WHY LIBERALS ARE THE REAL FAUSTIANS

by James Lawrence

In the discourse of the True Right, one does not have to look hard for the influence of the German philosopher-historian Oswald Spengler (1880-1936) and his two-volume tome Decline of the West. Even where we do not hear the name, this influence betrays itself in the use of terms like ‘Faustian Man’ and ‘Caesarism’, as well as in the general tendency to contrast a lost organic ‘Culture’ with a soulless and materialistic ‘Civilisation’. But while these conceptual rays of enlightenment are widely appreciated, few of us muster the determination to squint for long at the darker core of Spengler’s theory, because its notorious pessimism and fatalism might annihilate our entire project for European resurgence.