As said in a previous article, when it comes to politics and everything related, books written during the interwar period often stand out as the best reading. Before 1914, most essays tend to prefer prose or erudition to seriously tackling the issues they should ponder. From the 1930s onwards, but especially after the 1945+ purge and the 1960s offensive, the Left managed to take over the cultural life, shattering many interesting and even existential issues in the process.
By contrast, essays written between the two are the most interesting. Anxious about the present and future, the authors show willing to problematize fully the issues they tackle. Their books are polemical, sometimes openly whistleblowing, yet written in an atmosphere still free enough to go straight to the point.
Books mentioned last time approach a wide range of topics through interrogations such as the nature of modern civilization or the degeneration of man in modern times. Those mentioned here address narrower themes, and likely require some background to be fully appreciated.
1. Werner Sombart, The Jews and Modern Capitalism (1911)
OK, this one was published at the end of the Belle Époque and prior to Europe being covered by blood and shrapnel. However, most if not all of its translations, including two in English, reached the public after 1915, and the book is still republished today.
If you went through a liberal arts course, you may have heard about the sociologist Max Weber and his famous thesis on capitalism. “Protestant ethics”, Weber said, valued worldly success, hard work, and a kind of autonomy through the autonomous reading of the Bible that favored entrepreneurship. This mindset led many people to engage in entrepreneurship and work harder, thus unwittingly fostering the ascent of modern capitalism.
Sombart, a contemporary of Weber, agreed with him but looked farther. Namely, “the features of Puritan dogmas that really impacted on the genesis of capitalist spirit were but borrowed to Judaism.” Neither a classical liberal nor a socialist, neither pro- nor anti-Semitic, Sombart was an erudite and penetrating historian whose vision of modernity was truly brilliant.
According to him, there is a sharp contrast between the medieval European world and the world of Judaism. To Christians, the basis of economics and social order was subsistence: everyone had his own “field”, whether as a real parcel of land, trade or social function. Market prices had to be regulated so that each one’s interest could find an outlet in the general equilibrium. Jews, on the other hand, had a double set of standards: they showed mutual solidarity—tribalism—but considered the non-Jewish world as a free market. They also sanctified worldly gains and excelled in moneylending.
Jewish activity during the Middle Ages often caused harm to Christian merchants, peasants, and craftsmen, but was also favorable to someone else’s interests. In the late Middle Ages, Jews became important army suppliers. When power-hungry kings smashed the nobility, destroyed fortresses, curtailed the corporations’ specific prerogatives, and carried on expensive wars, they needed able managers, fresh money and military assets. Jews, thanks to their huge transnational networks and trade abilities, responded to the call—and when the kings fell, thanks to their own hubris, their suppliers and moneylenders stayed.
Meanwhile, as Jews were attracting capital and conquering more and more important positions in society, they soaked the West with their own peculiar mindset. For example, Jews tend to be urbane, to have a high IQ and a lack of sense of concreteness: this set of features helped them to contribute goods as abstract things, through the prism of quantity. Jews then played an important role in turning the economy into a big stock exchange, where actual goods became a support—or a pretext—to trade obligations and financial products. Moneylending went from the outskirts of the economy to its heart.
Just like Evola’s Revolt against the modern world, Sombart’s book cannot be adequately summed up in a few paragraphs. It gives an impressive big picture of modernity, economics, and Judaism. A major complement to Kevin MacDonald’s well-known books on said topic.
2. Eugène Tavernier, 50 Years of Politics: A Work of Irreligion (1925)
I hesitated before mentioning this one. It hasn’t been translated in English and speaks mainly about French history. What makes it relevant is the insight it gives into how organized forces of leftward pushing act in general.
A retired journalist, Eugène Tavernier wrote this book as a shrewd testimony of what he had seen for decades. 50 Years of Politics gives both an overview and an analysis of a long-winded, concerted effort from the secularist Left to rip Catholicism from the French.
The effort spanned on decades and spread up on various fields of public life. In law, the Republic—born by ransacking churches, decapitating political opponents and bathing in the blood of faithful peasants—legalized divorce, created harsh conditions for Catholic seminaries and institutions, forcefully secularized schools, and finally claimed the ownership of the cult places in 1905.
In the academia and “high culture”, Tavernier portrays various intellectuals who, although some of them were really astute, were all unhinged minds, and all united to scorn Catholicism. Especially interesting is the portrayal of Edgar Quinet (1803-1875), a Freemason and radical republican who posed as a moderate “man of letters” but showed a relentless hatred of his ancestors’ religion:
He demanded that laws be secularized; he defined new ideas and used formulas that became the thought, rule, and language of our secular world, both official and private… Eventually, Quinet explained with pleasure what he meant by secularizing the laws: he wanted, “by the means of new laws”, struggle against national beliefs, as to create a new French people uprooted from Catholicism. [In 1850] this prophet of toleration pressured the freethinkers to impose their ideas through force… (pp.98-99)
Under the pretext of erudite exegesis, Quinet greatly contributed to the republishing of an ancient Protestant writer whose main, if not only, quality consisted in attacking “papism” vehemently.
Tavernier also mentions how the Grand Orient de France, the main French masonic obedience, repeatedly contributed to uniting and coordinating the irreligious, pushed for the erasure of religious references from most social institutions, and was constantly implicated in underhanded manipulations such as diverting public money or spying army officers.
The reader does not need to be a Catholic to see the relevance of this book: its topic bears a strange analogy with today’s multiculturalists and SJWs. To better face the beast today, look at how it behaved in the past, at an earlier stage.
3. Francis Delaisi, The European Revolution (1942)
Many contemporary books about the Great Depression are written by Keynesian economists. The view they give is thus biased in favor of a particular managerialism—among many others possible—that insists way too much on spending, justifies unduly authority from pompous academics, and lead to massive inflation and debt.
Francis Delaisi’s European Revolution defends economic managerialism, but is by no means Keynesian, and contains very few gibberish. Writing after the “economic renaissance” of 1930s Germany, it compares the failure of the “liberal” economy determined by private banking with National Socialists’ rather innovative policies. The success of the latter model, Delaisi confidently adds, can free Europe from the shackles of Wall Street speculation, hence the book title.
After 1918, US bankers found themselves almost overloaded with European gold. Exhilarated by the power between their hands, they started investing in most of the West and beyond. Their massive investments created many employments, production soared both in the US and abroad, giving birth to what would be eventually called the Roaring Twenties. But as time passed, it became clear—to finance initiates at least—that bankers were abusing from the leverage effect to create dollars out of thin air thanks to bookkeeping. Financial economy was slowly drifting away from real production and real consumption possibilities.
A bubble was forming. American government tried to avoid its bust, especially on wheat stocks, this cereal being then overproduced, by investing half a billion dollars on supporting wheat prices in 1929. These efforts failed, Delaisi recounts, mostly because of the short view and cynical opportunism of the main actors. Farmers, instead of reducing their production, increased it: if government was supporting the prices, they could sell more and thus earn more money instead of tightening their belts. Big transportation industry, also, disliked the government intrusion into what they considered their exclusive territory, and they managed to flood the European wheat markets by a sophisticated game of delivering too much on the same markets and toying with their own margins until the stocks crashed.
Here, it seems that capitalism, understood as the will to live thanks to one’s capital instead of honest productive work, led both producers and sellers to get out of their place. Each actor tried to squeeze the situation for his own benefit and/or maintain an unwarranted income. Their short-term policies hastened the bursting of the bubble—and many of those who thought they could speculate as well were left naked on the sand.
Beyond the mentality problem, Delaisi sees in nineteenth-century and beyond capitalism a glaring issue: it gives an unreasonable advantage to sellers. Universal gold standard, along with globalization, allow to buy anything in any place where production costs are cheap and sell it where said costs are higher, to the expense of local producers.
With 100g of gold, an international trust could buy in 1937: 4 weeks of work from an American factory worker, 20 weeks from a French one, 23 weeks from an Italian one, and 37 weeks from a Japanese one… The whole world was astonished when Czechoslovakia received Japanese socks and watches which were sold per kilo at a cheaper price than those produced nearby. (chap.9, p.142)
Unregulated competition means producers have to lower their prices and life standards to match someone else’s slave work. If they can’t, they are reduced into joblessness. Sounds familiar?
When Hitler was appointed Chancellor in 1933, Germany had been bled dry and unemployment was rampant. His economic policy was interventionist and high-energy. Germany rejected the gold standard for the “work standard”, reopened factories, asserted that the German producer’s interest was legitimate against international speculation. Government stabilized the value of money and basic commodities, thus protecting the people from stock jobbing. They borrowed from their own people instead of going to foreign banks… And guess what? It worked. People were rationed at first, but life conditions greatly improved. Too bad the New Deal admirers never talk about this one.
Seems, then, a planned economy can work—if and only if crucial requirements are met. People participating there should identify with the common good, be disciplined and OK with being more or less taught what to do, and should be able to do the required job. Failure to meet these conditions explain why so many socialist attempts broke down.
The European Revolution, of course, explains the workings of both pre-1930 capitalism and National Socialist managerialism with much more detail than I did. A shame that it hasn’t (yet?) been translated in English.
As a conclusion
Academic explanations of reality are at best limited by political correctness, at worst bound to spread falsehoods and smears. Weber’s thesis about “Protestant ethics” has been so much mentioned it became a trite, classical liberals are still criticized as well, but why is no one speaking about Sombart’s work aside from carefully closeted research departments? Possibly, the scope with which it extends outside the “muh persecutions muh Holocaust” narrative makes the average liberal teacher uncomfortable.
Likewise, the historical trend towards secularism and atheism is often casually mentioned as if it had happened spontaneously, whereas a closer look shows that it was the result of a relentless cultural war fought by generations of institutionalized far-Leftists. Many so-called classics of today were yesterday’s SJWs.
Understanding where we come from and what really happened requires unplugging from the post-1945 cultural Marxist matrix. Fortunately, thanks to all the free eBooks around and a thriving ancient books market, this has never been easier.
Read Next: How The Global Financial Market Mirrors The Sexual Marketplace
https://s3.amazonaws.com/lowres.cartoonstock.com/history-hitler-suicide-defeat-defeated-losers-ate0059_low.jpg
I am literally laughing on literally Hitler!
In the God Emperor’s bunker, he would shoot George Soros in the head and walk back out into the sunshine.
It’s also worth noting, as to the Sombart work, that in the Middle Ages, Christians were prohibited under Church law from charging interest for loans. Any interest was considered usury (as opposed to now, where it means charging excessive interest), which had a chilling effect on trade (no letters of credit, no financing, etc.). Realizing the need, the Church allowed the Jewish people of Europe, who very restricted in the occupations they were allowed to engage in, to practice money lending. The view of Church was that since the Hebrews denied that Jesus was the Messiah, their souls were already condemned, so what difference did it make? Let them charge the interest (so was the logic of the time). As the rules on usury eased as commerce developed, the Jewish people of Europe had already established the financial networks and wealthy nobles continued to turn to their banking houses for service, just as they had traditionally done. So the story of the “Jewish bankers” of Europe grew from the fact they handled a business no else was allowed to engage in for a very long time.
Shhhh… don’t mention it to the white supremacists here. Some might actually see their bullshit torn to shreds.
Yes. It’s easier to say, “I coulda bin a contender if it hadn’t been for dem Joos!” than to look at their own lives and errors.
The only one holding racist or supremacist views is you. I’m 5 days late this article, but that had allowed me to see the whole of the comments.
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What I see is people talking in an educated debate setting without the racist double standard of political correctness.
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You on the other hand believe white people are evil (your tone and statements not based on facts) and believe that whites are less of a people and have less rights to discuss issues than other people. Therefore, you are an anti-white supremacist.
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Hopefully your biases can be overcome and your racist attitude changed.
> You on the other hand believe white people are evil (your tone and
statements not based on facts) and believe that whites are less of a
people and have less rights to discuss issues than other people.
Therefore, you are an anti-white supremacist.
Citation needed.
Yes, see the post of the racist moron, I think her stupid name is verelst.
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What’s your next lame attempt to feel mainstream you bigot? Because it’s certainly not your ugly mug shot, or pathiticly low upvotes.
Just shut up.
Oh, poor racist baby. Way to show your empty head is filled with nothing but your own bigotry.
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Here’s a suggestion, go back to your community college, get your money back and take a debate class with it, then come find me. Maybe next time you’ll have something more to say than your racist dribble.
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Hahaha you effing cry baby troll.
You must really be popular over at Toastmasters with that epic level debating skill.
I’m giving you an up vote because the other guy said you don’t have any.
Oh snap, that was a good one, mind if I use it sometime?
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HAHAHA, you still suck. Go blow yourself you racist pos.
“It’s all because of the Catholic Church! Jews were forced into this career, they’re innocent!”
Actually, the situation varied greatly depending on time and place. Some kings teamed up with Jews, which doesn’t mean the latter were passive. Other times Jews were encouraged to convert or pursue other careers, and then, their conversions mostly come up as insincere. Check The Occidental Observer, in particular Andrew Joyce’s studies of Middle Ages history and moneylending in general.
Nobody’s fault and nobody’s innocent. They were all just living in the mores of their times, like we do. If humans are still around in 600 years they might look back at us wonder “what the hell were those guys thinking?” I get you on the coerced conversions and while a few Jewish people got very wealthy in money lending,most were quite poor.
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Well I don’t think it was the official view of the church but point taken.
Interestingly enough in the Levant Christians were also noted moneylenders to muslims for similar reasons. In the OT, lending to foreign nations was permitted, just not to fellow Jews (keeping unity within the tribe. I believe a similar logic prevailed amongst Levantine Christians.
Interesting note. I was not aware of that. You can learn a lot here. That’s why I like this forum so much.
“He who practices usury goes to hell. He who does not goes to the poor house”. As any Italian you happen to see who came up with this observation – and when. When the Jews were expelled from England, interest rates doubled. Competition is good. Europe no longer had any. Banking became an entirely Christian business. Now, what Jews did invent was international investment banking, starting in the 128th century. But that all ended with WW2, when governments discovered that by printing money, enabling inflation, and raising taxes to levels previously extortionate levels, they didn’t need Rothschild any more.
I’ll get to Sombart later – haven’t look at him since decades ago in college.
Thank you for a rational and sane response to the nasty anti-semitism that often crops up on this site.
I wonder if you could back this up with references?
The propaganda about the wonders of the “gold standard” always sounded fishy to me. Francis Delaisi’s book may offer some reasons why restoring it in the United States could cause a collapse in the current standard of living. When the British imposed the gold standard on India in the 19th Century, crop failures would turn into widespread famines killing millions because the shortage of money impeded ordinary Indians’ ability to try to get some food from areas with better harvests through trade. The artificial “money famine” of the gold standard turned a survivable hard year into a deadly disaster.
Libertarians are morons that’s why. Especially ancaps. They literally think that corporations that get subsidized protection through their workers’ taxes, welfare dependents who’s livelihood depends on the state as well as rational human beings in general will support their garbage.
The gold standard only would work if their is a small amount of money in the economy (most of human history). Liebertarians don’t realize that the 67 feet^3 cube that is all the gold in the world doesn’t account for this.
Yes you are right, because fiat currency is so good and stable, free of corruption and manipulation, hence people’s wealth can’t be inflated away /sarcasm
In fact, Argentina did an interesting experiment with fiat currency during its crisis, search about the ‘patacones’.
It’s a curious case thank you for bringing it up. My point was that fiat money will always be an easily manipulated device to measure and control the wealth transference, no matter how you slice it, the perfect way for a government/elites to rob the people blind of their wealth and fleece rival states as well. This system is partly responsible of the failures of free trade, since fiat currencies are the perfect instruments to wage economic war through devaluations and reevaluations perfectly timed to destroy the wealth of your rivals. Under the old gold standard (before WWI) or any other tangible based currency systems, such manipulation was virtually impossible.
Fiat currency, if left to small banks, can also be free from corruption.
There’s such a thing known as “mining companies holding back supply to drive up currency”. Economic manipulaiton is endemic to free-market capitalism.
Ironically, that’s the option I’ve heard from many libertarians (currency emission via private banks), from no one else.
Moreover while manipulation is a problem in a free market system, ours is not a free market by any means, the fact that you claim the current system is free market capitalism shows either your ignorance or simple bad will. In a State-run economy (which seems to be the system you prefer) manipulation is the very name of the game.
There’s no such thing as a free market. Throughout the history of capitalism, with the notable exception of a few years under Grover Cleveland in the US, there was never a “free” market.
Free market is an ideal, one to strive for. Of course free and perfect markets don’t exist but freer markets can be established. What we have now is not even close to being free market and its schemes are likely to blow up in the collective faces of the westerners within the next decade if not sooner, whether you like it or not.
Only a technological miracle will avert such fate.
I’ve never ever heard that sort of thing from anyone on the ancap side of libertarianism and after a decade of reading I thing I would have wondered into it if you were correct.
Most ancaps don’t make the connection because they’re too stupid (or too well-paid) to make the connection. Just because you haven’t heard it, doesn’t make it false.
So that “literally think” is what you are projecting on them and why I haven’t see it in any an-cap libertarian writing is because it’s in your head, not theirs.
What is written is a reflection of what is thought.
I think most libertarians realise that it takes some kind of courage and morality to value freedom more than safety and not many people have such courage.
How is the volume of the gold affecting it’s value on the market? Also libertarians and anarcho-capitalists would rather want free, decentralised banking.
More gold = Less pricey.
A gold standard currency can be manipulated, especially between an empire and its colonized territories. This is likely the case with what you mention. I would assume that there was some law preventing competing currencies or the settlement of contracts in anything else and the empire limited supply. None of which should happen in a properly implemented gold based currency.
Thanks gor the heads up – seriously for anyone wanting to acwuire knowledge means going back to the books the suthor recommends, and the even the classics of way long ago.
There are GREAT political books written after 1945. Off the top of my head:
1) Manufacturing Consent
2) The Origins of Totalitarianism
3) The Closing of the American Mind
4) Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (Schumpeter, a favorite)
5) Parliament of Whores, or Give War a Chance (P.J. O’Rourke, humor)
6) Disaster Capitalism, Naomi Klein
A lot of these take a dim view of unfettered capitalism, which is my own view. Maybe your list looks different. But the point stands: People didn’t stop writing good books after WWII.
Chumpky was a Pol Pot supporter and Klein is JAP transplant from hippie parents who is a feminist cunt. Pass.
Explains alot about you though.
That’s an easy game. Lemme play.
Tom Wolfe: “Wolfe is a WASP Ivy League elitist who looks down his nose at all of us. Pass.”
Or Phillip Roth: “Roth is a socially awkward Jew who never fit in and now takes his revenge on society by dissecting it. Pass.”
or Jesus Christ: “Short little Jewboy with delusions of grandeur. Martyr complex. Pass.”
See how easy that is?
Try this, punk: Debate the ideas INSIDE the books, not the authors. I comment here a lot. Let me know when you’ve read all 600 pages of Disaster Capitalism, and then we’ll talk.
Play away. I found Noam unconvincing and Naomi a typical feminist most at ROK would ridicule.
You want to convey their words as “intellectual”– have at it chump.
There is not one word in Disaster Capitalism about feminism. Get your facts straight before you criticize.
Klein is a little leftist cunt who has no clue about the role of market forces is the reason there is actual advancement and completely misses that capitalism has generated more wealth than any socialist ideal she is advocating. I understand why you defend her because neither do. You are both economically illiterate.
I don’t know if it’s a ground-breaking book, but I would offer Storm of Steel by Ernst Junger. It’s a great book. And a book men can relate to. Thinking about it I’m gonna read it again.
I have heard great things about it also. I’ll make it next on my reading list.
You will be glad you did. I learned about it in Quintus Curtius’s book 37.
Yes. A great book – by someone who actually seemed to enjoy World War One! Still well worth reading.
Yes read that one. Junger was a bad ass.
Sung to the COPS theme song Bad Boys:
Bad Jew, bad Jew
whatcha you going to do
whatcha you going to do when they build gas chambers and overs for you
Bad Jew, bad Jew…
Jews don’t roll over so easy these day. Sort your life out and stop blaming Jews for you inadequacy.
Says the kike.
We’ll share a few cans of bottled sunshine with you, thats what. Why do you think we invented it? We appreciated the ovens so much, we figured youd enjoy a taste of the same next go around.
Most articles on ROK, which try to offer penetrating insight, fail. The best articles are usually simple lists because they are easier to write and don’t require as much insight. This is one of the few lists that actually offers depth in its perspective. Good job especially on #1
I have been looking for a good book to read in French. I just ordered a book on Amazon I think was the same, but the title was diffferent.
La Nouvelle Religion.
The review was similar to what the Andre wrote about.
#4 “Das Experiment von Worgle”
I couldn’t find an English translation for this book, but it describes the economical “Miracle of Worgl” during the great depression. Incredible things happen when a town decides to print it’s own local, debt free currency.
Here’s a reference on the event for those interested:
https://mises.org/library/free-money-miracle
“Jews, on the other hand, had a double set of standards: they showed mutual solidarity—tribalism—but considered the non-Jewish world as a free market.”
collectively they have also shown a corresponding ability to toggle between communism and capitalism depending on circumstances, as well as on whether they were so to speak facing inside or facing outside. That isn’t necessarily cynicism (or hypocrisy), it can be ‘evangelism’ too – the idealistic communistically minded jew (or gentile as well) may wish to evangelise to the gentile world what he finds works within the community he is familiar with (e.g. lending at the same rate to both other jews and to gentiles might qualify as such in a very broad sense) while the evangelical capitalist (jew) may wish to bring economic competition from the ‘outside world’ into his own community.
Mediating upon, and manipulating the boundaries of the inside and the outside (with respect to economics and pretty much everything else) can explain a great deal of how the modern world works, both jewish and gentile