Thiel, Schmitt, and, Spengler

An Addendum

A number of people have asked why I didn’t engage more in my piece with Peter Thiel’s interest in Leo Strauss, the controversial political philosopher who inspired the neocons and the Claremont Institute. Part of the reason is that Strauss, while he once declared himself a fascist, is a very slippery character who (intentionally) brings with him a lot of problems of interpretation and I didn’t want the article to be about obscure hermeneutics. But I do regret not looking more closely at his essay “The Straussian Moment,” which I believe dates from 2004, during the height of the War on Terror era. The entire essay is essentially a critique of the Enlightenment, which he calls a period of “intellectual amnesia and slumber, its denial of violence, killing, and war as constitutive parts of the human condition and a consideration of what positive role they should play in Western civilization.

Particularly notable to me are his invocations of two other thinkers, Carl Schmitt and Oswald Spengler. Both are important figures in what’s called the Conservative Revolution, a constellation of reactionary intellectuals in the Weimar that wanted to see the republic destroyed and replaced with some sort of authoritarian arrangement or another. Both of them had ambivalent and complicated connections with the Nazi regime. Spengler’s gloomy, apocalyptic philosophy of history was a kind of spiritual pre-cursor to Nazism and admired by many Nazis. He envisioned an inevitable replacement of democracy with a new “Caesarism” and a non-Marxist synthesis of “Prussianism and socialism” that would combine the national virtues of the Germans with a new collective social project. While Spengler initially welcomed the rise of both Mussolini and Hitler as the fulfillment of his prophecy, the Nazis were ultimately too crude and plebeian for the echt elitist worshipper of Prussian aristocracy.

The jurist Carl Schmitt, who developed the theory of “emergency” dictatorship—now cribbed by Thiel cronies Curtis Yarvin and Michael Anton—along with a belief in the spiritual need for an epochal clash of civilizations, was once a conservative opponent of the NSDAP who advocated their banning. Then, after the Nazis gained power, he joined the party and defended Hitler’s extra-judicial murders of his political opponents in The Night of the Long Knives. Eventually, he was purged from the Nazi party by the S.S., who suspected him of opportunism. In general, the fascioid intellectuals who created the preconditions for Nazism were often rendered obsolete and unneeded after its actual arrival.

In the essay, Thiel’s engagement with Schmitt is rather cautious: on the one hand, he seems to approve of Schmitt’s “political” division of the world into friends and enemies, and to critique the West as being more confused than its “Islamic” opponents about being involved in an existential struggle with another civilization, seeing at as a necessary condition of waging the fight at all, but he pulls back and considers the cost of what turning into that sort of polity:

Still, note of caution aside, Thiel seems to prefer the prospect of Schmitt’s “political” world of conflict than the de-politicized world of entertainment and administration, the “blue-pilled” world of post-historical liberalism:

More striking, however, is Thiel’s invocation of Spengler. Coming directly after his endorsement, using Strauss, of an extra-judicial, extra-parliamentary global espionage network, he writes this:

It’s kind of notable that he left this quote untranslated; I will provide the translation here:

As Thiel, this is the conclusion to Spengler’s 1922 second volume of The Decline of the West, his massive work of philosophical history dividing the world into different civilizational epochs, each with their own organic life-cycle. According to Spengler, the era of democracy and “money”—low, material acquisitiveness—is coming to a close and being replaced by the new Caesarism and the rule of “blood”—a more primal, vitalistic order of force and violence: “After a long triumph of world-city economy over political creative force, the political side of life manifests itself after all as the stronger of the two. The sword is victorious over the money, the master- will subdues again the plunderer-will.” Spengler depicts this development as a necessity, a destiny that must be embraced and willed by “us,” the spiritual elite of his readership. He concludes with a quote from the Stoic philosopher Seneca, which translates to, “the fates lead the willing, and drag the unwilling.”

It’s clear that Thiel deeply identifies “as a Straussian” with this “call for action:” the fatalistic embrace of the new Caesarism. It’s also clear what the stakes are in his mind, considering it comes directly after his mocking dismissal of the “textbook” civics understanding of American democracy.

---

There’s one more interpretative framework that I neglected but that I think is very helpful to understand Thiel’s futurism, his preoccupation with technology and the stagnation of technological progress combined with his critique of democracy and the Enlightenment: Jeffrey Herf’s concept of “reactionary modernism,” which he applies to the thinkers of the Conservative Revolution like Spengler and Schmitt and the Nazis themselves:

Before and after the Nazi seizure of power, an important current within conservative and subsequently Nazi ideology was a reconciliation between the antimodernist, romantic, and irrationalist ideas present in German nationalism and the most obvious manifestation of means—ends rationality, that is, modern technology. Reactionary modernism is an ideal typical construct. The thinkers I am calling reactionary modernists never described them- selves in precisely these terms. But this tradition consisted of a coherent and meaningful set of metaphors, familiar words, and emotionally laden expressions that had the effect of converting technology from a component of alien, Western Zivilisation into an organic part of German Kultur. They combined political reaction with technological advance. Where German conservatives had spoken of technology or culture, the reactionary modernists taught the German Right to speak of technology and culture. Reactionary modernism was not primarily a pragmatic or tactical reorientation, which is not to deny that it transformed military-industrial necessities into national virtues. Rather, it incorporated modern technology into the cultural system of modern German nationalism, without diminishing the latter's romantic and antirational aspects. The reactionary modernists were nationalists who turned the romantic anticapitalism of the German Right away from backward-looking pastoralism, pointing instead to the out- lines of a beautiful new order replacing the formless chaos due to capitalism in a united, technologically advanced nation. In so doing, they contributed to the persistence of Nazi ideology throughout the Hitler regime. They called for a revolution from the Right that would restore the primacy of politics and the state over economics and the market, and thereby restore the ties between romanticism and rearmament in Germany.

It seems to me that Thiel, with his “retro-futurist” desire for a reactionary political and cultural regime combined with an renewed emphasis on technological development, fits very well in this tradition, which differentiated between the “parasitic,” calculating capitalism of the merchant and banker with the “creative” capitalism of the inventor and industrial entrepreneur. Interestingly, Herf points out this perspective was not limited to traditional intellectuals, but was shared by many engineers, which we know is Thiel’s class background.