“Lucky Per” by Henrik Pontoppidan (translated by Naomi Lebowitz)

This novel, set in nineteenth century Denmark, is a bildungsroman. The eponymous hero, Per, was born into a rural Jutland family, whose men had, for generations, taken the cloth. His father was a hard and cold pastor, who was feared and ridiculed by his own congregation in equal measure. Per was the black sheep in the family. As a boy, he was more fun-loving, than god-fearing. At night, he liked to sneak out of the parsonage to go sledding and to flirt with girls. “An unappeasable hatred of his family awakened in his hitherto carefree soul, a defiant and bellicose feeling of abandonment that would become the heart and driving force of his future life.” Per was shunned by his parents and siblings alike and eventually packed off to Copenhagen to study engineering. Science and progress had become the buzz words of the age. Since Denmark’s defeat in the war to Prussia, its leading lights preached industrialization and modernization. To the enlightened, even Copenhagen seemed like a European backwater.

Per is caught up more than most in the fever of the age. “His life’s motto, “I Will,” would now be tested. It would be all or nothing.” He wants to become a man of substance and influence. He derides the religious-tempered and aesthetes alike. Despite his blooming atheism, Per felt in his bones that he was destined for something special. “For he knew now he was born to become, in his domain, the morning horn-herald, the path breaker in this sluggish society of thick-blooded sons of pastors and sextons.” Per has romantic dalliances with all that Copenhagen has to offer, eventually settling down and becoming betrothed to a Jewish heiress from an illustrious banking family. She is a like-minded soul: modern, passionate, and headstrong. “They talked together about the future, envisioned the coming century that, eventually, would give mankind back its spiritual freedom, reawaken the courage to act and the instinct for adventure, erect altars to strong and great deeds on the ruins of the church.” Armed with a letter of credit from his perspective father-in-law, Per travels the Continent to further his budding engineering schemes. However, his relationship with his father’s Church keeps lingering in his life. He cannot escape his past. The pull of the Danish countryside again proves alluring when he meets in Rome the wife of the Master of the Hunt in his native Jutland. “Nature folk were, essentially, the happiest. With a curtsy before a pair of sticks nailed together to form a cross, they solved all the riddles of life and death and let the fiddles wail on.” Eventually, having absconded to the country, Per meets two rural parish priests with divergent world views, who both, nonetheless, once again tug on his heartstrings and threaten to pull him back into the Christian fold. “How poor was the worth of such a cheaply bought cheerfulness in comparison with the faith or the doubt that had cost blood and battles…. The citizens who sat comfortably protected by their own lack of passion…. had never felt a titanic urge to struggle with the gods.” Eventually, Per makes his own personal peace with himself. “When, in spite of all the good fortune that had come his way, he wasn’t happy, it was because he had not wanted to be happy in the general sense of the word…. It was in solitude his soul felt at home, and in affliction and pain.”

“The Confucian-Legalist Legacy” by Dingxin Zhao

Zhao is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago. He attempts to frame the sweep of Chinese history through a Confucian-Legalist lens. The Confucian-Legalist state was “a system of government that merged political and ideological power, harnessed military power, and marginalized economic power. In the Confucian-Legalist state, emperors accepted Confucianism as a ruling ideology and subjected themselves to the control of a Confucian bureaucracy, while Confucian scholars both in and out of the bureaucracy supported the regime and supplied meritocratically selected officials who administered the country using an amalgam of Confucian ethics and Legalist regulations and techniques.” This was a formal system that had its precursors in the first Chinese dynasty, the Qin, but began in earnest in the Western Han dynasty, continuing, with only minor interruptions, for centuries, until the end of imperial China with the fall of the Qing dynasty.

Zhao begins his history with the city-state period of Western Zhou, from 1045 to 741 BC. “Three pivotal institutions of Western Zhou origin exerted an enduring impact on the history of China: the Mandate of Heaven, the kinship-based “feudal” system, and lineage law. The Mandate of Heaven concept, which originated as the early Zhou rulers’ justification for their overthrow of the Shang state, endured as a foundation of state power, widely accepted among Chinese rulers, the elite, and the people. The dominance of this political concept made government performance one of the most important bases of state legitimacy…. The Western Zhou “feudal” system took shape in the course of Western Zhou kinship-based military colonization. This political arrangement not only sustained Chinese culture when ancient China faced many potential intruders, but also contributed to the spread of Western Zhou culture and identity, and its writing system…. To regulate the relationships between the Western Zhou court and the enfeoffed city-states, the Zhou rulers gradually improvised a system of lineage law. The development of lineage law furthered the importance of family in Chinese culture…. Hierarchy, division of labor, and meritocracy contributed to the emergence of bureaucracy during the Western Zhou period.”

