cloven, the hatreds and interests
of its parties make them more each others’ enemies
than the people’s.

And yet it is this very class—not as possessor of
means but as possessor of the tradition, which is
capable, which is indispensable, and which is sum¬
moned to take in hand the transformation of the
German spirit, to free it from the bonds of mechanism,
of capitalism, of militarism, and to lead it to its true
destinies. It cannot do this for itself alone, amid the
blind bitterness of the war of classes; it cannot do it
as a sovran leader relying on its deeper insight, for
its and every other prestige has gone by the board;
it can only do it by the way of service and sacrifice—
it can only do it if the service and the sacrifice are
approved and accepted.

The masses will not understand this sacrifice of
service; but the more responsible of their leaders
will. Not to-day, indeed, nor to-morrow; but on
the day when experience has shown them that I am
telling the truth. At first they will do as in Russia;

80

THE NEW SOCIETY

when want becomes acute, they will seek to buy
experience and tradition at a high price from indivi¬
duals. But mentality and spirit cannot be bought—
only labour and dexterity. Then gradually men will
come to understand that the highest things are not
marketable commodities, they are only given away.
And at last the responsible leaders, those who rule
in order to serve, will separate themselves from those
of the Cataline type, who serve in order to rule.

So long has the narrow, parsonical, cynical contempt
for the understanding of the lower classes prevailed—
through our fault—a reversal to blind worship of
the masses, of the immature and the unsuccessful,
is not inexcusable. We are here to love mankind—
all mankind, the outcast as well as the weak—every
man and all men. But the masses are not quite the
same thing as mankind. The masses who congregate
in the streets and at public meetings are not com¬
munities consisting of whole men, but assemblages
in which each man takes a part and is present, indeed,
with his whole body, but by no means with his whole
being. The masses are absent-minded; and presence
of mind only comes to them when through the lips
of some true prophet the Spirit descends upon them.
But when that happens, they take no decisions; they
do not get beside themselves; rather, they sink into
themselves. Before the distortions of a mob orator,
with his extravagant promises, the masses become
merely a driven crowd eager for gain, not human
souls. They are the concave reflector of passions

THE NEW SOCIETY

81

and greeds that rage in the focal point of the speaker’s
rostrum; they return in concentrated form the rays
that dazzle them. He who puts the masses in the
judgment-seat, who looks for counsel and decision
at their hands, lias neither reverence nor love for
man. Sooner or later the truth of this will be realized
by all honourable men among their leaders.

The day is also far when the upper classes will come
to their senses. They have never understood what
the world is, nor what Germany is, nor what has
happened to themselves. They see houses and fields,
streets and trees very much as they were; they think,
if they only play the game a little craftily at the
beginning, everything will remain as it used to be,
and they will come out all right in the end. It is
just as when some merchant goes bankrupt for a
million; for the first fortnight the servants wait at
table as usual and the family eat off silver plate;
the ruin is still on paper. But in a year’s time every¬
thing is dispersed to the winds, and men have changed
along with their utensils. When one sees for what
trivialities people are fighting to-day one begins to
understand how callously and shamelessly they gave
up a thousand times over that which they had sworn
to defend with the last drop of their blood; they none
of them know what has really happened. In a
few years’ time they will know; and then they will
fight no more for things that no longer exist; they
will be meditating a general sacrifice to save what can
still be saved, and what is worth saving.

F

IX

Germany is a land without power, without poise,
with its prosperity shattered, its authorities and its
external aims annihilated, its intellect and its ethics
at a low ebb. In such a condition, if we wish to under¬
stand the only kind of life-faculty which can save us
from intellectual and spiritual death, give us force and
inspiration to shape for ourselves and for the world the
new social order of freedom, spirituality 1 and justice,
and in the true sense to “ save ” us, we must look
ourselves and the German character in the face—
this unknown, problematic character, which for a
century in contradiction to its own inmost being,
has been flattering and lulling itself with hackneyed
and complacent phrases and unproved judgments.
For we can undertake nothing and claim nothing
which has not its prototype in our own soul and is
not founded in our own past, our own traditions.

There is no people, not even the French, which
in recent decades has administered to itself and
digested so much praise as w'e have. We never

1 Geistigkeit. This is a difficult word to translate. It
sometimes means merely intellectuality, sometimes in addition
(as here) all that is implied in the phrase, “ Ye know not
what manner of spirit (ofou iryev^aros) ye are of.”

82

THE NEW SOCIETY

83

discussed ourselves but at once the stereotyped toasts
began. The more German culture declined, the more
disgusting became our babble about it.

The persons through whose mouths we let ourselves
be lauded were school-teachers without comparative
knowledge, professional banquet-orators, nationalists
who praised in the service of some interested hatred,
and scholars with appointments who were simply
commissioned to demonstrate that the Hohenzollern
system was the last word of creation. No one dreamed
of distinguishing this glorification of the German
people from the apotheosis of the dynasties—to
which we had vowed our heart’s blood—and the
profound insincerity of these declamations was shown
by the indifference with which the dynasties, the main
feature in the programme, were afterwards got rid of,
and the affair of the heart’s blood shelved.

We know the stereotyped phrases. German faith,
French knavery. The world is to find healing in
the German soul. We are the heroes—the others
arc hucksters . 1 To be German means to do a thing
for its own sake. We are a “ race of thinkers and
poets.” We have Culture, the others merely Civiliza¬
tion . 2 We alone are free—the others are merely
undisciplined (or, as the case may be, enslaved).
All this we owe to the favour of God and our education

1 Referring to Werner Sombart’s war-book, Handler und
Helden.

2 Cf. Thomas Mann’s remarkable book on the real sig¬
nificance of the war : Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen (1918).

84

THE NEW SOCIETY

under the (here fill in Prussian, Bavarian or Saxon)
reigning House, which all the world envies us. Clearly
therefore we are destined for world-dominion; we
have only to fall-to.

In one of these phrases, about doing things for
their own sake , 1 there is truth. All the more was it
for us in particular a vice and a sign of degradation
to let ourselves be dazzled by the shadowless trans¬
parency-picture of glorification that was offered to us.
There were interests concealed in the game, and much
lack of moral fibre, all of which we passed over in
silence; it was out of place in our festal oratory.

It would be an equal or even a greater vice, only
reversed, if we were now to despair of ourselves.
Moderation was what we needed then; what we need
now is vigorous and conscious self-possession. To-day
it is no easy and attractive business to bring our strong
qualities to the surface; it implies an amount of
conviction which it is hard to attain, and self-depre-
ciation means a pitiful faint-heartedness. But all
sham goods offered by babblers, by selfish interests,
prophets of hate and commercial travellers must go
overboard.

We have never been a “ race of thinkers and poets,”
any more than the Jews were a race of prophets, the

%

1 Sachlichkeit. Rathenau seems to have in mind the
German feeling for disinterested study and research as
illustrated, for instance, by the fact that when the German
Government heard of the genius of Einstein they brought
him to Berlin with a salary of nearly £1000 a year and no
duties except to think. Modern bigotry has expelled him.

THE NEW SOCIETY 85

French and Dutch a race of painters, or Konigsberg
a city of Pure Reason. 1 The old German upper
classes have, in three well-defined epochs, had force
enough to throw up individuals of mighty endowments
for music, poetry and philosophy; the former lower-
classes, whose blood runs in nine-tenths of our present
population, have scarcely contributed anything to
these glories. They have in recent years shown them¬
selves thoroughly industrious, plastic, apt for dis¬
cipline, order-loving, intelligent, practical, honourable,
trustworthy, warm-hearted, prudent and helpful,
and adapted beyond all expectation to the mechaniza¬
tion of life and industry; of their power to produce
talent we know little, except perhaps in the domain
of research and technique, which are less a test of
creative energy than of applied knowledge and
methodical assiduity.

The important question as to what relations exist
between the number, quality and greatness of
individual endowments and genius on the one side,
and the character of a people on the other, is still
unexplored and very obscure, although we possess
a science which calls itself by the quite unjustified
name of national psychology.

While on one side we have rarely made any serious
study of national characteristics, but have confused
them with achievements of culture and habits of
life that mostly proceeded from a thin upper stratum

1 Where Kant lived and taught, and published his Kritilc
der reinen Vemunft.

86

THE NEW SOCIETY

alone, on the other we have as a rule tacitly set down
individual endowment (with a strong emphasis on
our own) as illustrations of national character. In
this respect, too, we showed that laxity in proving
what we wanted to prove which abounds everywhere
from the point where calculation with things weighable
and measurable leaves off, and judgment begins.
We think it an established fact—in accordance with
just this arbitrary test of genius—that genius belongs
par excellence to the so-called blonde blue-eyed races
of the earth. The fact that among the score or two of
geniuses of all ages who have been determining forces
in the world it is hardly possible to find a single
example of this blue-blonde race, but they can be
proved to have been almost all dark, did not affect
the question. On the other hand the English, whose
influence on culture has been surpassed by none,
had their genius-forming power, in which they are
actually deficient, seriously over-estimated. It was
the reverse with the Jews. The fact that in spite
of their small numbers they have produced more of
world-moving genius than all other nations put
together, and that from them has proceeded the whole
transcendental ethics of the Western world, has not
prevented their being pronounced wholly incapable
of creative endowment.

We shall put aside all this rubbish and for the
present decline to go into theoretic questions. Great
individual endowments are related to national char¬
acter—to the character of the mind, not that of the

THE NEW SOCIETY

87

will, which must be considered apart—as the blossom
to the plant or the crystal to the mother-solution;
to determine the one from the other needs something
more than a mechanical generalization. There is
no such thing as a “ race of thinkers and poets.”
This, however, we can say : that a people which begets
great musicians, poets and philosophers is one which
devotes itself to moods and to visions, while another,
as for instance the Latin group, which creates forms
and standards, is one that at the cost of mood and
vision, incarnates its sense of will.

