# The Coming Caesars  ## Metadata - Author: [[Amaury De Riencourt and Timothy L. Price]] - Full Title: The Coming Caesars - Category: #books ## Highlights - It (Caesarism)...is not dictatorship, not the result of one man’s overriding ambition, not a brutal seizure of power through revolution. It is not based on a specific doctrine or philosophy. It is essentially pragmatic and untheoretical. It is a slow, often century-old, unconscious development that ends in a voluntary surrender of a free people escaping from freedom to one autocratic master... ([Location 58](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=58)) - Tags: [[blue]] - American citizens are less free, more tyrannized, and more susceptible to being totally dominated by a powerful Tribune (what amounts to a special interest genie for the masses) in the presidency than ever before. ([Location 76](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=76)) - Tags: [[blue]] - It is the contention of this book that expanding democracy leads unintentionally to imperialism and that imperialism inevitably ends in destroying the republican institutions of earlier days; further, that the greater the social equality, the dimmer the prospects of liberty, and that as society becomes more equalitarian, it tends increasingly to concentrate absolute power in the hands of one single man. ([Location 119](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=119)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Caesarism is therefore the logical outcome of a double current very much in evidence today: the growth of a world empire that cannot be ruled by republican institutions, and the gradual extension of mass democracy, which ends in the destruction of freedom and in the concentration of supreme power in the hands of one man. ([Location 129](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=129)) - Tags: [[blue]] - We must see in the President of the United States not merely the Chief Executive of one of the Western democracies, but one already endowed with powers of truly Caesarian magnitude. Today, one man is directly in command, either as peacetime President or wartime Commander in Chief, of more than half the globe’s economic and technical power. Along the militarized borders of the Western world he is in full control, as Augustus and the Roman emperors after him were in full control of the limes. As an autonomous Executive who is constitutionally free from parliamentary interference, he is all at once Chief of State and head of government in control of all cabinet appointments as well as Commander in Chief of the most powerful armed forces in the world. He is the only statesman in the Western world who can make major decisions alone in an emergency. He is in control of a de facto empire into which the scattered fragments of the dissolving British Commonwealth are gradually being merged. Everywhere, on the European continent, in the Western Hemisphere, and in the Far East, he can make the weight of his incalculable power felt with immediate and crushing speed. ([Location 141](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=141)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The prime element in this situation is neither political nor strategic—it is essentially psychological. It is the growing “father complex” that is increasingly evident in America, the willingness to follow in any emergency, economic or military, the leadership of one man. ([Location 150](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=150)) - Tags: [[blue]] - What is the essence of history? Not so much the recorded facts as the thoughts, dreams, emotions, ideals, and aspirations of the human beings who have acted on its grand stage. History is life itself. Behind the disconnected facts, there is the continuous evolution of human societies; behind the outward forms, the living essence. Like everything else that is alive, history experiences ebbs and flows. It has a beating pulse that manifests itself in recurrences and cycles, moving from tension to relaxation and back again to renewed tension. ([Location 181](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=181)) - Tags: [[blue]] - As in physical science, the true test of a valid interpretation of history is whether it can explain the greatest number of phenomena with the smallest and simplest formula. ([Location 195](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=195)) - Tags: [[blue]] - We must first of all define the social unit with which we are dealing, isolate it from other neighboring societies, and watch its historical development. A human society thus delineated is not merely an aggregate of separate human individuals; it is an entity in its own right, endowed with a life of its own, a collective life greater and far more lasting than the lives of the separate individuals who belong to it: it is a spiritual organism. Its reality is recognizable in that it has a definite spiritual source and that from this source flows a coherent stream of religious, philosophic, artistic, scientific, and political creations, which are all interrelated, which have, all of them, a profound symbolic unity within the broad framework of a distinctive world outlook belonging specifically to that particular society and to no other. And like all organisms that are alive, a particular society is compelled to follow certain biological laws throughout its historical development: it is born, grows, blooms, decays, and eventually dies. ([Location 196](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=196)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Culture predominates in young societies awakening to life, grows like a young organism endowed with exuberant vitality, and represents a new world outlook. It implies original creation of new values, of new religious symbols and artistic styles, of new intellectual and spiritual structures, new sciences, new legislations, new moral codes. It emphasizes the individual rather than society, original creation rather than preservation and duplication, prototypes rather than mass production, an aesthetic outlook on life rather than an ethical one. Culture is essentially trailblazing. Civilization, on the other hand, represents the crystallization on a gigantic scale of the preceding culture’s deepest and greatest thoughts and styles, living on the petrified stock forms created by the parent culture, basically uncreative, culturally sterile, but efficient in its mass organization, practical and ethical, spreading over large surfaces of the globe, finally ending in a universal state under the sway of a Caesarian ruler: ([Location 208](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=208)) - Tags: [[blue]] - This interpretation of history’s inner development has a special meaning for us today because we are in the very process of switching from European culture to American civilization. In this sense, we are experiencing a momentous and baffling change of historical phase, one that no one can correctly understand who does not grasp the fact that we are reaching the culmination of a process that started a thousand years ago when the first Gothic spires began to dot the European landscape: it is the final winding up of European culture. The 20th century is the dramatic watershed separating the culture behind us from the civilization that lies ahead. ([Location 224](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=224)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The English, after having cut off the head of one king, and expelled another from his throne, were still wont to address the successors of those princes only upon their knees. On the other hand, when a republic falls under the sway of one single man, the demeanor of the sovereign remains as simple and unpretending as if his authority was not yet paramount. When the emperors exercised an unlimited control over the fortunes and the lives of their fellow citizens, it was customary to call them Caesar in conversation; and they were in the habit of supping without formality at their friends’ houses. ([Location 255](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=255)) - Tags: [[blue]] ## New highlights added January 12, 2025 at 11:26 AM - Greece 1,000 years before Christ and Western Europe a 1,000 years after—these were the birthplaces and birth times of two great societies whose emotional roots dug deep into mythological eras filled with legendary figures, heroes and supermen, dreamlike eras depicted in the fantastic tales of Homer and Charlemagne’s chroniclers. Both were emerging from chaotic Dark Ages replete with barbarian invasions—Boeotian and Dorian in Greece, Teutonic and Norman in Europe—receding nightmares of their collective childhoods. ([Location 263](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=263)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Those who awoke to new life were entirely new breeds of men, dynamic offspring of the rape of old civilized populations by wild barbarians. Dorian Greeks and Gothic Europeans looked at the world with the puzzled, curious, and naive eyes of newborn children. They looked at it as no one ever had before. They were moved to extreme tenderness or utter ruthlessness, excited to great joy or quick anger and often swept to sublime ecstasies by their vibrant faith. Compelled by a mysterious urge to materialize in stone, color, music, and verse their profound visions, they created new cultures over the gaping ruins of dead civilizations. ([Location 267](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=267)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The prime concern of culture in those days was the harmonious and simultaneous development of ideal man and ideal society. The goal was the development of life’s highest creation, individual man—the development of excellence in body and soul, of human wholeness. But social concerns were never neglected. Society was conceived of as an organism analogous to the human body with its soul, mind, limbs, and organs, each of these having its appointed place, its tasks and duties, its privileges and rights. Society was a spiritual organism in which man, the living cell out of which the social body was made, was free to develop his individual potentialities to the full. The goal was a harmonious balance between individual and social requirements. ([Location 278](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=278)) - Tags: [[blue]] - In the Italian city-states, the teeming little worlds of the Medicis, the Sforzas, Borgias, and Malatestas, could be found the same vitality and exuberant artistic and literary output that characterized the bustling Hellenic world of the 7th and 6th Centuries BC. The ideal of Unity and harmonious synthesis had been abandoned in the Olympic and Christian societies, but only to be all the more emphasized in the creative individual. Glaucus of Chio and Leonardo da Vinci were universal geniuses who combined within themselves the talents of engineers, scientists, and artists. Everywhere, under the leadership of such universal men, there was a search for new forms, new symbols, new modes of expression, new outlets for the expansion of creative souls. Ionic and Eleatic philosophers paralleled the Humanists; Descartes and Anaximander, Leibnitz and Thales, all were searching for new formulations of eternal truths. ([Location 310](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=310)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The rise of internal tensions and discords was temporarily abated whenever the young societies were