Even after the collapse of the Western Zhou, the Eastern Zhou city-states that emerged as power centers modeled their system of governance on their western predecessor. However, “the early Eastern Zhou city-states were not run by bureaucracies and had no standing armies. These city-states began as lineage-based organizations with dukes acting as lineage heads…. City dwellers in China did not possess a territory-based identity, and the Chinese city-states were not territorial states…. [Later,] during the Age of Total War, although all the major city-states had developed into territorial states, the social relations caged into these states were not yet territory-based…. Consequently, people accepted “foreign” rulers with little psychological aversion, and local scholars frequently travelled to other states to attain better positions, both of which were conducive to the unification of China.” The Eastern Zhou period is often separated into the Spring and Autumn period and the period of Warring States, together spanning 770-221 BC. Zhao, instead, breaks it into three periods—the Age of Hegemons (770-546 BC), the Age of Transition (545-420 BC), and the Age of Total War (419-221 BC).

The Eastern Zhou period was one of continual warfare and shifting alliances, as the new city-states sought to gain power at the expense of their neighbors. Throughout these centuries of war, the Qin, Jin, Qi, and Chu city-states emerged as dominant powers, although the Wu and Yue, particularly, developed later into formidable rivals as well. During the Age of Hegemons, “the states whose rulers became local hegemons tended to free themselves from the constraints of Western Zhou rituals and codes of conduct and to adopt war strategies based on their utility or efficiency…. Qi, Jin, Chu, and Qin were also able to achieve dominance because they were located on China’s outskirts and faced enemies on fewer fronts. Their peripheral geographic locations allowed them to retreat from interstate conflicts at the center when they were weakened, returning to the fray after regaining their strength…. To maintain dominance, a state needed to either conquer or manipulate the state of Zhou, which was thus far still a rallying point. As the spheres of influence of all four local hegemons…. converged, the four theaters of war gradually merged.” Along with warfare, these hegemons experimented with political reforms. Bureaucratization and secondary feudalization were two ways in which they tried to maintain control over their expanding territories. Land was parceled out based on the county (xian) system, which served both as an administrative and military unit.

During the Age of Transition, succession struggles broke the city-state of Jin into three competing states. This increased competition ramped up the process of innovation and reform. Li Kui, Duke Wen’s chief minister, is considered the first Legalist philosopher. He established a full-fledged bureaucracy, a comprehensive system of penal law, promoted increased agricultural production, and strengthened the army through universal conscription. These Legalist reforms put the State’s welfare (and its ruler’s) ahead of the people’s. “The state’s administration and taxation capabilities greatly increased as bureaucracy and meritocracy became the norm.”

In the Age of Total War, rival philosophers and teachers wandered from state to state selling their knowledge. Shi were the lower nobility, often poor, who sold their service to the state, as opposed to farming or commerce. They also started systems of private education. “Confucius (551-479 BC) was the first person to have offered private education on an impressive scale.” Shi also broke down kinship-based relations. Now, successful shi and the rulers who employed them became enmeshed in patronage networks. They were rewarded monetarily by their patrons and were free to leave them at will to search for better opportunities or more authority in neighboring states. “The kind of freedom of expression that the shi group exercised, whether in written treatises expressing their views or in oral disquisitions meant to attract the favorable attention of rulers, was a completely new phenomenon…. All the major states were trying to attract clever men and effective problem solvers to their side.”

Zhao takes an interlude here to describe the major tenets of Confucianism, Daoism, and Legalism. “Confucius believed that the Western Zhou political system, which had taken form during the early Western Zhou period and had matured by the mid-Western Zhou period, was the model of a good society.” Most important was zheng ming, the rectification of names. This meant that “people from a certain social position must fulfill the duties and behaviors associated with that position…. It was only when social relationships in a stratified system became ambiguous that social conflict intensified, and turmoil and chaos ensued.” Furthermore, “believing that law could not be the basis of a good society, Confucius prescribed instead the cultivation of virtue that he referred to as ren.” This was sometimes thought of as humaneness or excellence, as well. Finally, “Confucius urgently promoted the importance of li (ritualized decorum), ritual music, and family relationships in education and daily life…. As for the role of family, Confucius believed that the family, with its extensive duties, responsibilities, and associated rituals sanctioned by lineage law, was the most important venue in which virtues and ritualized decorum were learned and became second nature.”

Daoism emerged before the end of the fourth century BC. “The meaning of dao partly corresponds to the English “way” or “road.”” Laozi, author of the “Dao de jing,” did not believe in human intervention in society. Intervention solved one problem by creating many more. “The wisest conduct of society is neither an artificial system of decorum, as Confucians thought, nor a system of laws and punishments, as the Legalists maintained but to “let be”…. Wuwei literally means nonaction, or not acting, even though in Laozi’s writing wuwei also means not to overact, not to push things too far, to keep things simple, and to let all beings follow their natural courses. To Daoists, “wuwei is the highest virtue” (shang de wuwei) and “the most important dao of all.”… A good ruler knows how to rule a country by less intervention (wuwei erzhi).”

Legalists were political realists. “In a society where lineage-law doctrines could no longer regulate social relations, they emphasized the importance of laws administered by a bureaucracy…. They promoted changes that would strengthen the state…. Legalists thinkers had little interest in justifying their theses on moral grounds.” An “ideology of war” permeated political and social relations. All was for the good of the State. Hanfeizi wrote, “If a ruler can keep punishments and rewards in his hands alone, his subordinates will be in awe of his mastery and avoid seeking benefits from him.” Zhao states, “Legalist doctrines centered on three necessaries: fa (penal law and bureaucracy), shu (administrative techniques coupled with the ruler’s artful deviousness), and shi (a ruler’s authority over his subjects).” A ruler was expected to play off the various branches of officials within the meritocratic bureaucracy, inspiring loyalty, while making sure they all feared him, as well.

The state of Wei, which formed out of the fracturing of Jin, most completely implemented Legalist ideology into practice. “Military competition in conjunction with the feudal crisis [of the three Jins] prompted the state of Wei to initiate Legalist reforms. Wei’s military dominance thereafter compelled the other states to learn from it, triggering a wave of isomorphic changes. The Legalist reforms greatly expanded a state’s power, giving it tighter control of the society and the ability to extract more resources for warfare. The reforms also made possible large-scale water projects for enhancing transportation and agricultural production, also for the purposes of war. Finally, the rise of state power after Legalism took hold fostered quick development of extensive technologies, that is, inventions aimed at extracting more output from more coordinated and organized inputs. That capacity placed a lid on the booming market economy, thereby firmly subordinating it to political forces. State dominance permitted the organization of the whole society into a war machine.”

Towards the end of the Age of Total War, the successor to Wei’s hegemony was the state of Qin. Wei declined in the mid-fourth century BC as its alliances with its two former Jin allies, Zhao and Han, broke up due to deceit and mistrust. Its poor geography in the middle of China also precipitated Wei’s decline. “Relative to the other states Qin’s geopolitical and geographical positions were the most ideal. Equally important, Qin’s aristocratic tradition was very weak, and its policy of importing talent and instrumentally effective ideas and institutions from the other states was very strong. Both factors facilitated radical Legalist reforms in Qin.” Qin was also adept at playing off the interests of the other city-states against each other. They would form alliances only to break them at their convenience and convince enemies further afield that they were not a threat, until they had built up adequate strength and manpower. “By the Age of Total War, the interstate system had sunk into Hobbesian anarchy. Without norms and institutions acting as a regulatory force, an anti-Qin alliance could not be maintained because the parties to it did not trust one another, often disregarded each other’s interests, and each wanted the others to bear the brunt of Qin’s assaults.” Lack of nationalism and patriotism for particular city-states also paved the way for the unification of China. “Talented individuals were inclined to leave their natal states for better opportunities in bigger and stronger states, and the masses did not care who ruled them. Both attitudes greatly lowered the cost of conquering another state and contributed to Qin’s victory.” Although the Qin dynasty was short-lived, due to its brutal Legalist policies even during times of peace, it established a unified China that would last, with only minor periods of fracture, to modern day.

During the Western Han dynasty, the concept of the Mandate of Heaven was fully restored and Imperial Confucianism emerged. This was not quite the same as Confucius’ original teachings. This “Confucianism not only emphasized the dominance of the head of state over his officials and subjects, but also the dominance of officials, who were of the elite, over their subordinates and over commoners…. While emphasizing the dominion of the state, Confucianism also emphasized that it is the ruler’s virtue that sustains his rule, and it authorized Confucian scholar-officials to indoctrinate rulers with Confucianism from childhood on and to criticize immoral rulers…. Once Confucianism was transformed into a state ideology, Confucian learning and moral conduct became increasingly important in the selection of officials…. The Confucianized bureaucracy [became] a significant institution through which the state [absorbed] social elites into the government…. Confucianism satisfied much of the religious need of the Chinese and performed many social functions…. This it accomplished through the rituals of ancestor worship and its emphasis on the human capacity to cultivate and achieve union with the ways of Heaven.”

Another Confucian reform that was to have a long-lasting impact was the civil service exam system. “The civil-service examination for recruiting civilian officials had been pioneered late in the Age of Disunion and Sui dynasty, and was immediately adopted by the new Tang dynasty rulers. It endured from the early seventh century until its abolition in 1905…. By the Ming dynasty, mastering Neo-Confucian orthodoxy became crucial to examination success. Being rule-driven and instrumental, it was also Legalist in its use of competitive examinations to select officials…. Since emperors increasingly participated in the grading of the essays and in the placement of successful candidates in appropriate offices, the examinations also enhanced the personal loyalty of the successful to the emperor. Finally, since successful candidates came from different regions and different backgrounds, the resulting bureaucracy was hardly likely to form a single interest group in opposition to the state.”

The primacy of Confucian philosophy gave rise to a new gentry class. These were often those who had studied for the civil service exam, but had not been selected to serve in an official capacity. “Unlike the English gentry, the Chinese gentry acquired their status mainly from education rather than land and wealth; also unlike the English, their status was not inherited. As gentry, they were community leaders. They sponsored local schools, promoted Confucianism and its ethics, provided welfare, arbitrated local disputes, and saw to the construction and upkeep of the local irrigation and road systems. Acting at the intersection between state and society, the gentry carried out all these functions on a volunteer basis…. The state’s limited infrastructure was compensated for by the self-organizing lineage communities led by the scholar-gentry who shared the mentality and values of government officials.”

Zhao concludes with some remarks on the legacy of Confucian-Legalist thought in modern China. “The millennia-long domination of the Confucian-Legalist state has given China a strong state tradition, a huge core territory, a large population with a shared identity, and a pro-education ideal…. The Confucian-Legalist state tradition also instills in China a tradition of civilian rule that is quite unusual among the developing countries…. The legacies of the Confucian-Legalist state tradition have given China an inward-looking character…. China has inherited a strong tradition of performance-based legitimacy derived from the concept of the Mandate of Heaven.”

“Metapolitics: From Wagner and the German Romantics to Hitler” by Peter Viereck

Viereck  wrote the first edition of this book in 1941, when a Nazi victory in the Second World War seemed more than possible, if not likely. In the book, he traces the ideas of the German Romantics through Richard Wagner to Hitler and the Nazi Party. Wagner and his Bayreuth Circle coined the term “metapolitik.” It blended Wagnerian mysticism with political, economic, and national philosophy. Viereck states, “I shall use “metapolitics” to mean the semi-political ideology resulting from the intertwining of four distinct strands. These four are romanticism;…. the “science” of racism; a vague economic socialism, protesting sometimes demagogically and sometimes sincerely against capitalist materialism; and the alleged supernatural and unconscious forces of Volk collectivity.” Viereck claims that the German man has always had two souls beating under one breast. He contrasts these two impulses in the German psyche—western civilization rooted in the Mediterranean cultures of Athens and Jerusalem and the uniquely Teutonic Kultur. He quotes historian H.W. Steed, “the Germans understand by Kultur an intimate union between themselves and the natural forces of the Universe, whose actions they alone are capable of apprehending.” Viereck expands, “The assertion that “Germany can never be understood” by other races means that the magic word “Kultur” can never be pinned down. It is understood only by blood, by the subconscious. It is inexpressible in words. It is expressible only in feeling, the heroic feeling of German blood…. [It is] a deliberate revolt not only against reason but against all moral and political restraints, a revolt against humanity, against universals, against internationalism on behalf of the Volk and mother nature.”

This concept of Kultur, previously expressed only in poems and literature, had its militant roots in the German resistance to the invasion of Napoleon. During the War of Liberation, Father Jahn stressed the unconscious role of the Volk throughout the shaping of history. Jahn coined the term “folkdom” (Volkstum), “that which the Volk has in common, its inner existence, its movement, its ability to propagate. Because of it, there courses through all the veins of a Volk a folkic thinking and feeling, loving and hating, intuition and faith.” Wagner later coined the word Wahn, which was also incorporated into the Nazi vocabulary. Viereck states, “By Wahn, a key-word of Wagner, too ambiguous for safe translation, he means something between pragmatic myth and glorious madness. This Wahn is produced by the supernatural “spirit of the race.””

Hitler incorporated Wagner’s metapolitics, whole-hog, into the Nazi regime. “The diabolically clever combination of appeals with which Hitler won the masses consists of the very same appeals which compose Wagner’s metapolitics. These are: Pan-German nationalism; vague promises of economic socialism (the “true” anti-Marxist brand); fanatic anti-Semitism, both economic and racist; revolt against legalism; revolt against reason, especially against “alien” intellectualism; the Fuhrer principle; yearning for the organic Volk state without class distinctions; hatred of free speech and parliamentary democracy and of the international bankers supposed to control democracy; misty nordic primitivism of the Siegfried and Nibelungen sagas.” Wagner was the bridge between the Second Reich of Bismarck and the Third Reich of Hitler. However, it was only the Third Reich that fully expressed Wagnerian philosophy. “Wagner is far closer in spirit to the Nazi Third Reich of steeled romanticism than to the Prussian Second Reich of orderly bureaucracy. The latter exalted the state, whereas Wagner and Hitler exalt the Volk. The state to romantics represents lifeless form; it is static legality. The Volk represents living content; it dynamically overlaps and smashes state lines…. Americans tend toward the serious error of identifying the Second with the Third Reich. This overlooks the whole revolutionary, expansive, romantic side of nazism. The plebeian Hitler throws out not only the Junker spirit of class distinctions but also the admirable non-political civil service and non-political Reichswehr autonomy so typical of the Kaiser’s bureaucratic state.” Hitler, himself, exclaimed, “We as Aryans can only picture the state as the living organism of a nationality.”

Hitler’s court philosopher was Alfred Rosenberg. Viereck states, “Rosenberg’s philosophy stands or falls on this basic assumption: God created man not as an individual nor mankind as a whole, but individual races of men. These are the building blocks of history, the only lasting units…. A nation is the political expression of the race…. No two races have the same soul. Therefore no two races can understand each other; no two speak the same moral, aesthetic, or intellectual language…. Nazism is the revolt against conditioning by environment.” For Rosenberg, the nation is beyond good and evil. It lives only for itself, its own expansion, its own domination, and its own glory. It is ever becoming and never being. “Rejecting alike government by parliament or by kaiser (monarch), Rosenberg demands the Volk-king, the hero-dictator risen from the ranks, whom Jahn and Wagner prophesied…. The gist of the Fuhrer myth is that the Fuhrer is (incarnates) the Volk.” Rosenberg, himself, states, “We want to see in a German king a person like ourselves.”

Viereck states that Nazi ideology fed on the sympathies of the mass-man to flourish. “Nazi appeals could never work in an uneducated country. They are effective only where the masses are educated but not well enough, and not educated into individuals but into that lowest common denominator, the mass man…. Mass man is he who is laudably well educated in ideas of sweeping social change but deplorably well educated in critical discrimination between them, laudably well educated in the mass organization of vast material power but deplorably educated in the needed moral restraints of power…. An over-mechanized and over-specialized industrial society is spawning mass men, instead of responsible, self-disciplined individuals rooted in the universal moral values…. The rich are as susceptible to mass-man mentality as the poor.”

Viereck next gets a bit carried away with himself and takes on the entire regrettable sweep of German history. “If only the Teutons of heroic Hermann the Cheruscan had lost to the Romans the battle of Teutoburg Forest, if only they had become part of the great Mediterranean civitas . . . if only Germany had passed through a real eighteenth century, the mental discipline of the Latin-French tradition, that unpretentious clarity, that fastidiously classical humanism, that well-balanced scepticism, that laughing rationalism!”

Viereck, in winding down, turns back to the specifics of the present German case. “Prussianism by itself…. failed completely to attract the masses under the German Republic. Prussianism, meaning efficient state bureaucracy and aristocratic militarism, is prosaic and uninspiring to the masses. It lacks the emotional glamour of German romanticism. Nazism, unaristocratic and national-bolshevist to the root, the culmination of a hundred years of Romantic Volk movements, is not Prussianism except in spurious externals. Nazism, as Hans Kohn once brilliantly put it, is the strange new child of a marriage between romanticism and Prussianism…. The Nazi revolt against western civilization is romanticism transferred from the middle classes to the masses, welded to a sort of national bolshevism, saturated through and through in that mass-man revolt which is sweeping all mechanized industrial society.”

“Leaving The Atocha Station” by Ben Lerner

By the first page of this novel you know exactly who this narrator is. “The first phase of my research involved waking up weekday mornings in a barely furnished attic apartment, the first apartment I’d looked at after arriving in Madrid, or letting myself be woken by the noise from La Plaza Santa Ana, failing to assimilate the noise fully into my dream, then putting on the rusty stovetop espresso machine and rolling a spliff while I waited the coffee…. Next my project required dropping myself back through the skylight, shitting, taking a shower, my white pills, and getting dressed. Then I’d find my bag, which contained a bilingual edition of Lorca’s Collected Poems, my two notebooks, a pocket dictionary, John Ashbery’s Selected Poems, drugs, and leave for the Prado.” This type of self-styled creative is well worn, but still worth getting into the head of when portrayed convincingly. Soon, he is pondering art. “I had long worried that I was incapable of having a profound experience of art and I had trouble believing that anyone had, at least anyone I knew. I was intensely suspicious of people who claimed a poem or painting or piece of music “changed their life,” especially since I had often known these people before and after their experience and could register no change…. Insofar as I was interested in the arts, I was interested in the disconnect between my experience of actual artworks and the claims made on their behalf.” The narrator, Adam, is living in Madrid on a Fulbright Fellowship, supposedly researching a historical epic on the Spanish Civil War to be written in verse. He spends much of his time scoring hash from African illegal immigrants, flirting with women, and making fun of the American tourists (in his own head). He can speak rudimentary Spanish, but in his struggle to learn it better he alternates between false confidence and hopelessness. “My plan had been to teach myself Spanish by reading masterworks of Spanish literature and I had fantasized about the nature and effect of a Spanish thus learned, how its archaic flavor and formally heightened rhetoric would collide with the mundanities of daily life, giving the impression less of someone from a foreign country than someone from a foreign time.” Often, his struggle with language generates his most beautiful thoughts. “The song was Portugese, not Spanish; I experienced the slow shading of one language into another, a powerful effect only my ignorance of both enabled.” Adam is a published poet and he is always trying to measure up to other writers, both past and present. “I forced myself to listen as if the poem were unpredictable and profound, as if that were given somehow, and any failure to be compelled would be exclusively my own…. I just smiled slightly in a way intended to communicate that my own compliment had been graciousness and that I in fact believed his writing constituted a new low for his or any language, his or any art.” Adam is immensely concerned with appearances, his and others, and, so, often puts on a pose. “I didn’t know how to compose my face, if indifference tinged with vague disdain was still the right expression. If I could have smiled Teresa’s inscrutable smile, I would have.” However, through it all, his self-importance is saved by his slightly biting humor. “The prospect of being a writer in residence in a modern palace frequented by the beautiful was not without its allure, however exhausting it would be for my face.”