Devotion, receptivity, the feeling for Nature,
comprehension, the passion for truth, meditative
depth, spiritual love, are the fairest gifts that can be
granted to any people, and to us they have been
granted. But they exclude other gifts, which stand
to-day in high repute, and which we affect in vain.
They exclude the capacity for shaping forms and
standards, the aptitude for rule, if not even for self-
government; in any case the qualities which go to
the creation of nationalities and civilizations.

It is no mere accident that in not one of the hundred¬
fold provinces of life, from art to military organiza¬
tion, from State-craft to joint stock-companies, from
saintliness to table-utensils, have we Germans dis¬
covered a single essential and enduring form. And
again, there is scarcely one of these forms which we
have not filled with a richer and more living content
than those who first discovered it.

For whoever bears the All within himself can be

88

THE NEW SOCIETY

satisfied with no form; he finds in himself at once
vision and reality, thesis and antithesis. He seeks
for a synthesis, but all form is one-sided. He con¬
ceives, chooses, comprehends, fulfils, breaks in pieces
and throws away. He remains a unity in constant
change, like the year as it proceeds day by day, hour
by hour, and no two of them alike. He does not force
things—out of respect for creation.

But he who makes forms must use force. He
makes himself the standard and comprehends himself
only. Everything else, everything that is extra¬
normal, unconformable, unintelligible and not under¬
stood remains for him something alien, trivial, inferior,
or negligible. The maker of forms can rule, even by
compulsion, without being a tyrant, for he is con¬
vinced of the value of what he brings and knows
no doubts. He is ruthless, yet only up to a certain
limit, which is determined by his sense of the infe¬
riority of the other. The man who rejects forms,
however, cannot rule; the very penetration into the
domain of another seems to him a wrong to his
own, the basis of which is recognition and allow¬
ance. If he is forced to penetrate, he Joses all balance,
for in wrong-doing he understands no gradations.
Similarly he is incapable of civilizing, for he cannot
take forms seriously; he violates them himself—
how can he impose them upon others ? In his inmost
soul he is naive, for creation is seething in him; but
in execution he is conscious, critical, eclectic and
methodical, in order that he may be completely

THE NEW SOCIETY

89

master of the one-sided element into which he has
forced himself. The man of forms, however, is, in
his soul, rigid and conscious, but in action naive,
because he does not know the meaning of doubt.

Forms grow up like natural products in the course
of centuries. They assume the existence of uni¬
formity in individuals, fathers reproduced in sons
with scarcely a variation. Egypt, Rome, and that
modern land of antiquity, France, are examples.
For generations France has been content with three
architectural styles, which are really one and the
same style. The changes in the language are hardly
perceptible. The principal domestic utensils are almost
the same as they were a hundred years ago, fashion
is merely a vibration. Foreign living languages are
little studied, their spirit is not understood, the
pronunciation remains French. Foreign countries
are looked on as a kind of menagerie; everything is
measured by the native standard. Every one is a
judge of everything, for he holds fast to the norm.
Within the norm the French are keenly sensitive,
their feeling for relations is very sure; the slightest
deviation is observed. To doubt the validity of
the norm is out of question; one might as well
criticize the sun and moon as the style of Louis
Quatorze.

The final judgment of the British in the affairs of
life is “ this is English,” “ that is not English.”
Foreign lands are a subject of geographical and
ethnological study. The whole mighty will of a

90

THE NEW SOCIETY

nation is here concentrated in the form of civilizing
political energy. Every private inclination is a fad,
and even fads have their fixed forms. An offence
against table-manners is banned like an attack on
the Church. Nature is mastered with consideration
and intelligence, whether the problem is the breeding
of sheep or the ruling of India.

The assurance, self-command and art of ruling
which spring from forms are lacking in Germany.
Our strongest spirits are formless; they are eclectic
or titanic, whether they despise forms or choose
forms or burst forms. We have three homes between
which we hover—Germany, the earth, and heaven.
We comprehend and honour everything—every land,
every man, every art and every language; and we
are fertilized by what is foreign; on the lower level
we enjoy it and imitate it, on the higher it spurs us
to creation. We are docile, and do not hate what
rules and determines us, only what contracts us and
makes us one-sided; an autocratic government may
be tolerated, even venerated, if it knows how to be
national and popular and does not interfere with
our elbow-room.

We have already touched on the volitional char¬
acter 1 of the German people, a character which has
been gravely altered by the subsidence of the ancient
upper stratum of society, and by long privations and
miseries. The Germans of Tacitus were a freedom-

1 As opposed to the inward, intellectual and spiritual
character.

THE NEW SOCIETY

91

loving and turbulent people; of this not a trace is
left. Any one who did not recognize under the
autocracy that we care little for self-determination
and self-responsibility may do so under the revolu¬
tion, which merely arises out of an alteration in ex¬
ternal conditions. We are not even yet a nation,
but an association of interests and oppositions; a
German Irredenta , as it has been and unfortunately
will be shown, is an impossible conception. And
since we are not a nation and represent no national
idea, but only an association of households, it follows
that our influence abroad can only be commercial,
and not civilizing or propagandist.

From this side we are able to understand the
German history of the past two centuries. Prussia,
an extra-German Power, grown up in colonized
territory, organized itself into a bureaucratic, feudal
and military State. It succeeded in mastering half
Germany and in loosely linking up the remainder.
By rigid organization, by its federated Princes and by
the strongest army in the world, it supplied the
place of the national character and will which were
wanting. Mechanism was pressed into the service,
and bore the colossus into a period of blooming
prosperity. The system looked like a nation; in
reality it was an autocratic association of economic
interests bristling with arms. It was incapable of
developing national forces and ideas, not even in
relation to its settlers in other lands; it was confined
to commercial competition; weak alliances were

92

THE NEW SOCIETY

relied on to secure the position externally; self-
government was not granted, because the military
organization was the pivot of the whole system;
the drill-sergeant tone at home had its counterpart
in the brusqueness of our foreign policy; enmities grew
and organized themselves, and the catastrophe came.

For character of will we had substituted discipline.
But discipline is not nationality; it is an external
instrument, and when it breaks it leaves—nothing.
Now since the Prussian system which called itself
by the mediaeval title of the German Empire was,
in spite of the professors, no popular, national fabric,
but a dynastic, military and compulsory association,
with a constitutional facade, the interested nationalist
elements took on the repulsive and dishonourable
forms that we all know. The most deeply interested
parties, cool and conscious of their strength, the
Prussian representatives of the military and official
nobility, avoided all declamation and only interfered
when their interests were endangered. The greater
industrialists sold themselves. A higher stratum of
the middle-classes composed of certain circles of
higher teachers and subaltern officials took the
business seriously, and in order to escape from their
drab existence created that atmosphere of hatred of
Socialists, telegrams of homage, and megalomania,
which made us intellectually and morally impossible
before the world. Instead of the Germany of thought
and spirit one saw suddenly a brutal, stupid community
of interested persons, greedy for power, who gave

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93

themselves out as that Germany whose very opposite
they were; who, unable to point to any achievements,
any thought of their own, prided themselves on an
imaginary race-unity which their very appearance
contradicted; who had no ideas beyond rancour;
the slaverings of league-oratory and subordination,
and who with these properties, which they were pleased
to call Kultur , undertook to bring blessing to the
world.

It was no wonder; for our slavonicized associa¬
tion of interests, bent on subordination and on
gain, does not produce ideas; its possessions were
power, mechanism and money; whoever was im¬
pressed by these things believed they must impress
others too, and so the conclusion was arrived at that
all the great spirits of the past had lived only to
make this triple combination supreme. Wagner had
formed the bridge between the old Germany and the
new—armoured cruisers and giant guns appeared
as a free development from Kant and Hegel, and
the word Kultur, a word which Germany ought to
prohibit by law for thirty years to come, masked
the confusion of thought.

To discover now, after our downfall, that Germany
ought never to have carried on a continental let alone
a world policy, would be a pitiful example of esprit
tVescalier . It is true that it was our right, and even
our duty, by our intellect, our ethics and our great¬
ness, to carry it on; but the weakness of our char¬
acter on the side of Will was the cause of its failure.

94

THE NEW SOCIETY

Bismarck, a bom realist in politics, grown up in the
Prussian tradition, trained in the diplomatic tradition
by Gortschakov, made the calamitous choice. He
made us safe for certain decades; but it was only
an intuitive policy in the manner of Stein 1 that
could have saved us for centuries.

In the midst of self-administered and self-determin¬
ing nations the German people, from lack of self-
consciousness, indolence of will and innate servility
remained under a patriarchal system of government,
a minor under tutelage of divinely-appointed dynasties
and ruling classes. In the childish movement of the
educated bourgeoisie of 1848 Bismarck saw only the
helpless and Utopian, but not the symbolic side,
which Marx might have showm him. His practical
spirit judged with a smile that a handful of peasantry
and grenadiers would suffice to bring to reason this
dynastically-minded people. It was only too true;
although the bulk of this people had not for thirty
years been formed by the peasant class, and although
he himself had learned how to make use of the power
of the modern industrial State in peasant disguise.
And so he refused to allow his countrymen to come
of age; broke, with the superiority of genius, and
with the weapons of success and authority, the
incompetent forces that resisted him; created, by

1 Stein was the chief loader of Prussia from the Frederician
into the modem era. His ministry of reform by which a
peasant-proprietary was established, and municipal institu¬
tions created, lastod only from September 1807 to November
1808.

THE NEW SOCIETY

95

the magical mechanism of his Constitution, the
German Empire as a mere continuation of the Prussian
bureaucratic State reinforced, by the self-glorifying
dynasties, with the whole volume of the still existing
and justly appreciated habit of obedience; and
annihilated for a generation every aspiration for
freedom by branding it with the stain of moral and
social depravity. Our political worthlessness and
immaturity came to its climax in the race of office-
climbers in 1880, which in 1900 gave place to the
battle-fleet patriotism of the great capitalists.