menaced by the assaults of barbarian hordes—when Greece repelled the vast Persian armies of Darius and Xerxes, when Europe faced the onslaughts of Moors, Mongols, and Turks. But as soon as the external threats disappeared, internal dissensions were renewed with greater bitterness than ever. ([Location 324](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=324)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The inner structures of Greece and Europe were based on multiplicity and diversity, tensions and antagonisms, all of which generate a fabulous creativity in a culture’s summer and autumn—and self-destruction when the winter of cultural decline sets in. ([Location 333](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=333)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The Renaissance was only one phase of the reaction against the Gothic order. On the intellectual and religious level, a simultaneous reaction took place, a reaction against papal authority, against the Catholic Church’s historic claims, and against medieval theology. The Renaissance had liberated southern Europe from the shackles of the Gothic and Teutonic spirit and had reclaimed its Mediterranean legacy. The Reformation liberated northern Europe from the Latin and classical discipline of the Catholic Church. Although they did not operate on the same level, they both tore apart the organic unity of medieval Christendom and set its components traveling on their separate courses. Both movements joined hands, however, in exalting man’s individualism and autonomy—the Renaissance in art and literature, the Reformation in religion, both in philosophy. ([Location 361](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=361)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Greece had experienced her own Reformation, her Orphism with its powerful reaction against the Homeric world outlook. 2 When Xenophanes of Colophon inveighed against the “abominable” Olympus and its corrupt gods, he set in motion the Eleatic protest and his Reformation eventually culminated in Zeno’s Stoicism. Sweeping away the Olympian pantheon was just as drastic as brushing aside the Catholic cult of the Virgin Mary and the saints. The practical results were the same in both cases: the rise of unmitigated nationalism through a transfer of religious sentiment to State and nation, the patriotic attachment to the Greek polis and to the European state. ([Location 378](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=378)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The tendency to explain the universe and man’s destiny in naturalistic rather than in spiritual terms underlined the Renaissance and the Reformation. The dogmatic keystone that held together the Gothic hierarchy of values was removed, and the well-built structure that had embraced all human thoughts, aspirations, and activities disintegrated. ([Location 386](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=386)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The ascending merchant and lawyer class, imbued with a new social and religious radicalism, wanted to erase the entire medieval structure, tearing out utterly and forever all traces of Catholic and aristocratic compromise. Thus arose the Puritan movement, the crystallization and fighting organ of the expanding energies of this new philosophy of life, which threw itself against an intimidated and confused Church and set in motion the Cromwellian revolution. Puritanism was the real Reformation of England, the apex of the whole Protestant movement, the sharp edge of the righteous sword, which cut the united Christendom of Gothic days to pieces. ([Location 447](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=447)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Strong, inhumanly self-reliant, endowed with an ecstatic dryness of temper, which brushed aside the psychological complexities of mysticism, the Puritans were geared to a life of action. They shunned subjective contemplation and were determined to throw their fanatical energy into this struggle against nature—a struggle incipient in the Gothic spirit—remorselessly brushing aside all men who stood in their path. They fought their own selves with gloomy energy, repressing instincts and emotions, disciplining and rationalizing their entire lives. ([Location 457](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=457)) - Tags: [[blue]] - the remarkable feature was that its dominant theme was economics. Calvin had partly legitimized business, finance, and banking and had refused to condemn material wealth provided it was acquired through hard work and dedicated to the Lord. Calvin’s was a practical concession to an existing situation. The Puritans went much further. To them business was a spiritual calling, economic prosperity was a sign of divine benediction, and earthly success the definite touchstone of a spiritual blessing that opened the gates of salvation. Merrie England, the land of carefree aristocrats and boisterous laborers, was forever swept away by the icy middle-class fanaticism that despised all human weakness. Self-reliance, thrift, and hard work became the guiding principles of all those who parted company with bishops and clergy, with medieval pageantry, and the refinement of a European culture in full development. ([Location 468](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=468)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The only element, which disappeared almost entirely after the subsequent Glorious Revolution of 1688, was royal power. The Crown became a mere symbol, and political power fell into the hands of a new aristocracy that replaced the downfallen feudal nobility already largely destroyed by the Tudors and the Stuarts. This new aristocracy blended the traditional blood-nobility with the higher middle class. Alone of all the European ruling classes, it was able to mix successfully the virtues and political talents of an aristocracy with the keen business sense of the capitalist middle class. ([Location 508](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=508)) - Tags: [[blue]] ## New highlights added January 31, 2025 at 11:26 AM - Classical Greece and Western Europe had too much surplus energy to remain physically contained within their geographical limits. ([Location 535](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=535)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The fabulous power of Babylon’s monarch Nebuchadnezzar or, 2,000 years later, that of the Moghul emperor Akbar inspired the Greeks and westerners with the same feeling of awe and yet contempt—contempt for the effeminate people who were unable to rule themselves through representative institutions and who crawled at the feet of despotic monarchs. ([Location 541](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=541)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The dynamism of youthful cultures can never be confined to one domain and always overflows, exploring, digging, discovering, and exploiting in the spiritual as well as in the physical worlds, covering like tidal waves the known worlds of its respective ages. ([Location 553](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=553)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Many speculative writers of the Renaissance such as Thomas More and Francis Bacon had conjured out of their daring imagination remarkable pictures of ideal Platonic republics and, late in the 16th Century, many sober nonconformists of England had instinctively come to identify this mental ideal with the remote coast of North America—a savage, deserted coast, far removed from the brilliant and opulent world of the West Indies and Latin America with its glittering cities full of priceless Baroque churches and palaces, its mines and inexhaustible tropical resources. ([Location 562](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=562)) - Tags: [[blue]] - All other settlers in America—Portuguese and Spaniards, the French in Louisiana and Canada— sooner or later succumbed to the overwhelming influence of American nature. They befriended the Indians and in their humane weakness reverted often to an entrancing form of primitive life to whose charms the English and the Dutch were immune. Archaic tendencies are always deeply embedded in every human being and the confused instincts of prehistoric life were often able to develop unchecked among the Latins who entered into full communion with the wild spirit of the American earth. Not so with the iron-willed Puritans. They imposed their abstract plans and concepts on nature from the very start, making no concessions to the land, determined to dominate, not to bend and adapt. ([Location 585](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=585)) - Tags: [[blue]] - they set the pattern of American life and thought from the very start: an absolute domination of rational man over a nature with which he refuses to enter into communion. America was destined to become the expression of Europe’s dream, a dream that could never come true in the Old World because the cramping limitations imposed by tradition, and the pressure of relatively large populations impinging on one another in a limited space, stood in the way. In order to make an idealistic utopia come true in Europe, violent coercion was necessary because there was no virgin space where a new society might be built up without affecting unwilling neighbors. ([Location 593](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=593)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Communal freedom and decentralization were established from the very beginning, and all official positions were elective. But individual freedom was remarkably restricted. The franchise was tied to property qualifications and church membership. The local governments were empowered to regulate politics, religion, economics, and customs. The idea of mass democracy was repulsive to the Puritans, who were imbued with a Calvinistic faith in their predestined superiority. John Cotton, Winthrop, and other leaders believed firmly in class distinctions, so long as they themselves were the social and political elite, rid of a profligate aristocracy, which had bothered them in England and contemptuous of the lazy lower classes. ([Location 608](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=608)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Like the early Romans of the 5th and 4th Centuries BC, the Puritans founded communities of self-disciplined men whose unremitting toil was wholly dedicated to abstract entities—the abstract deities of the Roman state, the Almighty of the New England “Saints.” In both cases, individual men were, in contradistinction to Greece and Europe, ruled by the community and public opinion. Mutual vigilance, methodical organization of communities, tyranny of the group, devotion to duty and self-control, all these characteristics of the coming American nation were born in these early days. Romans and Puritans were dedicated to a severe, joyless life; determined men who bowed to no other men, natural born republicans. ([Location 616](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=616)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Puritanism, under its moral aspect, eventually conquered the whole of America as Stoicism was destined to conquer the entire Roman world, this very Stoicism that John Buchan defined as “Puritanism stripped of its element of rapture.” 4 Both had in common the fact that they were not so much elaborate philosophies as ways of life, psychological attitudes, the ultimate ethical consequences of Protestant reformations. They made few demands on the mind but a great many on the character and both stood opposed to the prevailing Epicureanism of Greek and European cultures. They espoused the ethical point of view of civilization rather than the aesthetic outlook of culture. ([Location 629](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=629)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Since suffrage remained limited to church members and property-owners, the economic foundations of New England were laid in favor of the small ruling oligarchy. Thanks to their exclusive political power and keen sense of business, they were able to distribute among themselves extensive land grants, which rose steadily in value as wave after wave of colonists swept in from the Old World. Inasmuch as economic prosperity was blessed by the Lord, members of the oligarchy felt that their establishments rested securely on spiritual foundations. ([Location 654](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=654)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Thus started America’s traditional solution to most human conflicts—a solution made possible by the almost infinite extension of land in the interior—re-emigration of dissenters and foundation of new colonies away from the increasingly congested seaboard. ([Location 664](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=664)) - Tags: [[blue]] - America was able to dispose of her democratic elements by distributing them along her mobile frontier, a fringe of pioneering men following the sun, generation after generation, across the length and breadth of a gigantic continent, endlessly re-enacting the bold landing at Plymouth Rock. In the same vein, Rome disposed of her adventurous elements—pioneers, democrats, and discharged legionaries—by sending them off to distant Italian colonies on the edge of her own expanding “frontier.” ([Location 673](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=673)) - Tags: [[blue]] - In Rome and Anglo-Saxondom, the protection of the individual was easily achieved because the citizens rarely abused liberty. Both had strongly rooted in their psychological temper a strong feeling for the community’s interests, a social instinct that made them understand the advantages of social organization and self-imposed discipline, all this underlined by a basic altruism. ([Location 694](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=694)) - Tags: [[blue]] - A new characteristic of American politics thus came to light. The wealthy classes of the eastern seaboard were conservative and anti-imperialistic, the more democratic and equalitarian populations of the interior were radical and expansionist. This was the beginning of the natural alliance between social democracy and the expansionism, which is also a constant factor in Roman history. ([Location 741](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=741)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The 18th Century saw the rise to global supremacy of the British Empire, the magnificent flowering of European culture and the very beginning of the Industrial Revolution. It was to the West what the Age of Pericles was to the classical world. These Ages of Enlightenment that seemed to so many in Greece and Europe as being the threshold of a wonderful new world, were in fact the supreme expressions of cultures approaching their zenith, ages when everything was in style, when bad taste was still impossible, when no dissonance could yet mar the cultural harmony. ([Location 766](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=766)) - Tags: [[blue]] - in England and America, the pattern was clearly set. In all English-speaking countries, as it had been in Rome, individual freedom was the basis of social and political life. At the same time, the aristocracy rose to supreme and undisputed preeminence, but it was no longer the same ruling class that had preceded the Tudors and Stuarts. It was a new one that had willingly incorporated the higher middle class and had become partly converted to its economic ideals. It was the first of the great compromises whereby the Anglo-Saxons were able to reduce political and social frictions to a bare minimum. Within the English aristocracy, the landed gentry (Tories) came to terms with the financial and business patricians (Whigs). It was a strange but workable alliance between the old feudal nobility based on landowning and blood ties and the new wealth of finance, commerce, and industry—between the old countryside and the new city. Both were willing to struggle for supremacy within the constitutional framework of a two-party system and thus virtually share the supreme power in the state. They had their club—the House of Commons—and all their trials of strength took the form of parliamentary debates. ([Location 785](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=785)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Rome followed the same enlightened road after the abolition of the Tarquin monarchy. Rome became wholly aristocratic. Because they were realistic, pragmatic, and remained sufficiently fluid to accept ceaselessly new recruits from the rising plebeians and middle classes, generation after generation, the Roman and Anglo-Saxon aristocracies enjoyed a “tradition of confidence” on the part of the people, which was unknown to Greece and Europe. ([Location 797](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=797)) - Tags: [[blue]] - From the creation of the Tribunate in 495BC to the democratic laws of Quintus Hortensius in 287BC, the decline of the old blood-nobility proceeded steadily and peacefully, with the predominance shifting to the new aristocracy of money and commercial wealth. But there was no brutal break, no revolution, no rupture comparable to the frightful revolutions, civil wars and slaughters of contemporary Greece. Rome in ancient and the English-speaking nations in modern times were the only states to survive the great eras of revolutions and world wars with unimpaired constitutions. Aristocratic standards and traditions were regularly transmitted through osmosis, as it were. ([Location 812](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=812)) - Tags: [[blue]] - This aristocratic reaction and pre-eminence was accepted in the British Empire for one simple reason. Alone among all the ruling classes in the world, this aristocracy was progressive, was “in form.” It alone was living consciously in the new age of economic development that the continental Europeans did not understand. ([Location 865](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=865)) - Tags: [[blue]] - John Locke and his followers of the Age of Enlightenment intellectualized the feelings of Protestants and Puritans by rejecting once and for all the Aristotelian and Thomist conception of society as an organic entity endowed with a life and meaning of its own, over and above that of the individual. Instead, society was now viewed as composed exclusively of free, equal, independent individuals moved by their own self-interest. Locke looked upon the revolution that overthrew the absolutist James II as fully justified by the twin theory of individual “natural rights” and the rational “natural law” to which all individuals could appeal against man-made laws. And although the British always retained a divided philosophic allegiance to both Hooker’s Aristotelianism and Locke’s extreme individualism, Americans followed Locke almost exclusively. It was Locke who provided the intellectual justification for the American Revolution—and from England’s Glorious Revolution to the American one a century later; a clear legal thread springs from the very root of Anglo-Saxon psychology. ([Location 886](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=886)) - Tags: [[blue]] - With our historical perspective, we can see the line of Greek evolution quite clearly. Aeschylus, Pindar, and Sophocles poured their fervent faith in the Olympian deities into their great literary creations, as Phidias did in his statuary. But already Pythagoras, the Eleatic philosophers, and the Orphic devotees had initiated the ideological reaction of the classical world’s Reformation, and their natural successors were the skeptical Protagoras, the Sophists (who introduced the notion of relativity and denied the existence of any absolute), the materialistic Democritus, and the Voltairian Euripides. Worship of speculative science appeared with Anaxagoras and Democritus, the counterpart of the French Encyclopedists of the 18th Century. The same reaction against the Periclean and Voltairian urban rationalism animated the romantic advocates of a “return to nature”: the Greek Cynics and France’s Rousseau. ([Location 911](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=911)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The predominant type in New England was no longer the stern, God-fearing Puritan of the old days but the sharp Yankee merchant. The triumph of the economic world outlook over the religious was symbolized by the gradual shift for franchise qualification from church membership to property ownership, to the “stake in society” that alone could qualify the ruling elite of landowners and businessmen. ([Location 930](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=930)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Americans followed their British cousins—and later overtook them—in slowly reducing man to an exclusively homo economicus, a producing and consuming machine who thought of little except economic laws and requirements, goods and production. Because their social instincts were, in fact, very strong, because their individualism was never as marked as that of Europeans, English economists such as Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham could propound the most individualistic economic doctrines ever put forward by man without poisoning their society. Anglo-Saxons could absorb it, and live by it whereas the individualism of a Voltaire could only destroy the Latins. ([Location 949](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=949)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Imprisoned in their narrow vista through which they saw economics as the beginning and end of man’s serious purpose in life, the English-speaking people led the rest of the world economically and at the same time were spared the frightening convulsions that began to shake Europe from the French Revolution onward. The preservation of private property became their main goal. Inevitably, they soon came to embody the most conservative outlook in the West, a form of enlightened and progressive conservatism similar to that prevalent in Classical Rome, which frowned as much on the social revolutions of Greece as on the reactionary monarchies of the Hellenistic East. ([Location 958](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=958)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The Great Awakening was an irrational outburst attempting to slough off the bewildering intellectual confusion of a culture that stood on the threshold of decline. An American phenomenon, the Great Awakening was the answer of the South and West’s self-reliant, illiterate pioneers, whose practical wisdom refused to accept the skepticism of the more intellectual East. It shook off the increasing lethargy and indifference, which under the guise of tolerance, slipped into the increasingly secularized Protestant denominations. As theocracy waned beyond recall, religion became increasingly personal. Independent sects multiplied. Men and women listened more and more to the “inner light.” Faith externalized itself, no longer in theology or mystical meditation, but in good works, and the persistent humanitarian trend of the Protestant world became the indispensable counterpoise to the ruthless economic individualism of the Industrial Revolution. ([Location 971](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=971)) - Tags: [[blue]] - With Benjamin Franklin as a living symbol, the true American soul began to emancipate itself from its European cocoon: pragmatic, compromising and conciliatory, profoundly devoted to freedom and fundamentally inclined toward equality, industrious and frugal, unrefined and comfortable. Here again there is a direct connection between the somber, iron-willed Pilgrim Fathers and the optimistic, skeptical Franklin in whom religious fanaticism metamorphosed itself into an idealist morality. This direct connection was a fundamental utilitarianism, a direct outgrowth of early Puritanism, which gradually ended by reabsorbing its parent into itself. Since material success is a sign of spiritual blessing, every production should be gauged by the test: “Does it work, is it useful?” Bach’s fugues could not pass the test, but Franklin’s lightning rod could. And so could his homely aphorisms, which were meant to be read near the family stove, another of his inventions. And so it was with the nameless but practical Romans who invented techniques and gadgets that were unknown to the more brilliant Greeks. ([Location 1002](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=1002)) - Tags: [[blue]] - On the eve of the American Revolution, the basic difference between Americans and Europeans was already clear-cut. It was the same fundamental opposition that set the Romans apart from the Greeks—the cult of Beauty and Theory in Greece and Europe, the cult of Morality and Pragmatism in Rome and America. Romans and Americans already displayed a genius for avoiding those social and political conflicts, which tore apart Greeks and Europeans. They always worked at producing a uniform level of ability among all men rather than bringing into great prominence those individuals who were more highly gifted. The result was a far higher average than in Greece and Europe, and yet an almost complete absence of great creative personalities, a very high average of popular education but no outstanding originality, no real contribution to culture. ([Location 1015](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=1015)) - Tags: [[blue]] ## New highlights added January 31, 2025 at 1:23 PM - The end of the Seven Years’ War in 1764 had given Great Britain complete supremacy in India and had transferred the huge French possessions in North America to the British Empire. England now learned at her expense that a great deal of the loyalty of Americans now born and raised in America to their British connection was due to their fear of a redoubtable French imperialism. Having disposed of that threat, the British were no longer needed. In 1763, Britain had fulfilled part of her historic role in America. She had destroyed the one rival who could have divided the continent and who, by settling the immense territory stretching all the way from New Orleans to Montreal, could have founded an antagonistic and far more powerful Latin empire. The French threat had vanished and the Americans were now fully prepared to take their destiny into their own hands. ([Location 1045](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=1045)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Note: Fits into Sarah Paine’s framework that common enemies tie allies together. When the British and American colonists had France as their common enemy, they remained close. Once that common enemy was removed, the colonists drifted away from Britain ## New highlights added February 1, 2025 at 11:26 AM - with the end of the Seven Years’ War came the end of a century of unmitigated prosperity. A severe slump hit America. The ill-advised British chose this precise moment to assert their full authority. The Sugar Act of 1764 and the Stamp Act of 1765 were followed by a series of arbitrary measures promulgated in London without reference to American wishes. In addition, having destroyed the counterpoise of a menacing French empire on the North American continent, the British attempted to replace it with an Indian threat. A proclamation of 1763 forbade settlers to cross the Appalachians into Indian Territory. In this clumsy way, Britain hoped to limit the alarming growth of the colonies and preserve a profitable fur trade with the large Indian nations that were under British influence. Nothing could have been better calculated to infuriate the expansionist frontiersmen. ([Location 1056](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=1056)) - Tags: [[blue]] - on the deeper level of state of mind, the Americans had already become conscious of their un-European nature, conscious of the differences that separated them from their cousins beyond the ocean. To an often quoted remark of a British officer that “The people of America are at least a hundred years behind the old Countries in Refinement,” an anonymous American replied in the Connecticut Gazette: “As to Humanity, Temperance, Chastity, Justice, a Veneration for the Rights of Mankind, and every Moral Virtue, they [the Europeans] are a hundred years behind us.”3 As an American historian points out: “The appeal to ancient Rome for republican inspiration was especially favored...the way to exhort the Americans was to ‘stir up all that’s Roman in them.’” 4 ([Location 1070](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=1070)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Conscious of their moral superiority, the Americans were beginning to define their incipient nationhood in terms of ethics. Europe became to them the land of decadence, self-indulgence, and corruption that no amount of culture could justify, America the land of solid virtues—therefore the land of republics since, according to the French philosopher Montesquieu, republics thrive on virtue. ([Location 1076](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=1076)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Few Americans were prepared to sever all connections with the British Empire. The great Americans of those days—Jefferson, Franklin, John Adams—all thought in terms of a federal empire. ([Location 1089](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=1089)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The constitutional problem facing Britain and America might easily have been solved by the establishment of a federal assembly in London, over and above the British parliament and the colonial legislatures. ([Location 1099](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=1099)) - Tags: [[blue]] - John Adams estimated that as much as one-third of the Americans were loyalists. ([Location 1112](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=1112)) - Tags: [[blue]] ## New highlights added February 4, 2025 at 11:26 AM - Jefferson and his liberal friends remained in power during the war and the first years of independence. Aligned against Jefferson and his followers were most of the New England leaders like John Adams and most southern aristocrats like George Washington, whose strong convictions were made plain when he stated that “mankind, when left to themselves, are unfit for their own government.” ([Location 1125](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=1125)) - Tags: [[blue]] - reunion had become impossible and mob rule prevailed—an extremely mild and reasonable mob rule judged by the European standards soon to be set by the orgiastic French Revolution. The electoral franchise was considerably widened. From the limited number of Americans who signed the Declaration of Independence and constituted a small oligarchy, to those who voted for the adoption of the Constitution, there was a tremendous increase in number of popular voters. In most states, almost every taxpayer acquired the right to vote—still far from universal male franchise, but a considerable step in that direction. The equivalent democratization in Rome was the transfer of political rights and privileges from the limited Comitia Curiata to the much larger Comitia Centuriata, the assembled levy of those bound to military service—military service in Rome being a duty and source of political rights equivalent to taxpaying in the English-speaking world. ([Location 1133](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=1133)) - Tags: [[blue]] - This was no new problem. Rome had faced it time and again. It was the problem of geographic expansion and concomitant democratization. New Roman citizens were eventually granted full political rights, but were inscribed in a limited number of “tribes” regardless of their large numbers; they remained a minority in the Assembly. Under-representation always penalizes newcomers until they can revolt successfully, and this can only be achieved through a tight alliance between all the victims of an oligarchy— alliance between Roman plebeians and Latin allies, or, in America, between eastern lower classes and western frontiersmen. ([Location 1155](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=1155)) - Tags: [[blue]] - throughout the 19th Century, three times as many Englishmen emigrated to America as to all the British dominions and colonies put together, further tightening the instinctive bonds between them. ([Location 1172](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=1172)) - Tags: [[blue]] - In 1777 the Continental Congress approved the Articles of Confederation, and all the states ratified them by 1781. Jefferson and his democratic followers were in full control of the situation and had established what they thought would be the ideal structure, a league of virtually independent states: “Each state retains its sovereignty, freedom and independence, and every power, jurisdiction and right that is not by this confederation expressly delegated to the United States in Congress Assembled.” 1 The sole agency of federal government was Congress and the delegates from the states acted chiefly as ambassadors. Congress had no direct authority over the states’ citizens. There was no federal Executive. ([Location 1175](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=1175)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Their aristocratic and middle-class opponents, on the defensive, saw clearly that the splitting up of the country into thirteen weak little republics was the sure road to political impotence and financial chaos. Further, the states would be at the mercy of any strong and determined European power. This conservative opposition was largely urban (and therefore northern) although it was bolstered by a growing number of southern planters. They were all frightened by the growing insolvency of the states and by the insecurity of property, a condition that had started during the Revolution when the estates of fleeing loyalists were confiscated and distributed to the patriots. ([Location 1185](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=1185)) - Tags: [[blue]] - It was George Washington who perceived the tight connection between centralization and territorial expansion, and saw the inevitability of the twin trend at the same time. His journeys in the West convinced him that the Mississippi Valley was destined to be rapidly colonized and that, under existing conditions, the new country would fall under Spanish domination since the mouth and the west bank of the great river belonged to Spanish Louisiana. Without trade outlet to the sea, the westerners would vote themselves into the Spanish Empire or, at any rate, secede from a loose confederation, which could not protect them. The very safety of the original states would be endangered by the rise of another republic across the Appalachians. The safeguard of the United States therefore required the protection and incorporation of the West—and this could only be guaranteed by a strong central government. ([Location 1195](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=1195)) - Tags: [[blue]] - By the middle of the decade following ratification of the Articles, the virtual bankruptcy of the whole structure was obvious. Everything was at a standstill, the credit of America abroad was nil, the political situation was chaotic, the economic and financial conditions of most states disastrous; ([Location 1215](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=1215)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The time for a conservative reaction was at hand and the gentry rallied around George Washington. A convention was summoned in Philadelphia in May, 1787, Washington presiding. The delegates were men of outstanding intellect, integrity, and political experience. Their instructions were merely to revise the Articles of Confederation, whose failures were glaring. But the hopelessness of attempting to patch up a machinery that had almost entirely broken down became obvious. With remarkable boldness and spirit of decision, they decided to disregard instructions and work on an entirely new scheme. This new Constitution was devised by basically conservative men who saw in the virtual independence of the states the sure road to catastrophe. They were security-holders, manufacturers, ship owners, planters—all those who had a “stake in society”—and they designed a strong central government powerful enough to check the demagogy of state legislatures dominated by insolvent debtors. ([Location 1220](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=1220)) - Tags: [[blue]] - It had been Locke’s conviction that a government’s primary duty was the preservation of property and this view was followed by John Jay, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison. These men were patricians who believed in the fundamental inequality of men. They upheld liberty with vibrant conviction and saw the greatest threat to it in equality. ([Location 1227](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=1227)) - Tags: [[blue]] - J. R. Lowell could claim a century later that the members of the Convention “had a profound disbelief in theory and knew better than to commit the folly of breaking with the past. They were not seduced by the French fallacy that a new system of government could be ordered like a new suit of clothes. They would as soon have thought of ordering a suit of flesh and skin. It is only on the roaring loom of time that the stuff is woven for such a vesture of their thought and experience as they were meditating.” 4 And, going back 2,000 years, here is Cicero: “Cato used to say that our state excelled all others in its constitution; in them, for the most part, an individual had established his own form of state by his laws and institutions...our state, on the contrary, was the result, not of one man’s genius but of many men, not of one man’s life but of several centuries and periods...actual experience stretching over the ages is needed.” ([Location 1251](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=1251)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The Convention decided to appeal for ratification, not to the states but to the people themselves. This was the first substantial indication that the United States had become a nation rather than a league of separate sovereign states. ([Location 1269](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=1269)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The cardinal feature of the new Constitution was the creation of an autonomous Executive, and the cardinal principle was the separation of powers. The fear of tyranny and the ardent desire to protect freedom were in the mind and heart of every Founding Father. The members of the Convention thought that they had found the answer in Montesquieu’s system of “checks and balances” whereby the various powers would more or less cancel each other out and be prevented from usurping absolute control. It was similar in spirit to the system prevailing in the Roman republic. Authority had to be diluted and scattered. In their search for workable formulas, the Founding Fathers had of course borrowed a great deal from England. But they had borrowed even more from their own colonial experience and much of their political philosophy was native to the American soil. ([Location 1274](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=1274)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Edmund Randolph saw the danger and warned: “Our chief danger rises from the democratic parts of our constitution. It is a maxim, which I hold incontrovertible that the powers of government exercised by the people swallow up the other branches.” 7 Time and subsequent events were to give ample confirmation to this warning. Nothing would have surprised the conservative members of the Philadelphia Convention as much as the subsequent development of the Executive and its transformation into a tribunician power. But then, like the early Romans, they were defending liberty, not equality. Their sole aim was to prevent the turbulent mob from controlling the federal government, as they had controlled so many state legislatures. They conceived of the Presidency as the mild mouthpiece of the ruling gentry. There were plenty of forebodings, however. George Mason of Virginia claimed: “We are not indeed constituting a British government, but a more dangerous monarchy, an elective one.” 8 ([Location 1295](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=1295)) - Tags: [[blue]] - They did not foresee that, from being merely the first magistrate of a mildly aristocratic republic, the President would be metamorphosed, from Jackson onward, into a powerful Tribune of the people. They never thought that their careful separation of powers could be thus bypassed because new circumstances would compel the slow transformation of their republican institutions. ([Location 1305](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=1305)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The creations of the Tribunate in Rome and of the Presidency in America were remarkable examples of political flair. Such vaguely defined offices paved the way for legal evolution rather than violent revolution, through very gradual changes within their plastic structures. Tribunes and Presidents represented or came to represent the whole people as opposed to local and particular pressure groups and privileged minorities entrenched in legislatures, senates, and other assemblies. It was from the Tribunate that Caesarism sprung almost legally in Rome. The remarkable metamorphosis of the Presidency from Washington to Franklin Roosevelt was carried out peacefully and constitutionally. Everywhere else, in Greece and Europe, institutions were fast losing their holy character and were being violently destroyed. But Rome and America could adapt themselves, thanks to the acute realism and pragmatism of their citizens. ([Location 1316](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=1316)) - Tags: [[blue]] - They also saw a guarantee of freedom in the separation of powers. But the problem was complicated by the federal structure of the government and the existence of the individual states. In order to protect the states’ autonomy, the Constitution makers ended by weakening the federal House of Representatives and, unwittingly, by increasing the relative power of the President. As understood by the Founding Fathers, and as argued subsequently by Hamilton, Congress could do nothing except what was specifically authorized in the eighteen paragraphs, whereas the President could do anything that was not specifically forbidden. In time, since the logic of growth and expansion fostered increasing centralization and concentration of power, an enormous amount of unforeseen authority came into the hands of the federal government—and the greater part of it went straight to the White House, since the door was open for it at that end and closed at the other. ([Location 1360](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=1360)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Washington’s personality and the circumstances of the world had more influence in shaping the political structure of the United States than the Constitution itself. It was his immense dignity and prestige that enabled the American nation to get the best out of bitter antagonists such as Hamilton and Jefferson. Austere, aloof, an acute judge of human nature, thin-lipped Washington represented the typical Roman-like quality of the Founding Fathers. The contrast between these men and the flamboyant, dramatic and unstable personalities who dominated revolutionary Europe at the time could not have been more striking. Washington never courted popularity, never failed to impress his inflexible will on his compatriots when he had decided on a definite course of action. He had the high wisdom and great courage to stand up to the wave of Francophile feeling, which swept America during the French Revolution. Undaunted by threats and insults, he refused to be dragged into a futile war against Britain in spite of petty grievances, and he expressed his farsighted judgment in advocating peace and neutrality: “Sure I am that if this country is preserved in tranquillity twenty years longer, it may bid defiance in a just cause to any power whatever; such in that time will be its population, wealth and resources.” 12 ([Location 1395](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=1395)) - Tags: [[blue]] - American isolationism, thus stated, found its counterpart in Rome at the end of the Second Punic War when the abysmal danger of increasing foreign commitments stared Rome in the face. A political party was formed by Publius Scipio, the great victor of Zama, to check the growing Roman tendency to become emotionally involved in foreign affairs—and also to curb the incipient imperialism, which was beginning to raise it’s head. Similar imperialism was already finding growing acceptance in American public opinion—designs on Canada, on Spanish Florida, on Mexican territory. ([Location 1416](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=1416)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Very much like the Victorian Europeans, the Greeks who lived in the Hellenistic Age following Alexander the Great felt that they were living in a new, modern era of prosperity, of economic expansion, of discovery of the world with its strange petrified civilizations—Egypt, Babylon, Persia, and India. They had no feeling of cultural decline, no inkling that the Age of Pericles was the summit of creative power and inspiration from which they were slowly descending. ([Location 1431](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=1431)) - Tags: [[blue]] - In the course of this decline the grand philosophies find their supreme formulations—Plato and Kant, Aristotle and Hegel—in huge systems of abstractions that crown the whole edifice of a culture’s profound thought, and are in fact the closing chapter of systematic philosophy. And soon, systematic philosophy, this last attempt to retrieve on the intellectual plane the creative synthesis of the culture’s springtime, dies out. Ethics replace metaphysics, sociology replaces logic and dialectics, analysis replaces synthesis. Stoics, Cyrenaics, Epicureans, and Cynics vie with one another as Positivists, Transcendentalists, Existentialists, Pragmatists, and Socialists in modern times. The attempt at a synthetic comprehension of the whole body of the culture breaks up into so many careful analyses of its unrelated parts. The Hellenistic Age is increasingly blinded by the vast accumulation of knowledge, which no single man can now encompass in his heart and mind. An ever-increasing collection of facts and figures fails to be digested by man’s baffled brain. Inspiration wanes, the will to bring intellectual order into a disorganized world fades away. ([Location 1459](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=1459)) - Tags: [[blue]] - It was then and still is today an age of “Eiffel Towers”—an age of vast bureaucratic states where symbols and knowledge worked out over the past centuries are accumulated, stored, sifted, classified, distributed by countless experts, rhetoricians, compilers, an age of academics and gigantic libraries, of anthologies, encyclopedias, the age of the supremacy of the Alexandrian scholar who works over the original creations of the giants of the past. Cultural creation slowly gives way to civilized preservation. ([Location 1471](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=1471)) - Tags: [[blue]] - In the Alexandrian emporium of world trade, we no longer have true creative genius but a great deal of interpretative work. Art and literature become specialized professions classified as “business.” Hordes of grammarians, lexicographers, and critics compile records of past creations and make a business of exploiting the disinterested geniuses whose ashes were burned long ago. They invent better grammar, better punctuation. Aristarchus and Aristophanes of Byzantium, the latter chief librarian of the Ptolemies in Alexandria, were remarkably cultured men in their own right. They selected the best authors of the past with unerring judgment. But what paltry figures they were against such giants as Sophocles or Socrates! The dusk slowly falls on the Hellenistic world as it fell on Berlin, Paris, and London during the 19th and early 20th Centuries. ([Location 1478](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=1478)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Alexander’s meteoric conquest and Hellenization of the East could have been predicted long before it took place—as early indeed as the civil war between the Persian rulers Cyrus and Artaxerxes, in which the overwhelming superiority of Greek over Asian soldiers was strikingly displayed. Cyrus knew the worth of Greek troops and saw how they could strike terror in the hearts of the Persians; Alexander himself had to fight Darius’ 30,000 Greek mercenaries at Issus and his 50,000 choice Hellenes at Arbela. Greeks in those days assumed the same superiority vis-a-vis the Orientals as the Europeans later on, preening themselves on their greater vitality, technical ability, will power, and determination. ([Location 1521](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=1521)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Having destroyed the modern Alexander, the British undertook the establishment of the Hellenistic order themselves. Their success was due to a simple reason: they alone among the European powers were in tune with the modern temper; they alone lived consciously in a world of economic expansion. ([Location 1533](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=1533)) - Tags: [[blue]] - English freedom was home grown, insular, exclusive, and not exportable. The British knew that their freedom was largely due to their insular position. They never blindly believed, as their American cousins did later on, that freedom could possibly mean the same thing on a continent stretching from Spain to China in which vast populations alien to each other were constantly shifting and clashing. When Edmund Burke replied to a French statesman that, “we demand our liberties, not as rights of man, but as rights of Englishmen,” he pointed out the essentially parochial and insular outlook of his countrymen. It was not very generous, but it was realistic; and at that very moment, across the Atlantic, the more idealistic Americans were basing their whole political philosophy on the “rights of man,” all men. However unrealistic it may have been, and however often American actions have failed to live up to the proclaimed ideal, it did indicate that in the long run, a global “Roman” consciousness was America’s rather than Britain’s. ([Location 1549](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=1549)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The Industrial Revolution was stimulating a profound social evolution. Britain’s ruling class faced the fact and began to draw into itself the cream of the new industrial bourgeoisie after 1832. This aristocratic ruling class knew that politics, diplomacy, and statesmanship are matters of training, not of planning, that they are arts rather than sciences. They knew that they had to be played by heart with the unerring instinct of tactful men who have been brought up to look upon world politics as a keyboard. The Victorian rulers were able to prove that they could keep their fingers on the pulse of the world as no other ruling class since the downfall of the Roman aristocracy, with an unparalleled flair for the underlying realities of the times. ([Location 1561](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=1561)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The result of such political and social instability is that, if the victimized nations are to live at all, they must entrust a large share of their destiny to some nonpolitical organization; and thus it is that the contrast between Hellenistic and Roman, European and American administrative structures rested on the predominance of permanent bureaucracies in the Hellenistic and European states, as compared with the elective and non-bureaucratic institutions of Rome and America. ([Location 1576](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=1576)) - Tags: [[blue]] - the historic role of England has become clear. In reference to the classical world, England stands halfway between Greece and Rome—or, the other way around, Rome was both Britain and America. While Britain’s aristocracy and Parliament represent to a large extent the self-reliant, wise Roman aristocracy and Senate, America’s rising democracy and Presidential-tribunician power represent the rise of its Roman counterparts; and in the latter part of the Hellenistic Age, the slow decline of Britain in front of America’s developing power, as well as the decline of her own ruling class within the British nation, finds its counterpart in the decline of Rome’s traditional aristocracy with the concomitant rise of democracy and capitalism. Therefore, it is possible to view the political split between America and Britain as a superficial rather than a fundamental event, and their subsequent history bears out the contention that they both remained natural allies, tied together by innumerable invisible strings that no outsider could possibly snap. ([Location 1585](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=1585)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The pre-cultural stage is that of a new society not yet born to true historical life, leading a pure-ly instinctive existence, groping in cultural darkness like the child in the womb. Such was the state of the Persians before the beginning of the Christian era, such has been the state of Russia until our days, and such was pre-Homeric Greece or Carlovingian Europe. ([Location 1617](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=1617)) - Tags: [[blue]] - That Alexander the Great succeeded where Napoleon failed may partly be due to a mere accident of military strategy—the fact that the “scorched earth” policy that was suggested to Darius by his commander in chief was not followed, leading inevitably to disaster at the Granicus, whereas the Russians followed it 2,000 years later, burned Moscow, and destroyed Napoleon’s Grand Army. Yet, the ultimate result was the same because, regardless of their political relationship with the Greek and European West, the cultural subordination of Persians and Russians was the important fact. And the important sequel was, in both cases, the gradual collapse of the West’s cultural pre-eminence because it was at all times superficial. Below the thin sheet of Hellenization and Europeanization that covered Persians and Russians, there were simmering volcanos. We can sense in Russian history the Messianic spirit that moved the Zoroastrian Persians. Facing the Greek and European West, the thickly bearded Magian priests of Persia and Orthodox patriarchs of Russia stood as clumsy but fanatical guardians of the unborn souls of their coming cultures. And when in our 20th Century the revolutionary Father Gapon and the somber Rasputin decided to take a hand in the disintegrating political situation, they seemed to be reincarnations of the old Magian clergy, who cared nought for Western culture, in any shape or form. Neither the old Persians nor the modern Russians could really be seduced; they rejected Western ethics, laws, and religions. The Messianic spirit of Zoroaster and of the monk Philoteus (as reinterpreted by Dostoevski and the Slavophils) seemed, through their prophetic visions, to open entirely new vistas on the possibilities of development of the human soul; this Messianic spirit stood as an opaque screen between them and the dominant cultures against which they instinctively struggled with all their might. ([Location 1675](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=1675)) - Tags: [[blue]] - America’s task was twofold: the shaping of her political institutions, the preservation of her geographical freedom. Both tasks were well under way during the two decades following Washington’s retirement. The first President’s successor was the politically inept but farsighted John Adams, a hard, stern Puritan who frowned on relaxation, art, and poetry, a typical civilization man of the Roman stamp who claimed that “my sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain” 1—the stark expression of an instinctive preference for civilization over culture, the faith of men for whom culture is mere decorative froth on the periphery of life’s serious pursuits. Benjamin Franklin had already long ago sounded the keynote of this American temper when he had proudly claimed that in America “very few are rich enough...to pay the high prices given in Europe for Paintings, Statues, Architecture, and other work of Art, that are more curious than useful.” 2 America would build a civilization rather than a culture and would come into her own when the exhausted Western world would thirst for civilized order. ([Location 1702](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=1702)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The result of this conflict was a partial blend while Washington could make both antagonists work in his cabinet, and open rupture afterward. This rupture initiated the birth of what the Founding Fathers had always wanted to avoid: political parties. They had elaborated a Constitution that seemed to preclude political parties. They had foreseen temporary pressure groups and momentary alliances between sectional interests. They never foresaw the birth of huge political machines. Neither had they foreseen the amazing growth of presidential power over the years. Yet it was this very power that made the existence of permanent parties indispensable if a consistent policy was to be carried out. The policy-makers had to control the Presidency, whose overall importance had been considerably boosted by the failure of Congress to associate itself with it. Unsteady coalitions of shifting interests had to become permanent and find a common candidate for the highest office in the land—and all the opposition groups had to band together in order to wrest this power from those in office. Since opposition in practical-minded countries like Britain and America can only be constructive, the actual seizure of power was the primary consideration, overriding all doctrinal and theoretical differences between sections of the opposition. Thus came into being the two-party system on the British model, not as a copy of the mother country’s but a genuine growth on native soil. The struggle was on between those who were in power and those who were out. ([Location 1739](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=1739)) - Tags: [[blue]] ## New highlights added February 5, 2025 at 9:07 AM - When party coalitions and compromises were sacrificed to idealistic principles, the Union broke down and Civil War was the unavoidable outcome. This was to remain a bitter lesson to generations of post-Civil War Americans. ([Location 1755](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=1755)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Time and again, the administration had to preserve a balance between the commercial and industrial interests in the North, the agricultural and expansionist interests of the West, and the one-crop plantations of the South. Each solution favoring one section was purchased at the price of bargains and concessions to others. ([Location 1756](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=1756)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Embryonic political parties appeared shortly after Washington’s first inauguration. The basic conflict, underlying all sectional differences, was the opposition of the aristocratic planters and slave-owners of the South, in conjunction with the democratic western farmers and pioneers, to the bankers, merchants, and industrialists of the North. It was a struggle between the men who despised or feared money and those who manipulated credit and high finance. Alongside this basic opposition and yet inextricably mixed up with it was the nullification problem. Had the individual states the right to decide whether an act of the federal government was constitutional or not? If the answer was yes, the nation was back where it started with the Articles of Confederation, in fact was faced with the threat of secession at every step. The Federalists, Hamilton’s followers, became the staunch exponents of the centralizing theory that denied any such freedom to the individual states. The Republican Party, founded by Jefferson, adopted the platform of decentralization and states’ rights. ([Location 1771](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=1771)) - Tags: [[blue]] - from the very start, the members of the college that elected the President gave up their inherent right to vote as they pleased and fell under the sway of party discipline. In so doing, they altered the original conception of the Executive—from being the nominee of an oligarchy to becoming gradually a tribune of the whole people. It was only a first step in that direction but it was significant. ([Location 1782](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=1782)) - Tags: [[blue]] - His strenuous effort to break Hamilton’s power wrecked the Federalist Party, and it virtually disappeared from the scene of history at the turn of the century. This was a first lesson in practical politics. From now on no politician could ignore that collaboration between party and President was vital. But for all their swift and decisive fall from power, the Federalists really founded America’s machinery of state. ([Location 1794](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=1794)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Jefferson’s election at the turn of the century was the signal for a return of triumphant democracy—although he himself, like so many outstanding democrats in all ages, was essentially an aristocrat. All the way to Franklin Roosevelt, democrats and radicals have frequently been led to victory over conservatives and reactionaries by isolated aristocrats, who, like all converts, embraced their new politicals faith with the fervor of neophytes. Rome’s outstanding democratic leaders, from the noble Gracchi brothers to Julius Caesar, whose ancestry was as old as the dawn of Rome herself, were all blue-blooded aristocrats who turned against their narrow-minded peers and led the aroused people against them. ([Location 1802](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=1802)) - Tags: [[blue]] - A steely realist like Hamilton could not help being shrewd enough to predict that, once in office, Jefferson would be more autocratic than any of his Federalist opponents would ever dare to be. He also saw that the pressure of events would compel Jefferson to enlarge, even against his own will, the sphere of action of the Executive; and, indeed, that is exactly what happened. Jefferson had watched Washington behave in office as a reluctant constitutional monarch with Hamilton as prime minister. He had then watched Hamilton, now out of office, run Adams’ administration through the party channels that he still controlled. Jefferson quickly came to understand that the President and the head of the party must be one and the same man. Jefferson was both, and so were all the successful Presidents after him. Thus it was that the rigid separation of powers as provided by the Constitution, widened by the break between Congress and the Executive under Washington’s first Presidency, was gradually nullified by the growth of the party system—by those political parties that brought together and fused the powers the Founding Fathers had so carefully separated. Life always prevails over abstraction. Thus started the unofficial gathering of scattered powers within the caucus, where the President could confer with and influence Congressional leaders under the cloak of semi-secrecy. This regrouping of sundered powers was carried out by the President and therefore brought an immense increment of power directly to the White House, not to Congress. ([Location 1835](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=1835)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Jefferson rose immediately to the situation, threw his isolationism overboard, and wrote to the American minister in Paris in 1802: “There is on the globe one single spot, the possessor of which is our natural and habitual enemy. It is New Orleans, through which the produce of three-eighths of our territory must pass to market...the day that France takes possession of New Orleans...we must marry ourselves to the British fleet and nation” 7 ([Location 1853](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=1853)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Talleyrand’s po-licy of peace in Europe and French expansion in America would have, if carried out, changed a great deal of the history of the world. With the considerable means at their disposal, by far the largest army, the greatest population of any European nation—outnumbering the Americans ten to one—the French might have speedily occupied and effectively settled the Mississippi and Missouri valleys and linked up with Canada, surrounding the territory of the United States and preventing any further expansion. Indirectly, this might have caused the breakup of the Union. ([Location 1862](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=1862)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The logic of imperial expansion is implacable and makes a mockery of abstract idealism. The new western states of those days—Tennessee, Kentucky, and Ohio—depended for their trade outlet on the mouth of the Mississippi and would certainly not have remained in the Union if Louisiana had not been secured. With their withdrawal the Union would have shrunk to half its size, would have been denied all possibility of further expansion, and would have been constantly threatened with further disruption. As it was, it doubled its territorial surface at one stroke. Then and there, America’s destiny became set irrevocably in the twin trends of expansion and growing power of the Executive. Congress was in no way involved. ([Location 1887](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=1887)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The power of the Executive grows alongside the expansion of the nation, an inevitable trend if the nation dedicates itself increasingly to democratic equality. The slow metamorphosis of the Presidency into a Tribunate of the people was boldly accelerated by Jefferson’s purchase of Louisiana. From now on, the federal power, and within the federal structure, the executive power, grew almost continuously along with the democratization of the nation. ([Location 1898](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=1898)) - Tags: [[blue]] - American institutions, like the Roman, were solidly based on the principle of the rule of law, not men. This is one of the sharpest differences between the political and legal traditions of Classical Greece and Europe on the one hand, and of Rome and America on the other. Under such rule, law becomes automatically and inevitably involved in politics, whereas in Europe it does not. The rule of law sets up as supreme authority, not men, individually or collectively, but written documents, frozen abstractions such as Rome’s Twel-ve Tables or America’s Constitution—and a great deal of the political activit-ies of the nation revolve around the interpretation of these documents. The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and various amendments, and all the memorable speeches of great Presidents are studied and reinterpreted generation after generation with an almost religious passion. The sacred character of these documents gave to those who were entrusted with their interpretation—mostly lawyers—an inordin-ate importance in American history. Such simple words as person in the 5th Amendment have been analyzed to a degree that seems senseless to a European. Momentous political consequences have resulted from such interpretations. This is a direct outcome of the fact that American justice is based on the Constitution rather than on laws, since the latter can be invalidated by branding them unconstitutional. This power to cancel legislation is an original feature of America’s legal code and the major difference between the American and the European judiciaries. ([Location 1936](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=1936)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Thus, law and politics are inextricably mixed and the legal privilege of interpreting the Constitution, the power of “judicial review,” allows it to stand up against President and Congress, to act as a conservative brake on political and social evolution. Americans may not always be law-abiding but they are, like the old Romans, more law-minded than any other nation. Freedom of the individual from arbitrary tyranny and the paramountcy of law are inseparable. ([Location 1954](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=1954)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Anglo-Saxon law is a law of precedents, entailing a pragmatic concern for time and tradition, for organic growth rather than timeless logic. A law of precedents is utterly opposed to a law of reasons and fosters an immense conservatism. This has been reflected time and again in American history. The result is that whereas any layman can understand a European code if he cares to read the logical and permanently fixed document, nothing is more obscure than British and American legislation in its illogical accumulation of precedents, tradition bound, tied to concrete and particular cases and not abstract generalities, and always in a state of change. Tocqueville expressed it this way: “The French lawyer is simply a man extensively acquainted with the statutes of his country; but the English or American lawyer resembles the hierophants of Egypt, for like them he is the sole interpreter of an occult science.” 4 ([Location 1985](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=1985)) - Tags: [[blue]] - after Washington, Hamilton and Jefferson, the greatest single influence in shaping the political structure of America was that of John Marshall, the 4th Chief Justice of a largely untried Supreme Court. Mar-shall was appointed by the last Federalist in power, John Adams, and was himself an arch-Federalist whose 35 years on the bench were fateful for America. Taking office simultaneously with Jefferson, he was instrumental in building up the powers, both of the Supreme Court and of the federal government, to a degree that might have stunned the Founding Fathers. It is doubtful whether they had consciously wanted to hand over the power of judicial review to the Court, but Marshall took it without the slightest hesitation. ([Location 2021](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=2021)) - Tags: [[blue]] - It was during Jefferson’s Presidency that the decisive battle was fought between the Republican idealists and the Supreme Court—and was speedily won by John Marshall. In the celebrated case of Marbury v. Madison, the theory was firmly established that the Supreme Court was the one and only interpreter of the Constitution. Time sanctioned this decision even though it first seemed a usurpation at the expense of the legislative branch. ([Location 2026](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=2026)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Jackson impressed on all concerned that the President, as sole tribune of the people, was ultimately the last court of appeals because he alone had the power to enforce his decisions. ([Location 2048](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=2048)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The Roman and American pattern in law as in everything else was not invention but skillful adaptation, attention to reality rather than abstract theory, and ability to let institutions grow organically over long periods of time rather than attempt to plan them logically on the spur of the moment. ([Location 2053](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=2053)) - Tags: [[blue]] ## New highlights added February 6, 2025 at 9:25 AM - As opposed to Greece and Europe, Rome and America discovered early in their history the key to organic growth. They found it through trial and error, instinctively, without seeking it consciously or laying down rational plans. Organic growth implies not the brutal overpowering and subjugation of neighboring people to an imperial rule such as Athens, Sparta, and Thebes attempted time and again, or the bureaucratic empires of Macedonia, the Seleucids in Syria, or the Ptolemies in Egypt, or the imperialistic policies of European powers in Asia, Africa, or even Europe itself. Organic growth implies gradual extension through incorporation of aliens, neighboring people, or immigrants, as new cells join older ones in the process of building up the physical body as an organic unit. It precludes a policy of exploitation or subordination and implies a willingness to share, after a probationary period, one’s traditions, duties, riches, and privileges with the newcomers. ([Location 2062](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=2062)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Rome and America grew prodigiously because, alone in their respective worlds, their ruling classes were willing to raise the lower classes up to their level, to share their knowledge, skill, and privileges with them, and thus remain in a state of constant growth. They had fluid, “open” societies. Having established this supremely successful pattern, they could not help growing by drawing to themselves all those who were dissatisfied with worse conditions—with narrow-minded clinging to unjustified privileges or revolutionary instability as in Europe, with economic stagnation as in the Orient, with political chaos as in Latin America. ([Location 2070](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=2070)) - Tags: [[blue]] - American expansion would have been fraught with terrible dangers had the Union not found a formula that permitted admittance of the fast-developing western territories as new states with all the rights and privileges of the older states. This was an innovation of far-reaching importance, and one that few European nations would have contemplated in those days. ([Location 2080](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=2080)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Rome’s farsighted policy was a great innovation. Hitherto, classical expansion of the Greek and Hellenistic type had always ended in the juxtaposition of two political structures: the ruling city and the conquered territory—a scrapheap of protectorates, colonies, and dependencies exploited for the benefit of the ruling city. The res publica, the commonwealth, was strictly confined to the corporeal body of the city; and it was only after a great inner struggle that Rome developed the entirely new concept of an Italian nation that was no longer limited to Rome, of a continental rather than a city-wide res publica in which all citizens had equal rights. Roman Italy was the only nation in the full sense of the word in classical times. ([Location 2101](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=2101)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Every one of those Hellenistic empires was merely an overgrown polis that could not be metamorposed into a nation—a metamorphosis, which alone in the Classical world, the Romans were able to work out. ([Location 2110](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=2110)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Even for the Romans it was not easy. Many farsighted Romans, sensing the creeping sclerosis that was beginning to harden their institutions, advocated conferring Roman citizenship on all Italians before it was too late—Flaccus in 125BC, Drusus thirty-odd years later. But many other Romans were stubbornly clinging to their privileges, not so much to their voting rights as to the civil rights involved in citizenship. The result was the Social War, which finally conferred the citizenship on all Italians and completed the Romanization of Italy. The Social War was waged against Rome by her Italian allies, not in order to shake off Roman domination, but on the contrary, to be allowed to become full-fledged Roman citizens; they sought full integration within the Roman Common-wealth on a basis of equality. ([Location 2112](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=2112)) - Tags: [[blue]] - While the Americans solved their problem by gradually transforming the federal territories into autonomous states and by progressively extending the franchise to the adult male population in a few generations, the British solved theirs by working out the steady metamorphosis of their global empire into a commonwealth of scattered self-governing dominions. ([Location 2122](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=2122)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The successful absorption of these immigrants—who in time came to constitute the bulk of Rome’s population (it is estimated that between 81BC and 49BC 500,000 of slaves were freed in the city of Rome alone 2)—can be compared only to the remarkable record of America’s “melting pot” policy in the 20th Century. Success came from the fact that both nations had learned early the secret of organic growth—the social secret first, through the generous self-immolation of their ruling classes, then the territorial secret through the success of their geographical expansion. The subsequent success of their “melting pot” policies was only the extension of earlier achievements in the social and territorial fields. ([Location 2143](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=2143)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Romanization and Americanization imply a definite pattern of amalgamation and expansionism. They imply the triumph of the social over the individual outlook. They succeed in merging into their expanding communities a large number of scattered and lonely individuals who are, often unconsciously, longing for this social integration; and they add their weight to the remarkable decline of true individualism that characterizes nations like Rome and America, and which eventually becomes one of the hallmarks of civilization as opposed to culture. The immigrant is quite willing to leave his full individuality behind and immerse himself in a new society that is remarkably cohesive precisely because it restricts the free play of individualism. His acceptance in this new society makes him more Roman or American than the natives ever were. As a convert, he contributes more than one would think to enhance and even exaggerate their characteristics. ([Location 2149](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=2149)) - Tags: [[blue]] - While Americans were on the move westward, crossing the entire breadth of the continent, European newcomers, especially those belonging to the latest wave of immigration, often stayed in the East and absorbed the American characteristics of a land that was already becoming old. This made Americanization far easier than would have been the case if the Europeans had settled heavily in the virgin West while the native Americans remained in the East. This happened in a few isolated instances and the intractable nature of large groups of German immigrants in the Middle West made this danger quite plain. Some states might have become as distinctively German, Scandinavian, Italian, or Polish as Canada’s Quebec has remained doggedly French to this day. ([Location 2157](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=2157)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The Mexican War rounded off the immense American domain. It was also a turning point. For the first time, America had started a war of aggression and had become uncomfortably conscious of her latent expansionism. ([Location 2221](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=2221)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Lewis Cass, the leading imperialist of the time, wanted to grab the whole of Oregon and almost all of Mexico, and advertised his greed with shrill insistence. The penalty for the exacerbation of patriotic extremism and the arousing of uncontrollable passions was the shattering of the great North-South compromise and the Civil War. