/lit/ - Literature

>>22045456
Come back when you actually read Spengler's shortest book.
>a Caesar might not be as strongman military leader but rather a mere technocrat.
See this and this:
>>22046920
don't realize the fundamental character of a "technocrat" (which arguably doesn't exist in the real world), or a business magnate. Ultimately, a business magnate is a type of merchant. They do not have the same relations to society as an aristocrat, a statesman, a priest, or a military leader, nor do they have the same virtues.
If we follow Spengler's analysis, businessmen and banking elites are so prominent now because money is at its peak power. It's commonly conflated that money is equal to power, but this is a misunderstanding. When Spengler expounds on money power, he's not talking about material wealth as a sufficient cause, but as a totalizing feature of society. Consider that formerly, religion was such a powerful force in society that clergymen were major political players. Or, consider landed nobility, aristocrats. Such classes may have had money, but their power was not in using their money. They could use actual religious institutions and prestige to move history. Elites of today are not the same. Their primary way of exerting force is by spending money. Their whole system of power requires the fact that people "play the game" and follow the rules, something which Germanic warbands don't do. The primary mode of being in today's culture is relative to money. And money, as we conceive it, is certainly unique to Faustian man.
It's possible that a man who was a "technocrat" become a Caesar figure, but not functioning as a technocrat. Because becoming Caesar means becoming a type of general, statesman, or politician. In the same way, a man who was an engineer can become a novelist, but there is no "engineer-novelist." The two things are happenstance.
But even if we ignore Spengler, we can see that merchants, as a class, do not have the same ethos as generals, clergy, or statesmen. They fundamentally have different roles and abilities in society. It is true a businessman can become a statesman, but it's far rarer compared to a general, a lawyer, or a civil servant becoming one.

As an example of what I mean, this is why I think Trump, unrelated to what you thought about his policies or administration, was such a bad politician during his term. He treated it like a business. Corporations absorb each other. Employees cross over. It's like a sports game where rules are followed.
Politics is not like that. Politics is Carl Schmitt's friend/enemy distinction. It's something intrinsically different from how business competitors view each other. Trump tried absorbing political enemies, like it was a financial assets acquisition.
He had a genuine moment where he could "cross the Rubicon." Never happened. The man has businessmen ethos, not heroic virtues.

>Americans seem obsessed with politics bordering on total hysteria while simultaneously completely devoid of hope or any expectation things can be improved
To put it simply: it's the birth of Caesarism in America. Americans, in all parties, want radical changes and no longer have faith in the system as it is to accomplish that.
Read this. Originally published in 1957It's a Spenglerian piece but dealing specifically with America (and a little bit of Europe) in analogy to ancient Rome.
Amaury de Riencourt, a European, gives a lot of insights into American culture that many traditional cultural critics lack. This is probably because he admires America, to a great extent, but sees its rising ugly sides leading to Caesarism. Specifically, Riencourt understand what Americans are like unconsciously, rather than how they are merely perceived elsewhere or how they perceive themselves.
America is a Puritan country, a concept that is perpetually misunderstood by fools who hate the "moralizing" of Puritans, a false caricature of the actual Puritans. What this really means, is that Americans are, in actuality, very socialist (in the original Prussian sense, not the leftist Marxist one) and collectivist. The original culture, in dealing with splintering religious factions, used the great open space to find a new method to keep society together and mediate conflict.
This is precisely why the country is somehow so individualistic on one hand, and so polarized on the other. This is also why the country works as well as it does compared to places like Latin America. It's something that many foreign powers have grossly underestimated: how united the country can become under certain circumstances.
Another factor he notices is the feminizing of the nation's politics. The US (and the Puritans) was a patriarchal culture, and highly masculine one. The feminist aspect has corroded the Republican institutions.
This phenomenon culminates in the people wanting and needing a strong, paternalist leader because the sick system (which, by Spengler's assessment is the moneyed system) no longer works.
(1/2)

>>19249934
>>19249985
>I think the immense hubris of the Americans is that they think they’ll be the forerunners of any Faustian empire
It makes perfect sense, and to say such an idea only comes from Americans themselves is shortsighted. See: the Coming Caesars, written by a Frenchman. The fact that America is culturally assimilating Europe is obvious enough.
America is intensely similar to Rome, Babylon, the Qin, or the Ottomans, on a very base cultural level. The one philosophy that's come exclusively out of the US is Pragmatism in the vein of William James and Charles Sanders Peirce, which isn't too different from how the Qin adopted legalism. It's quite apparent that America, as victor of the World Wars, is playing the role that Rome did after its victory in the Punic Wars. Frankly, the US already has achieved "Imperium" in that sense, via NATO. It already has bases in Europe.
>America reached its apogee in the democratic moneyed phase and at its close
>Germany, the UK, or the EU broadly.
America doesn't just have money. It has military, which is the #1 factor of a Caesarian empire, and is how every universal state of a culture has come about. The only thing that makes the EU what it is revolves around the economy and diplomacy. Germany has less than 1/10 the manpower the active duty US military does. And Germany has almost no political will or capability for a strong army, with conscription suspended.
The US, however, has the third highest manpower count in the world, and maintains the selective service system, which could mobilize millions more. And in most strength and firepower rankings, the US is consistently #1. To say that some milquetoast EU politician would trump moneyed politics with blood in the Spenglerian sense is asinine and unlikely, especially when there is no EU army and it's unlikely there will be for now.
Not to mention that the military has drastically changed since the World Wars in a way similar to Rome's. It's become privatized and mercenary. The civil service aspect has diminished. Now, men join for career, benefits, or out of want of action. Compare that to seasonal citizen soldiers of the World Wars, or the citizen maniples of the Punic.
Now I can see the argument surrounding monetary collapse driving collapse of the rest. But far too often people behave like that's permanent. Just look at the Great Depression and Versailles preceding Germany conquering most of Europe, or just look at how Japan and the UK are still strong economies despite the loss of global reserve status and Japanese bubble burst. It's not a very Spenglerian argument, which ignores the ontology of events.

"The Coming Caesars" by Amaury de Riencourt. It was originally published in 1957. It obviously takes from Oswald Spengler, especially in the earlier chapters. However, the author, a Frenchman and Americanophile, focuses much more on America itself and the cultural forms of America, how they formed and how they parallel with Rome, things which Oswald Spengler wasn't as interested in as compared to Europe. It traces the macro-historical development of Caesarism in America, which is apparent even since the days of Andrew Jackson.
And, we're talking 1957. Long before the days of Trump and Obama, before the coalition conflicts of the Gulf War and Iraq.
Riencourt makes a couple of interesting observations as a European. For example, something no American would would say, is that Americans are collectivist. We tend to see ourselves as individualistic, ideally as rugged frontier types, at least contrary to other cultures. In a way, perhaps in more religious or philosophical ways, but that's not all true. I'd argue that America is politically collectivist and culturally assimilative, to a degree not even China or Europe is. Notice how rare multi-party politics is. Notice in war, how internal disputes and divisions almost never alter its course. "Oh, but Vietnam," you say. For as strong as anti-war sentiment is, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan went on for *decades.* When the Republicans and the Democrats face off, they tend to make it a team effort. When we went to war with Germany, the German-Americans (most substantial ethnic group of American whites), fought against Germany.

>>15933344
Google the Imperial Presidency. The American government has been Caesarist since FDR. The difference between Rome and America is that while a Caesarian takeover in Rome had to be done in a violent coup, in America Caesarism has become entirely constitutional. Rome would never under any circumstances accept a monarch due to its history, while America will gladly accept one as long as he is a monarch "for the people".

>>13969823
We should make a chart for Spengler books.