A self-administered and a self-determining nation
—such as the nations of the world, except ourselves,
Austria and Russia, were, on the whole, at the turn
of the century—would have been able to carry on a
sound and steadfast policy in economics and public
affairs, and to enjoy the confidence of the world, as
little begrudged as America. On the other hand, a
dangerous warship, armed upon an unexampled
scale, given to backward movements and commanded
by an uncontrollable sovran dilettante, could only
expect sooner or later to be expelled from the harbour
of the nations. History is apt to overdo it, especially
when corruption has gone on too long; with every
year that passed the doom became more certain;
instead of being expelled, we were annihilated.

That four years of hunger, a lost war and a military
revolt at last set us free, does not betoken any change
of character; and when to-day a servile and facile
Press lauds our wretched and idealess Constitution

96

THE NEW SOCIETY

as the finest in the world, that gives us no assurance
of its power to endure. Understanding is no sub¬
stitute for character, but it is at any rate a step
towards the goal; and if it is once understood that
other measures arc possible, and if, out of this period,
certain writings and thoughts shall survive—and
survive they will—then at any rate we may still be
weak, but we shall be no longer blind.

It might be possible at the outset of our journey
towards strength of will that we should grope our
way slowly—very slowly—back to the old problems
of power. It does not matter if we do. Before we
get there, the world will be changed, and will be
pregnant with new thoughts. Let us fulfil the duties
for which Germany was made what it is. Let us go
in quest of the idea and the faculty that are laid
upon us; let us do this in order to live, to recover
our health, to shape ourselves anew, to remain a
People, to become a Nation, to create a future and
to serve the world.

X

On balance it seems that the endowments of the
German people work out as follows :—

High qualities of intellect and heart. Ethics and
mentality normal. Originative will-power and inde¬
pendent activity, weak.

We give our devotion freely, and the heart rules
in action. Our feelings are genuine and powerful.
We have courage and endurance. Led by sentiment
rather than by inspiration. We create no forms,
are self-forgetful, seek no responsibility, obey rather
than rule. In obedience we know no limit, and
never question what is imposed upon us.

Of its own accord the German people would never
have adopted an ideal of force. It was imposed on
us by the idolaters of the great war-machine and
those who gained by it; even Bismarck did not
share it.

We are not competent to form an ideal of civiliza¬
tion, for the sense of unity, will to leadership, and
formative energy are lacking to us. We have no
political mission for the arrangement of other people’s
affairs, for we cannot arrange our own; we do not

lead a full life, and are politically unripe,
a 97

/

98

THE NEW SOCIETY

We are endowed as no other people is for a mission
of the spirit. Such a mission was ours till a century
ago; we renounced it, because through political
slackness of will-power we fell out of step; we did
not keep pace with the other nations in internal
political development, and, instead, devoted ourselves
to the most far-reaching developments of mechanism
and to their counterpart in bids for power. It was
Faust, lured away from his true path, cast off by the
Earth-Spirit, astray among witches, brawlers and
alchemists.

But the Faust-soul of Germany is not dead. Of
all peoples on the earth we alone have never ceased
to struggle with ourselves. And not with ourselves
alone, but with our daemon, our God. We still hear
within ourselves the All, we still expand in every
breath of creation. We understand the language of
things, of men and of peoples. We measure every¬
thing by itself, not by us; we do not seek our own
will, but the truth. We are all alike and yet all
different; each of us is a wanderer, a brooder, a
seeker. Things of the spirit are taken seriously with
us; we do not make them serve our lives, we serve
them with ours.

“ And you dare to say this, in the face of all the
brutalizing and bemiring that we experience—the
profiteering and gormandizing, the abject submis¬
siveness, the shameless desertions, the apathy, the
insincerity, the heartlessness and mindlessness of our
day ? ”

THE NEW SOCIETY

99

Yes, I dare to say it, for I believe it and I know
it. The soul of the German people lies still in the
convulsions and hallucinations of its slow recovery.
It is recovery not alone from the war, but from
something worse, its hundred-years’ alienation from
itself. The much-ridiculed choice of our old romantic
unheraldic colours, black, red and gold, instead of
the bodiless and soulless colours under which we
waged the war , 1 was, among the whirling follies of
the time, a faint symbolic movement of our better
mind. We must reunite ourselves with the days
before we ceased to be Germans and became Berliners.

What we need is Spirit. The whole world needs
it, no more and no less than we do, but will never
create it. History knows why it decided for Ver¬
sailles and the Hall of Mirrors. Not mechanism
alone, with its retinue of nationalism and imperialism,
is now again and for the last time to be glorified;
no, the whole Franco-British policy of acquisition
mounts up even to the throne of the Sun-king, and
it is seriously believed that it will govern the destinies
of the world for centuries to come. An inconceivable,
and, in its monstrous irony, unsurpassable drama,
which is put forward as the introduction to the
great era. The bourgeois conscience of the West

1 Black, red and gold were originally the colours of a
students’ Corps in Frankfort. They were adopted as the
colours of the abortive German Federation of 1848, apparently
under a mistaken idea that they represented the colours of
the ancient Germanic Empire. The colours of the Empire
of 1870 were the Prussian black and white, with the addition
of red.

100

THE NEW SOCIETY

has no inkling of what it means. To this conscience,
the war was a huge violation of decency, contrived by
bandits; its victory is the final triumph of a capi¬
talist, rationalistic civilization; the torch lit in the
East means murder and incendiarism, and the upward
migration of the people from the depths is to it
invisible.

No; it is not here that the spirit of the future is
being formed. One may discover further ingenious
devices, lightning-conductors to mitigate the stroke;
but gently or violently a natural force will have its
way, and the new earth which it is preparing needs
new seed.

That we have been given the faculty to shape a new
spirit does not imply that we are at liberty to choose
whether we shall do it or not. Even if it were not for
our life’s sake—even if it were against our life—still we
must obey. But it is for our life’s sake, as we have
seen, and as it is indeed obvious, for every organism
can live only by fulfilling the purpose of its being.

And now we have got to a very dangerous place—
a place where the usual moral peroration lies in wait
for us—that German peroration which announces
universal redemption, and immediately, on that lofty
note, closes the discussion. Fatherland, Morality,
Humanity, Labour, Courage, Confidence—we all
know how it goes, the writer has written something
fine, the reader has read something fine; emotion
on both sides, little conviction on either.

It appears, then, that I have just been writing

THE NEW SOCIETY

101

something extremely suspect. Has the reader fol¬
lowed me through five-and-thirty of these difficult
folios in order to arrive in the end at that very
everyday term, Spirit ? 1 Is there any term in
commoner use, and what are we to think about it ?
Softly—there is worse to come ! The next word is
still more dubious, philistinishly so, in fact—the
word Culture . 2 I cannot help it—we must pass
on by way of these everyday conceptions. We must
get through the crowd, where hack-phrases elbow us.
Any journey you may take, though it were to Tibet,
must begin at the Berlin Central Railway Station.
What is wrong with these popular phrases is not
that they start from an everyday conception, but
that they remain content with it, and do not think
it out to the end.

Our task, therefore, stated in the most general
terms, is to make actually spiritual a people which
is capable of spirituality. And since spirituality
cannot be propped up by any external thrust, by ser¬
mons, newspaper articles, leagues, or propaganda,
but must be associated with life and developed out
of life, so the organic process and the condition of
life to which it leads is called Culture.

It is only with deep reluctance and after long
search that I have written down this beautiful word,
a word now worn almost beyond recognition. Can

1 Geist.

* Bildung. It is as difficult in English as it is in German to
render in one word exactly what the author is thinking of. In
its literal sense Bildung implies a shaping and formative action.

* N. \\*

102

THE NEW SOCIETY

we find our way back to its application and signifi¬
cance ? Even when it is not drawn out with a
futile prefix 1 one can hardly detect its pure meaning
by reason of the many overtones. The school, if
possible the university, some French and English,
the rules about I and Me, visiting-cards, shirt-cuffs,
foreign phrases, top-hats, table-manners: these are
some of the overtones that make themselves heard
when we talk of a cultured man, or rather as they
have it a cultured gentleman. A hundred years
ago, as the word implies, we understood by culture
the unfolding and the full possession of innate
bodily, spiritual and moral forces. In this sense
Goethe showed us the two fraternal figures formed
after his own image: Faust the richer, and the poorer
Wilhelm Meister, striving for culture.

The ideal which hovers before us is not one of
education, not even one of knowledge, although both
education and knowledge enter into it; it is an
ideal of the Will. It will not be easy to convey the
breadth and the boundless range which we are to
attach to this conception. That it is not an airy
figment is clear from the fact that for centuries the
Greeks, with full consciousness, adopted as their
highest law (though directed to a somewhat different
end) that impulse of the will which they called
Kalokagathia , a

fca . 1 Auabildung.

a A harmony of character, compounded of beauty and
goodness.

THE NEW SOCIETY

103

From one who has introduced the conception of
mechanism into German thought, who has rescued
the conception of the soul from the hands of the
psychologists and brought it back to its primal
meaning, who has written so much about soulless
intellectualism, and has put forward the empire of
the soul as the goal of humanity, it is not to be
expected that he should preach any mechanical kind
of culture, or indeed any that it is possible to
acquire by learning.

How culture is to be produced we shall see;
the first thing necessary is that it should be willed.

Willed it must be, in a sense and with a strength
of purpose and a force of appreciation of which we
to-day, when the ages of faith, of the Reformation,
of the German classics, and the wars of liberation,
lie so far behind us, have no idea at all.

When the current conception of intellectual culture
so much prized in family, society and business life,
and tricked out with criticisms of style, with historical
data and incidents of travel is justly ridiculed, then
the will to complete cultivation of the body, the
intellect and the soul of the people must be so strong
that all questions of convenience, of enjoyment, of
prestige and of material interests must sink far into
the background. This word must sound so that all
who hear it can look in each other’s eyes with a full
mutual understanding and without the slightest sense
of ambiguity; just as they do in Japan when the
name of the common head of all families, the Mikado,

104

THE NEW SOCIETY

is named. There must be one thing in Germany
and it must be this thing, which is altogether out of
reach of the yawning, blinking and grinning scepticism
of the coffee-house, and of the belching and growling
of the tavern. Any man who puts this thing aside
in favour of his class-ideas, or his speculations in
lard, or his dividends, or the demands of his Union,
must understand that he is doing something as
offensive as if he went out in public without washing
himself.

The conception of Culture as our true and unique
faculty must be so profoundly grasped that in public
life and legislation it must have the first word and
the last. Though we become as poor as church-mice
we must stake our last penny on this, and tune up "
our education and instruction, our models and out¬
look, our motives and claims, our achievement and
our atmosphere, to so high a point that any one
coming into Germany shall feel that he is entering
into a new age.

Society must be penetrated by this conception.
Those classes which already possess something re¬
sembling it—such as training, education, experience,
tradition, outlook, good breeding—must pour out
with both hands what they have to dispense; not
in the way of endowments, conventicles, lectures
and patronizing visits, but in quiet, self-sacrificing,
personal service.

All this, of course, cannot be done without the free
response of the other side. The devoted attempts

THE NEW SOCIETY

105

which have been made, especially in England, and
for some years with us too, to win this response
by long and unselfish solicitation were destined to
remain merely the mission of individual lives, for
they were not supported by the will of the com¬
munity as a whole; it rather ran counter to them.
A Peace of God must be proclaimed, not as between
the Haves and the Have-nots, not between the prole¬
tariat and the capitalists, not between the so-called
cultured classes and the uncultured, but between
those who are ready for a mutual exchange of experi¬
ence, a give-and-take of their tradition on both sides.
Not an exchange on business principles, such as
propaganda in satisfaction of demands, or curiosity
on one side for a new pastime on the other, but a
covenant. This, however, is only practicable if the
class-war, as an end in itself, is put a stop to.

The great change itself cannot be come by so
cheaply; it demands other assumptions, of which
we shall have something to say later. But the
attitude and temper, the recognition of the task,
could not be better introduced than through the
mutual service of the two social strata.

We have still at our disposal, handed on from the
past, certain organized methods of investigation and
administration. We now need chairs and institutes
of research, not for the trivial business of popular
enlightenment and lectures, but for the study and
investigation of the needs of national culture,
the idea which must now take the place of national

IOC

THE NEW SOCIETY

defence. We shall have need of central authorities,
not, like the late Ministries of Culture skimping the
scanty endowment of the Board Schools, but doing
the work of German education, progress, and inter¬
change of labour . 1

1 Arbeitsausgleich. The meaning of this will be apparent
later.

XI

Some decades ago the conscience of middle-class
society in England was stirred. The result -was
Toynbee Hall and the Settlements-movement, which
afterwards found praiseworthy counterparts in Ger¬
many. Society had begun to understand the wrong
which it had done to its brothers, the proletariat,
whom it had robbed of mind, and offered them
instead soul-destroying, mechanical labour. Then
choice spirits arose who dedicated their whole lives
to the service of their brothers. This great and
noble work did much to soften pain and hatred, and
here and there many a soul was saved by it; but it
could not act as it was intended to act, because it
could not become what it imagined itself to be.

It ought to have been, and believed itself to be, a
simple and obvious piece of love-service, a pure
interchange of spiritual possessions between class
and class, no condescending pity or educative mis¬
sion. It was a noble and a splendid error; the
movement retained the form of sacrifice and bene¬
faction. On both sides social feeling was indifferent
to it, or even hostile. What one hand gave, a

thousand others took back; what one hand received,

107

108

THE NEW SOCIETY

a thousand others rejected. The collective con¬
science of a class had never been stirred, it was
merely that the conscience of certain members of
upper-class society had sent out envoys; it had not
moved as a body. Individuals were ready to sacrifice
themselves, but the conditions of labour remained
unchanged.

So long as a general wrong is allowed to stand, it
gives the lie to every individual effort. The wrong
becomes even more bitter because it loses its uncon¬
sciousness—men know it for wrong, and do not
amend it. For this reason a second movement of
importance, that of the People’s High Schools, which
has created in Denmark the most advanced peasant-
class in existence, can achieve no social reform in
lands cloven by proletarianism. If in addition to
this the High School movement should depart from
its original conception, that of a temporary com¬
munity of life between the teachers and the taught,
and should, instead of this, resolve itself into a
lecture-institution, then the danger arises that what
is offered will be disconnected matter, intended for
entertainment, and without any basis of real know¬
ledge, something commonly called half-culture which
is worse than unculture, and is more properly described
as misculture.

No work of the charitable type can bring about
the reconciliation of classes or be a substitute for
popular education. The reconciliation of classes,
however, even if it were attainable, is by no means

THE NEW SOCIETY

109

our goal, but rather the abolition of classes, and our
ultimate object is not popular education but popular
culture. We do not intend to give with one hand
and take back with the other, we shall not condemn
a brother-people to dullness and quicken a few
chosen individuals; no, we mean to go to the root
of the evil, to break down the monopoly of culture,
and to create a new people, united and cultured
throughout.

But the root of the trouble lies in the conditions
of labour. It is an idle dream to imagine that out
of that soulless subdivision of labour which governs
our mechanical methods of production, the old handi¬
crafts can ever be developed again. Short of some
catastrophic depopulation which shall restore the
mediaeval relation between the area of the soil and
the numbers that occupy it, the subdivision of labour
will have to stand, and so long as it stands no man
will complete his job from start to finish—he will
only do a section of it; at best, and assuming the
highest mechanical development, it will be a work
of supervision. But mindless and soulless work no
man can do with any joy. The terrible fact about
the mechanization of industry is that productive work,
the elementary condition of life, the very form of
existence, which fills more than half of each man’s
waking day, is by it made hated and hateful. It
degrades the industrious man, thrilling with energy,
into a work-shy slacker—for what else does it mean
that all social conflicts culminate in the demand for

110

THE NEW SOCIETY

a shortening of the hours of work ? For the peasant,
the research-worker, the artist, the working day is
never long enough; for the artisan, who calls him¬
self par excellence a “ worker,” it can never be too
short.

The advance of technical invention will make it
possible in the end to transform all mechanical work
into supervision. But the process will be long and
partial, we cannot wait till it is completed, especially
as times will come when technical knowledge will
stand still, or even, it may be, go back. Any one
who knows in his own flesh what mechanical work
is like, who knows the feeling of hanging with one’s
whole soul on the creeping movement of the minute-
hand, the horror that seizes him when a glance at the
watch shows that the eternity which has passed has
lasted only ten minutes, who has had to measure
the day’s task by the sound of a bell, who kills his
lifetime, hour after hour, with the one longing that
it might die more quickly—he knows how the shorten¬
ing of the working day, whatever may be put in its
place, has become for the factory artisan a goal of
existence.

But he knows something else as well. He knows
the deadliest of all wearinesses—the weariness of the
soul. Not the rest when one breathes again after
wholesome bodily exertion, not the need for relaxa¬
tion and distraction after a great effort of intellect,
but an empty stupor of exhaustion, like the revulsion
after unnatural excess. It is the shallowest kind of

THE NEW SOCIETY

111

tea-table chatter to talk about good music, edifying
and instructive lectures, a cheerful walk in God’s
free Nature, a quiet hour of reading by the lamp,
and so on, as a remedy for this. Drink, cards,
agitation, the cinemas, and dissipation can alone
flog up the mishandled nerves and muscles, until
they wilt again under the next day’s toil.

The worker has no means of comparison. He does
not know what wholesome labour feels like. He i
will never find his way back to work on the land,
for there he cannot get the counter-poisons which he
thinks indispensable, and he lacks the organic,
ordering mind which mechanical employment has
destroyed. Even if some did get back, it would be in
vain, for though agriculture is hungering for thousands
of hands it cannot absorb millions. The worker has
no means of comparison; hence his bottomless con¬
tempt for intellectual work, the results of which he
recognizes, but which, in regard to the labour it
costs, he puts on a level with the idling of the folk
whom he sees strolling or driving about with their
lapdogs in the fashionable streets.

The middle-class conscience, and even that of the
men of science, turns away its face in shameful
cowardice from the horror of mechanized labour.
Apart from the well-meaning aesthetes who live in
rural elegance surrounded by all the appliances which
mechanism can supply, who wrinkle their brows when
the electric light goes out, and who write pamphlets
asking with pained surprise why people cannot return

112

THE NEW SOCIETY

to the old land-work and handicraft, most of us take
mechanical labour as an unalterable condition of
life, and merely congratulate ourselves that it is not
we who have to do it.

The Utopianist agitators who knowingly or un¬
knowingly suppress the essential truth that their
world of equality will be a world of the bitterest
poverty, treat the situation just as lightly. Before
them, in the future State, hovers the vision of some
exceptional literary or political appointment. The
others may console themselves with the thought that
in spite of a still deeper degree of poverty, towards
which they are sinking by their own inactivity, the
hell of mechanical work, by no means abolished, will
probably be a little reduced, so far as regards the time
they spend in it. The notion that mechanical work
will be made acceptable and reconciled with intel¬
lectual, if only it is short enough and properly paid,
has never been thought out; it is a still-born child of
mental lethargy, like all those visions of the future
that are being held up to our eyes. Try notions
like this on any other ill—toothache, for instance !
All our rhetoric about mechanical work being no ill
at all, is ignorant or fraudulent, and if nothing further
be done than to reduce it to four hotirs, all our social
struggles will immediately be concentrated on bring¬
ing it down to two. The goal of Socialism, so far as
it relates to this pons asinorum of shortening hours,
is simply the right to loaf.

Let us look facts in the face. Mechanical work is

THE NEW SOCIETY

118

an evil in itself, and it is one which we never can get
rid of by any conceivable economic or social trans¬
formation. Neither Karl Marx nor Lenin has suc¬
ceeded here, and on this reef will be wrecked every
future State that may be set up on the basis of current
Socialistic ideas. In this point lies the central
problem of Socialism; undisturbed, as was till lately
that legendary conception of surplus-value, and bed¬
ded, like that conception, in a rats’-nest of rhetorical
phrases, repeated from mouth to mouth and never
tested by examination.

The bringing of Mind into the masses, the cul¬
tured State , 1 which is the only possible foundation
of a society worthy of humanity, must remain un¬
attainable until everything conceivable has been
thought out and done to alleviate the mischievous
operation of this evil, which dulls and stupefies the
human spirit and which, in itself, is ineradicable.
No Soviet-policy, no socialization, no property-policy,
no popular education, nor any other of the catch¬
words which form ad nauseam the monotonous staple
of our current discussion of affairs, can go to the
heart of the problem. Instead we must establish
and put into practice the principle which I have »
called that of the Interchange of Labour, and which
I must now, in broad outline, endeavour to explain.

The object of this principle is to bring mind into
labour. It demands—since mind cannot be brought
into mechanical work beyond a certain degree fixed

1 Bildungsstaat.

II

114

THE NEW SOCIETY

by technical conditions—that the day’s work as a
whole shall have a share of it, by means of the ex¬
change and association of mental and mechanical
employment. Until this principle shall have been
carried into effect, all true culture of the people
remains impossible. So long as there is no culture
of the people, so long must culture remain a
monopoly of the classes, and of escapes from the
masses; so long must society be wanting in equi¬
librium, a union open to breach from every side,
and one which, however highly its social institutions
may be developed, holds down the people to forced
labour, and destroys culture.

XII

There is a way by which the day’s work can be
ennobled, and even have mind brought into it , 1 on
capitalistic lines. Before the War we were just about
to enter on this path—America is treading it now.
Its fundamental condition is a huge increase in
general well-being.

The daily wages of the American working-man
have risen, as we have already remarked, to seven
or even ten dollars, corresponding to a purchasing
power of over a hundred marks. This amounts to
so radical a removal of all restrictions in domestic
economy that one can no longer speak of the prole¬
tarian condition as existing in the United States.
A man who drives to his work in his own automobile
can satisfy all his reasonable needs in the way of
recreation and of extending his education, he looks
at his sectional job (as has not seldom been the case
in America even in earlier days) with a critical eye,
he forms his own judgment of its place in the whole,
he improves the processes, and amuses himself by

1 Vergeistigt werden. It is difficult to render this word in
the sense in which Rathenau uses it; * intelloctualized ’ does
not say enough, and * spiritualized ’ says a little too much.

115

116

THE NEW SOCIETY

being both workman and engineer. (Consider in the
light of this fact the value of the prophecy that
America is standing on the brink of Bolshevism !)

In a country whose wealth at this moment—in
consequence of war-profits and depreciation of money
—is almost equal to that of the rest of the world
put together, the process of abolishing proletarianism
can go forward on capitalistic lines. But we Germans,
since it is decreed that we shall be among the poorest
of the peoples, and must begin afresh, and live for
the future—we shall renounce without envy the
broad path of the old way of thought, the way of
riches, in order to clear with hard work the new
path on which, one day, all will have to follow
us. The way of Culture is the way to which we are
pointed, and we have described Interchange of
Labour as the fundamental condition which enables
us to travel it. It is now clear that the conception
of popular culture is not, after all, represented
by any of the five-and-twenty idealizing catch¬
words with which we are wont to console ourselves
in our elegiac orations, but that by it is meant a
clearly defined political procedure.

By the principle of Interchange of Labour it is re¬
quired that every employee engaged in mechanical
work can claim to do a portion of his day’s work
in intellectual employment; and that every brain¬
worker shall be obliged to devote a portion of his
day to physical labour.

There are, of course, fixed limits to the application

THE NEW SOCIETY

117

of this principle, on the one side in intellectual, on
the other in bodily incapacity, as well as in those rare
cases where it is recognized that the interrupted
hours of intellectual work cannot be made good.

We would also establish a year of Labour-Service,
to be devoted by the whole youth of Germany, of
both sexes, to bodily training and work.

The tests of capacity and of the claim to be reckoned
as “ cultured ” is not to consist in examinations but
in proof of work. Any one who can offer some show
of claim can demand to be tested, and, if the result
is favourable, to receive further culture. Thus we
shall be taking seriously the question of the ascent
to higher grades, which, so long as it depends on a
particular age, or on school certificates, must remain
on paper.

Let no one say that this testing system is a mere
mechanical method, that it degrades Culture from
its intellectual dignity, and is equivalent to the
Chinese literary tests for office. True culture
is distinguished from mere sybaritic aestheticism in
that in some sense or other it makes for production.
Where there is no talent for art or for creative thought,
then there remain to be developed the educational
forces of judgment, or a faculty for the conduct of
life, which must have their influence.

Different categories of Culture will arise of them¬
selves; not ranks or castes or classes, but grades of
society, each of which may be attained by any one.
No one must be able to say that any monopoly of

118

THE NEW SOCIETY

culture has barred his way, or that training and
testing have been denied him. If the culture be
genuine it will never look down in intellectual arro¬
gance on the stages below it; if it have duties associ¬
ated with it, then he who has rejected the path of
ascent, or has failed in it, cannot claim to fulfil those
duties. Any one who has no faculty but that of a
glib tongue will find in the multiplicity of callings
some field for his activity; but the rule of the talker,
backed by force or not, will at any rate be spared us.

At this point we may hear a voice from the average
heart of Socialism exclaim: “ How is this ? Do

you call that having no castes ? We have just begun
to shake off the yoke of the capitalists and now are
we expected to put the cultured in command ? This
is pure reaction ! ”

Softly ! If this is a case of misunderstanding, we
shall clear it up. If any scruples still remain, we
shall consider them further.

Let us take the misunderstanding first. It is
apparently forgotten that capitalism ruled by here¬
ditary power. Any one who belonged to that circle
ruled along with it, whether he were competent to
rule or not. But culture is not a heritable
possession; no one can win it save by virtue of a
higher spirit and will. He who has this spirit and
this will, can and will win it. He who wins it is fit
for higher responsibilities. Is the voice from the
average heart answered?

No. It replies : “ Heritable or not, what do we

THE NEW SOCIETY

119

care ? We are out for equality. Distinctions in
culture are a kind of aristocracy.”

Now, good heart, you have revealed yourself.
What was the meaning of your everlasting talk about
the ladder for the rise of capacity? I shall tell you.
The capable man is to toil, and to rise just so far as
you permit him, namely, till you can possess your¬
selves of the fruits of his labour: then he is to be
thrust down, and the loudest mouth is to rule. You
are not pleased with this interpretation? Neither
am I, so we are quits.

For of the folly of imagining a society of equals
I do not intend to speak. The average man, who
cannot understand equality of human dignity,
equality before God, thinks nothing of demanding
equality in externals, equality in responsibility and
vocation. But this sham equality is the enemy of
the true, for it does not fit man’s burden to his
strength, it creates overburdened, misused natures,
driving the one to scamped work and hypocrisy, and
the other to cynicism. Every accidental and in¬
herited advantage must indeed be done away with.
But if there is any one who, among men equal in
external conditions, in duties and in claims, demands
that they should also be equal in mind, in will and
in heart—let him begin by altering Nature !

In remuneration also, that is to say, in the appor¬
tionment of conditions of work, a mechanical equality
would be tantamount to an unjust and intolerable
inequality in the actual distribution or remission of

120

THE NEW SOCIETY

work. Work of the highest class, creative and intel¬
lectual work—the most self-sacrificing that is known
to man because it draws to itself and swallows up
a man’s whole life, including his hours of leisure
and recreation—this w’ork demands extreme con¬
sideration, in the form of solitude, freedom from
disturbance, from trivial and distracting cares or
occupations, and contact with Nature. This kind
of consideration is, from the economic point of view,
an outlay which mechanical work does not require.
If mechanical and intellectual work are to be placed
under the same specific conditions, under which the
highest standard of output is to be maintained and
the producers are as faj* as possible to bear an equal
burden, then the scale of remuneration must be
different. Starting from a subsistence minimum it
must for intellectual work be graded two stages
upward, one for the output , 1 and one for the grade
of culture implied.

Women will also be subject to this system of
grading whether they exercise any vocation outside
their homes or not, for society has a deep interest
in the culture of its mothers, and in external
incentives to culture women must share equally
with men.

1 Assuming that the highest output is reached in the
particular instance, which of course will not be the case with
every worker whether in the mechanical or intellectual sphere.
The author appears to be referring to amount, not quality, of
output, as the latter would be covered by the second clause,
relating to grade of culture (Bildungsstufe).

THE NEW SOCIETY

121

An intimate sense of association will grow up
within each grade of culture. This, however, will
not impair the general solidarity of the people,
since no hereditary family egoism can arise. This
sense of association, renewed with elements that
vary from generation to generation, and correspond¬
ing very much to the relations between contemporary
artists who spring from different classes or territories,
will dissolve the relics of the old hereditary senti¬
ment and absorb into itself whatever traditional
values the latter may possess.

Between the separate grades there will not only
be the connexion afforded by the living possibilities
of free ascent from one to the other, but the system
of ever-renewed co-operation in rank-and-file at the
same work will in itself promote culture, tradition,
and the consciousness of union. We need only recall
the old gilds and military associations in order to
realize what a high degree of manly civic conscious¬
ness can arise from the visible community of duty
and achievement. The mechanical worker will be¬
come the instructor of his temporary comrade and
guest, and the latter will in turn widen the other’s
outlook, and emulate him in the development of the
processes of production. The manual worker will
bring to the desk and the board-room his freedom
from prepossessions and the practical experience of
his calling; he will learn how to deal with abstrac¬
tions and general ideas; he will gain a respect for
intellectual work, and will feel the impulse to win

122

THE NEW SOCIETY

new knowledge and faculty, or to make good what
he has neglected.

Two objections remain to be considered and
confuted.

First: there are far more places to be filled in
mechanical than in intellectual employment. Is it
possible so to organize the interchange of work that
every one who desires intellectual employment can
find it ? The answer is: that, whether we like it or
not, all work tends more and more to take on an
administrative character. Just as in industry there
is ever more talk and less production, so our economic
life is working itself out through thousands upon
thousands of new organizations. Industrial Councils,
Councils of Workers, Gild-Councils, are forming them¬
selves in among the existing agencies of administra¬
tion; and the immediate consequence of this is a
tremendous drop in production, to be followed later
by a more highly articulated and more remunerative
system of work. It is as if a marble statue came to
life, and then had to be internally equipped with
bones, muscles, veins and nerves. Or it resembles
the transformation of a shabby piece of suburban
building-ground: it has to be dug up, drained,
paved, fenced; and until traffic has poured into it,
it remains a comfortless and dismal waste.

But the administrative side of our future economic
and national life demands the creation of so manv

90

posts of intellectual work that at present there is

THE NEW SOCIETY

128

not the trained ‘personnel to fill it. If the Year of
Labour-Service is introduced, there will be still
more defections and gaps to be filled. The rush
for intellectual work is more likely to be too small
than too great.

Let us come to the second objection. Will not
confusion be worse confounded if there are many
who have to fill two jobs, if, in these jobs constant
exchanges are taking place, if the periods of work
are brief and subject to untimely interruptions, if
time and work are lost through never-ending re¬
arrangement ?

Assuredly. And any one who starts with the idea
of the old high-strung work done, as it were, under
military discipline, any one who cherishes the re¬
motest idea that this system can ever return, in
spite of the fact that its clamps and springs have
been dashed to pieces, may well lament these un¬
settlements. One who starts from the fluctuating
conditions of our present-day, make-believe labour
will take organic unsettlements as part of the price
to be paid, if they only lead in the end to systematic
production. But one who weighs the fact that the
make-believe life of our present economy has not
even yet reached its final form, will discern in every
new transition-form, however tedious, the final
redemption; in so far, at least, as any equilibrium
is capable of being restored at all.

The essence of the interchange of labour will,
therefore, consist in this, that while the distinction

124

THE NEW SOCIETY

between physical and intellectual work will still exist,
there will be no distinction between a physical and
intellectual calling. Until advanced age may for¬
bid, it will be open to every man not merely to acquire
some ornamental branches of knowledge but seriously
and with both feet to take his footing in the opposite
calling to his own.

The different callings will learn to know and re¬
spect each other, and to understand their respective
difficulties. This applies particularly to those who
call themselves the operative workers.

As soon as hereditary idleness has come to an end
and loafing has been trampled out, then many a one,
who now thinks that mental work is mere chattering,
will learn through his novitiate at the desk, that
thinking hurts. If he does not feel himself equal to
this kneading and rummaging of the brain, he will
go back with relief to his workshop; he will neither
envy nor despise those who are operative workers
with the brain, and will understand, or at least un¬
consciously feel, the oppositions in human nature
and the differences in conditions of life, and will
know them to be just. He cannot and must not
keep himself wholly aloof from the elements of
mental training; his contact with brain-workers will
not cease; and thus his complete and passive resigna¬
tion to the domination of ignorant rhetoric will lose
its charm.

Any man will be respected who contents himself
with the lowest prescribed measure of culture.

THE NEW SOCIETY

125

who modestly renounces further study, and goes
back to manual work. But there will be no excuse
for those who know nothing and can do nothing,
but pretend to set everybody right; for there will
be no monopoly of culture to keep them down,
and all genuine faculty must come to the test of
action.

To-day there are three classes of social swindlers.
First, those who live on the community without
returning it any service. These are the people who
live idly on inherited money, and the loafers. Against
these social legislation must be framed. Secondly,
those who deliberately practise “ ca’ canny,” and
therefore live on the surplus work of their fellows.
These are the champions of the principle ; Every one
according to his need, no one according to his deed;
the saboteurs of labour. Against these the remedy
lies in the spread of intelligence and a just system
of remuneration. Thirdly, there are those who
simulate thought and brain-work while they have
nothing to give but hack phrases uttered with a
glib tongue. Against these worst of all swindlers,
these sinners against the Spirit, the remedy is
culture.

And this, in the new Order, is open to every one,
young or old, who can maintain his foothold in the
exercise of intellect, when the chance is offered him.
He who in his test-exercise reaches a normal standard
of accomplishment can demand that he shall not be

126

THE NEW SOCIETY

sent back to manual work, but continue to be em¬
ployed in the same occupation, and be further
cultivated in whatever direction he desires. At
every further stage of development a corresponding
sphere of activity is to be opened to him, up to the
point at which the limits of his capacity come into
sight.

Let no one object that the rush for intellectual
work will become uncontrollable. Would that it
might I For then the country would be so highly
developed and its methods of work so perfected
that there would be quite a new relation between
the demand for head-work and for hand-work. For
a long time to come this rush will be far smaller than
we imagine; for the immediate future it will suffice
if the rising forces are set free, and the laggard are
tranquillized.

But, the Radicals will cry, what an unsocial
principle ! Have we at last, with difficulty, brought
it to the point that the accursed one-year examina¬
tion 1 is abrogated, and now are we again to be
condemned according to this so-called standard of
culture ?

Stay I there is a fallacy here. In our transition
period which is still quite dominated by the mono¬
poly of culture, I have nothing to say against the
abrogation of every educational test, even though
in a few years we shall feel the deeply depressing

1 Referring to the shortening of military service which used
to be accorded to recruits of a certain educational standard.

THE NEW SOCIETY 127

effects which will arise from the domination of the
uncultured.

But the transition period will come to an end.
Then every one who likes will be able to learn and to
execute, and every one who is able will wish to do so.

“ But supposing one does not wish ? May not he
be the very one who is most capable of achievement ?
We don’t want model pupils.”

Nor do I want model pupils. The boy who has
learnt nothing may make his trial as a man when
culture is open to all. But if, as a man, he does
not care to rack his brains he will be thought none
the less of; he will merely be offered ordinary work
according to his choice.

But those who wish to see responsibility and the
destiny of the country placed in the hands of men
who do not care to rack their brains, must not en¬
trench themselves behind social principles, but plainly
admit that they want for all time to establish the
rule of demagogy and the vulgarization of intellect.
It is not for such a one to pass judgment on the
mission of Germany.

The way to the German mission, to German culture,
which is to be no more a culture of the classes
but of the people, stands open to all by means of
the Interchange of Labour. The whole land is as
it were a single ship’s crew; the issues are the same
for all. The manual worker is no longer kept down
by over-fatigue, and the brain-worker is no longer
cut off from the rest of the people.

128

THE NEW SOCIETY

The manual worker no longer regards the territory
of culture as a sort of inaccessible island, but
rather as a district which he can visit every day and
in which he is quite at home. Every one in future
will start even in school training, and the degree
to which his further culture may be carried will
not be limited by want of money or of time, or,
above all, of opportunity. He will continually have
intercourse with men of culture, and in that
intercourse he will at once give and receive; the
habits of thought, the methods and the range of
intellectual work which are now only the heritage of
a few will be his own; and the two-fold language
of the country, the language of conceptions and the
language of things, will for him be one.

There will be no permanent system of stratifica¬
tion; the energies of the people, rising and falling,
will be in constant movement and their elements
will never lose touch. There may be self-tormenting
and unhappily constituted natures who will hate
their own dispositions and the destiny they have
shaped for themselves—these aberrations will never
cease so long as men are men—but there will be
no more hatred of class for class, any more than
there is in any voluntary association of artists or of
athletes.

And since culture is to be at once the recognized
social aim of the country and the personal goal and
standard of each individual, the struggle for posses¬
sions and enjoyments, doubly restrained by public

THE NEW SOCIETY 129

opinion and by deeper insight, will sink into the
background.

But the spirit of the land will not resemble any
that we know at present. As in the Middle Ages,
a spiritual power will rule, but it will not be imposed
from without or above, it will be a creation from
within. The competition of all will be like that of
the best in the time of the Renaissance, but it will
not be a competition for conventional values but for
the furthering of life. The country will become, as
it was in former days, a generous giver, not, how¬
ever, from the lofty eminence of a class set apart,
but out of the whole strength of the people.

Again, for the first time, the convinced and con¬
scious will of a people will be seen to direct itself to
a common and recognized goal. This is a fact of
immeasurable significance, it implies the exercise of
forces which we only discern on the rare mountain-
peaks of history, and of which the last example was
the French Revolution.

But those dangers of which we have spoken, that
hell of a mechanical socialism, of institutions and
arrangements without sentiment or spirit, are done
away with, for production has ceased to be merely
material and formal, it has acquired absolute value
and substance. Spirit is the only end that sanctifies
all means; and it sanctifies not by justifying them
but by purifying them.

i

XIII

As the kinsfolk of a dying man comfort themselves
in the death-chamber with every little droop in the
curve of temperature, although they know in their
hearts that the hour has come, so our critics flatter
themselves with the idea that in the end all will
come right, if not by itself at least with trifling
exertion. But it is not so: except by the greatest
exertion nothing will come right. Our lake-city of
economics and social order is ripe for collapse, for
the piles on which it is built are decayed. It is true
that it still stands, and will be standing for an hour
or so, and life goes on in it very much as in the days
when it was sound. We can choose either to leave
it alone, and await the downfall of the city, among
whose ruins life will never bloom again, or we can
begin the underpinning of the tottering edifice, a pro¬
cess which will last for decades, which will allow no
peace to any of us, which will be toilsome and danger¬
ous, and will end almost imperceptibly, when the
ancient city has been transformed into the new.

Let us have no doubt about it: something tremen¬
dous and unprecedented has to be accomplished here*

Does any thinking man believe that when the social

130

THE NEW SOCIETY

131

order of the world has collapsed, when a country of
the importance of Germany has lost the very basis
of its existence, when the development of centuries
is broken off, its faculties and its traditions emptied
of value and repudiated—does any man really be¬
lieve that by means of certain clauses in a Constitu¬
tion a few confiscations, socializations and rises in
wages, a nation of sixty millions can be endowed
with a new historical reason for existence? Why is
not the negro republic of Liberia ahead of all of us ?

Our character is weak on the side of will, and our
former lords say that we are good for nothing except
under strict discipline administered by dynasts and
hereditary nobles. If that is true, it is all over
with us; unless some dictator shall take pity on us
and give us a modest place among the nations with
a great past and a small future. If we are worthy
of our name we must be born again of the Spirit.
Merely to conceive this is in itself an achievement
for a people; to carry it out, to embody the con¬
ception in a new order of society, is at once a test
and an achievement.

Our social ethics must take up a new position.
Hitherto—stripping off the usual rhetorical phrases—
it has taken its stand on two effective and really
driving principles, those of Duty and of Success;
two side-views of Individualism. All else, including
love of one’s neighbour, sense of solidarity, faith,
spiritual cultivation, feeling for Nature, was (apart
from a few lofty spirits) merely subsidiary; means

182

THE NEW SOCIETY

to an end, convention or falsehood. There were few
whose careers were not influenced by these estimates;
the majority of the upper classes was wholly under
their dominion.

The two goals of our wishes, to have something
and to be something, were expressed by the whole
outward aspect of society. The great object was not
to be counted as a Tom, Dick or Harry, one who had
less, or was less, than others. There were grades of
being, grades of human being : it was possible to be
something, to be much, to be little, or to be nothing
at all. From the white collar to the pearl necklace,
from the good nursery to the saloon car, from the
watch-ribbon to the sword-belt, from the place at
the ordinary to the title of Excellency, everything
was a proof of what one had, or was, or believed
oneself to be. If one did not know a man one must
not speak to him; if one knew him, one might borrow
a hundred marks from him, but one must not ask
him for a penny. Whoever had wealth displayed it
in order to be admired; whoever had a social position
displayed his unapproachability and the weight of
his dignity, as, for instance, when with an absent
look and lost in the burden of his own existence he
entered a dining-hall. From inferiors one demanded
a degrading attitude and forms of speech, and pre¬
sented to them a face of stone; towards those in
higher position one came to life and displayed an
attentive civility. It was—or shall we say is?—
permissible to lavish in an hour the monthly income

THE NEW SOCIETY

188

of a poor family. “ One had it to spend ” and
“ what business was it of theirs ? ” In the lower
ranks there was much of genuine revolt against these
abuses and also much envy and malice, much open
imitation, and much of secret admiration. Every
silly craze was cheapened in hideous imitations, the
suburb and the village made a display which in
quality, indeed, fell below the model, but in quantity
not at all.

It may be said that these were excrescences or city
fashions; that one must not generalize. These are
empty phrases. To understand the spirit of a society
it is not hermits that one must study. And, more¬
over, let any one ask himself whether this society
was really based on the idea of solidarity and human
friendliness or upon unscrupulous personal interests
and exploitation, on shows and shams, on the demand
for service and the claim to command. If anything
can explain the eagerness with which we Germans
flung ourselves into a war whose origins we did
not know and did not want to know, then besides
the conscious objects, advantage, rehabilitation, and
renown, we must also take into account the obscure
impulse of the national conscience which in the midst
of evil individualism and of personal and class egoism
yearned for the sense of solidarity and fusion.

Is it objected that all this lies deeply rooted in
human nature, that it has been there from time
immemorial, and it is impossible to alter it at one
stroke ? Pedantic drivel 1 Many things lie deep in

184

THE NEW SOCIETY

human nature, and it depends on which of these the
will chooses to develop. And who talked of altering
things at one stroke ? Our judgment of values is to
be transformed, and if human nature never changed,
much that now flaunts itself in the sunshine would
be creeping in the shade. This transformation of
judgment is a matter of recognizing things for what
they are. When pomp, extravagance, exclusiveness,
frivolity and fastness, greed, place-hunting and vulgar
envy are looked on with the same eyes as aberrations
in other provinces of life, then we shall not indeed
have abolished all vice, but the atmosphere will be
purified. Look at our sturdy Socialists of the
November days 1 and proselytes of every description :
you can see that the acquisition of a new judgment
of values may be the affair of an hour 1 And for that
reason one must not criticize them too closely—unless
they try to make a profit out of their conversion.

All social judgments presuppose a system of recog¬
nized values. The values of Christian ethics have
never penetrated deeply into the collective judgment
of mankind; even in the mediaeval bloom of Christian,
or rather of ecclesiastical, culture the moral concep¬
tions of Christianity remained the possession of a few
chosen spirits and communities; society in general
accepted the mythical element, did homage to the
hierarchy, and remained ethically pagan, the upper
classes being guided by a code of honour resting on
the worship of courage. The Churches never made

1 1918, when the revolution in Germany broke out at Kiel.

THE NEW SOCIETY

135

any serious effort to shape an ethical code; they
were preoccupied with the teaching of dogmas of faith
which carried them ever farther and farther from the
groundwork of the Gospels, and they devoted whatever
surplus energies they had to politics, and to accommo¬
dations with the ruling powers of the world.

The cult of courage imposed on and exercised by
the ruling classes, and symbolically imaged in their
code of honour, took an effective shape in the ban¬
ning of cowardice and of cowardly crime. So far as
positive values go, the ethics of nobility degenerated
into smartness, the claim for “ satisfaction ” and the
exclusiveness of rank; a Prussian and Kantian
abstraction, the conception of duty, a conception at
bottom unproved and incapable of generating con¬
viction, became a rule of life, made effective by
training and control. The ruling powers and their
controls have given way, and their dry brittleness is
revealed.

We have not succeeded in finding a substitute for
social ethics in an idealized type of national character.
The imagination of the Western nations, like those of
antiquity, has shaped ideal types which they believe
or would wish themselves to resemble; they know
what they mean by “ esprit gaulois,” or “ English
character,” or “ American Democracy,” while, in
accordance with the problematic character of our
being, we Germans, except for the statuesque heroes
of legendary times, or certain historic but inimitable
figures, have conceived or poetically created no

186

THE NEW SOCIETY

character of which we can say that it embodies the
collective spirit of Germany.

The super-ethical doctrine of the being, the growth
and the empire of the soul has been laid down by us,
but there are as yet few into whose consciousness it
has penetrated; the transformation of thought and
feeling which must proceed from it will not lay hold
of the masses directly, but will filter continually from
one social stratum to another.

The recognized values of social judgment 1 It sounds
so abstract, so remote from practice, that one might
well believe we were landed again in the cloudland of
festal oratory and the emotions of the leading article.
The voluntary recognition of an invisible authority !
And this after we have shattered the visible, and are
living in the midst of intellectual anarchy and moral
Nihilism 1 And yet moral valuations, simple, binding,
and on the level of social judgment, are near enough
to be within our grasp.

Are not all the four quarters of the world to-day
talking about Democracy? Have not we ourselves
got tired of this word, forbidden till a year ago—tired,
even in circles where the modest word “ Liberal ** was
never pronounced without a frown ? And what does
Democracy mean ? Do we take it in the merely nega¬
tive sense, that one is no longer obliged to put up with
things ? Or in the meagre sense, that responsibility goes
by favour, and that the majority must decide? Or
the dubious sense, that we are yearning to make our
way through a sham Socialism to the Dollar Republic ?

THE NEW SOCIETY

137

It is not the form of government, it is the form of
society, that determines the spirit of a land. There
is no democratic form of society, for democracy can
be in league with capitalism, with socialism, or even
with the class of clubs and castes. The unspoken
fundamental conception which gives significance and
stability both to the forms of a democratic constitu¬
tion and to those of an organic society is called Soli¬
darity—that is to say, cohesion and the sense of com¬
munity. Solidarity means that each man does not
come first in his own eyes, but before God and State
and himself each man must stand and be answerable
for all, and all for each.

In this sense of solidarity the dominion of the
majority over the minority is not an object to be
striven for but an evil to be avoided; the true object
of a solid democracy is the dominion of a people over
itself, not by reckoning up the relative strength of its
various interests, but by virtue of the spirit and of the
will which it sets free. In this sense of solidarity no
society can be based on hereditary monopolies either
of capital or of cultivation; nor can it be delivered
over to the terrorism of vocations and unions which,
under the leaderships of shouters, claim the right
whenever they please, to strangle indispensable indus¬
tries; nor can it be based on demagogic flattery of
excitable mobs. Every born man must from his
cradle onwards have the same right to existence; he
must be sheltered and fostered as he grows up, and
be free to choose his lot. Every occupation must be

138

THE NEW SOCIETY

open to him, except that he must not encroach on the
sphere of another man’s liberty. The standard of his
activity is not to be fixed by birth or privilege or force
or cunning or the glib tongue, but again, by spirit
and by will.

To-day, while cultivation of the spirit is still a class-
monopoly, it cannot form any standard of creative
capacity. And yet it has been demonstrated that so
powerful is the passion for culture in a spirit which
is in any degree qualified for it, that even to-day it is
capable, by self-education, of surmounting some of
the artificial barriers. There was not, to my know¬
ledge, any illiterate among the Prussian or German
Ministers of the new era, and the one of them who
excused his deficiencies of language with the class-
monopoly of education was in the wrong, for any
man of normal capacity might in ten years* practice
of popular oratory have learned the elements of
syntax.

When access to the cultivation of the German
spirit has become a common right of the whole people,
Culture will become, if not the sign at least the pre¬
supposition of creative activity. The proof of
capacity will then cease to be settled either between
agitators and the masses, or in the dimness of privi¬
leged chanceries, but in the productive competition
of men of high intellectual endowment.

Society will not be divided by classes and castes,
it will not be graded according to pedigree or posses¬
sions, it will not be ruled by separate interests; by

THE NEW SOCIETY

189

ideas or by the masses; it will be an ordered body—
ordered by spirit, by will, by service and responsibility.

Any one who does not accept this self-created and
self-renewing order, and who at the same time rejects
the old, is simply working for the dominion of force
and chance. A society can no more remain per¬
manently without order than the staff of a factory or
the crew of a ship. Only instead of an organic order
we may have an accidental and arbitrary, an order of
the personal type, springing from the dexterity shown
in some favourable moment, maintaining itself by
force, and seeking to perpetuate itself in some form of
hereditary oligarchy.

An order of the priestly and hierarchical type is no
longer thinkable to-day, nor can one of the peasant
type come into question in a land of urban industry.
Whoever wishes to see an organic self-determining and
self-regenerating order of society, has therefore to
choose between the military order, resting upon dis¬
ciplined bodily capacity, or the mercantile and capital¬
ist order which rests upon business-sense and egoistic
alertness, or the demagogic order which rests upon
the rhetorical domination of the masses, and does not
last long as it soon turns to violence and oligarchy,
or finally the order of culture, resting upon spirit,
character, and education.

This last is not merely the only suitable one for us
and the only one which is worthy of our past; it will
also in time become the general order of society pre¬
vailing over all the world. In the vision of this order

140

THE NEW SOCIETY

we recognize the mission that Prussia neglected,
though it lay within its grasp for a hundred
years; what it neglected and the rock on which it
foundered.

The greatness of Prussian policy since 1713 lay in
its premonition and appreciation of the principle of
mechanism even before it became common to all
the world. Organization and improvement, the war
machine and money, science, practicality and con¬
scientiousness—all this is clearly mechanization seen
from the political side.

The early application of these principles was a
stroke of genius far in advance of the then condition
of the world. Seen from this standpoint, all the rest
of the continental world, not yet mechanized, and
burdened with the relics of medievalism, Cesarism
and clericalism, seemed torpid and lost in illusions :
arbitrary, inaccurate and slovenly. With short
interruptions this Prusso-central point of view was
maintained until the middle of the World-War; and
not quite unjustly, for Prussia remained in every
respect ahead of other powers in the department of
mechanization.

For a hundred years the Prussian principles had a
monopoly of success; elsewhere they were scarcely
understood and much less imitated. Then came
Napoleon.

He took over the mechanistic principle and handled
it as never a man had done before; he became the
mechanizer of the world. At the same time he was

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141

something mightier than that: he was the heir of the
French idea of spiritual and popular liberty.

Prussia fell, and would have fallen, even if its
mechanism had not grown rusty. Its leaders learnt
their lessons from France and England, they set on
foot a liberation of the people by departmental
authority and a liberation of the spirit by the people;
they put new life into the mechanism, and they con¬
quered with the help of England as we have lately
seen France conquer with the help of America.

But here came a parting of the ways. It was
possible to pursue either the way of mechanization or
that of the liberation of the spirit. Prussia did
neither; it stood still. In the place of the liberation
of the spirit came the reaction; in the place of
mechanization came the bureaucracy. On the rest
of the Continent, too, the movement for political
mechanization was stifled, the force that stifled it
being the uprising economic movement.

Bismarck was aware of the untried forces that lay
in the system of political mechanization. The world,
as we looked at it from our Prussian window, seemed
as loose and slovenly as ever, and it was so. Once
again, with a mighty effort, the Prussian mechanism
was revived and the movement of the bourgeoisie
towards liberty and the life of the spirit was repressed.
This was called “ realism ” in politics, and the esti¬
mate was a just one. There was no progress to be
made with professional Liberalism; but with Krupp
and Roon one organized victories. As in Frederick’s

142 THE NEW SOCIETY

time the slovenly Continent had to give way, Prussia
mounted to the climax of her fortunes, and won
Germany.

And again there was a parting of the ways; but
this time there was no one to stand for civic and
spiritual freedom. People believed they had all they
wanted of it; democracy was discredited and broken,
the professors were political realists, success followed
the side of mechanization, which was rightly supposed
to be linked with the dynasty, and mechanization in
the economic sphere drew to its side the hope of gain.

Bismarck died in the midst of anxieties, but to the
end he had no scruples. The two systems of mechan¬
ization were at their zenith, and the other countries
looked, in political affairs, as slovenly as ever. One
was wearing itself out in parliamentary conflicts,
another had no battle-cruisers, another was lacking
in cannon, or in recruits, or in railways, or in finances;
the trains never came in up to time, everywhere one
found public opinion or the Press interfering in pro¬
cess of law or in the administration, everywhere there
were scandals; in Prussian Germany alone was every¬
thing up to the mark.

Only one thing was overlooked. The mechanization
of economics had become a common possession for
everybody. Starting from this and with the methods
and experiences attached to it, it was possible also
for other countries, if necessary, to mechanize their
politics or, as we say now, to militarize them. And
this could be done with even more life and vigour

THE NEW SOCIETY

143

than in Prussia, whose organization was there believed
to be inimitable and where the principle of mechanism
was, as it were, stored up in tins and in some places
was obviously getting mouldy. In the matter of
Freedom, however, the other peoples were ahead of
us, and to the political isolation of Prussia spiritual
isolation was now added.

In the encircling fog which prevailed on economic
developments there was not a single statesman who
recognized that Prussian principles had ceased to be a
monopoly, or an advantage, not to mention a concep¬
tion of genius. This lack of perception was the
political cause of the war. Instead of renewing our¬
selves inwardly through freedom and the spirit, and
carrying on a defensive policy as quietly, discreetly,
and inconspicuously as possible, we took to arming
and hurrahing. Worse than any playing of false
notes was the mistake we made in key and in tempo :
D major, Allegro , Marcia , Fortissimo , with cymbals
and trumpets !

To-day we have no longer a choice before us, only a
decision. The period of mechanical Prussianization
is over for us, the period of the mechanical policy of
Force is over for all the world, although the heliographs
of Versailles seem to reflect it high above the horizon.
It is not a capitalistic Peace of God as imagined by the
international police which has now begun; it is the
social epoch. In this epoch the people will live and
will range themselves according to the strength of the
ideas which they stand for.

144

THE NEW SOCIETY

It is not enough for us to become Germans instead
of Prussians; not even if, as it were to be desired, we
should succeed in rescuing from the collapse of Prussia
her genuine virtues of practicality, order and duty.
It is not enough to brew some soulless mixture out of
the worn-out methods of the Western bourgeoisie and
the unripe attempts of Eastern revolutionaries. It is
not enough—no, it will lead us to destruction quicker
than any one believes—to blunder along with the
disgusting bickerings of interests and the complacent
narrowness of officialism, talking one day of the rate
of exchange, another of our debts, and the next of the
food question, plugging one hole with the stopping of
another and lying down at night with a sigh of relief:
Well, something’s got done; all will come right.

No, unthinking creatures that you are; nothing will
come right until you drop your insincere chatter,
your haggling, your agitating and compromising, and
begin to think. Here is a people that has lost the
basis of its existence, because, in its blind faith in
authority, it staked that existence on prosperity and
power; and both are gone. Do you want to stake our
existence, on ships, soldiers, mines, trade-connexions,
which we no longer possess, or upon the soil, of which
we have not enough, or upon our broken will to work ?
Are we to be the labour-serfs and the serfage stud-
farm of the world ? Only on Thoughts and Ideals can
our existence be staked. Where is your thought?
Where is the thought of Germany ?

We can and must live only by becoming what we

THE NEW SOCIETY

145

were designed to be, what we were about to be, what
we failed to become : a people of the Spirit, the Spirit
among the peoples of mankind. That is the thought
of Germany.

This thought is shaping the New Society—the
society of the spirit and the cultivation of the spirit,
the only one which can hold its ground in the new
epoch, and which fulfils it.

This is why we have been endowed with a character
whose will is weak in external things and strong in
inward responsibility; why depth and understanding,
practicality and uprightness, many-sidedness and
individuality, power of work and invention, imagina¬
tion and aspiration have been bestowed upon us, in
order that we may fulfil these things. For what do
these qualities, as a whole, betoken? Not the con¬
queror, not the statesman, not the worldling, and not
the man of business; it is a narrow and trivial misuse
of all faculty for us to pretend to represent these types
among the nations. They betoken the labourers of
the spirit; and far as we are from being a nation of
thinkers and poets, it is nevertheless our right and
our high calling to be a thinking nation among the
nations.

But on what, you may ask with scorn, is this think¬
ing nation to live? With all its wisdom, will it not
be reduced to beggary and starvation ?

No—it will live. That people which amid a century
of world-revolution is able to form for itself a stable,
well-balanced, ordered and highly developed form of

146

THE NEW SOCIETY

society will be one that works and produces. All
around there will be quarrelling and conflict, there
will be little work and little production. For the
next decade the question will be, not where is the
demand but where is the supply?

The countries are laid waste, as Germany was after
the Thirty Years’ War; only we do not as yet recog¬
nize it, so long as the fever lasts we do not notice
the decline.

Production, thought-out and penetrated with spirit,
on the part of a highly developed society, and com¬
bined with labour-fellowship, is more than valuable
production or cheap production; it is something
exemplary and essential. And this applies not only to
production itself but to the methods of production,
to the technique, the schooling, the organization, the
manner of thinking.

It is a petty thing to say that we were destroyed
out of envy. Why did not envy destroy America
and England? The world regarded us at once with
admiration and with repulsion; with admiration for
our systematic and laborious ways, with repulsion for
our tradesman-like obtrusiveness, the brusque and
dangerous character of our leadership and the osten¬
tatious servility with which we endured it. If it had
been possible anywhere outside of our naked, mer¬
cantile and national egoism to discover a German idea,
it would have been respected.

The German idea of cultivation of the spirit will win
something for us which we have not known for a

THE NEW SOCIETY

147

century, and the scope of which we cannot yet measure;
people will freely appreciate us, they will further us
and follow us on our way. We have no idea what it
means for a people to have these sympathetic forces
at its side, as France had in its creation of forms,
England and America in civilization and democracy,
Russia in Slavonic orthodoxy and the neutral States
in their internationalism.

There is no fear : we shall live, and more than live.
For the first time for centuries we shall again be con¬
scious of a mission, and around all our internal
oppositions will be twined a bond which will be some¬
thing more than a bond of interest.

The goal of the world-revolution upon which we have
now entered means in its material aspect the melting
of all strata of society into one. In its transcendental
aspect it means redemption: redemption of the lower
strata to freedom and to the spirit. No one can
redeem himself but every one can redeem another.
Class for class, man for man: thus is a people
redeemed. Yet in each case there must be readiness
and in each there must be good-will.

THE END

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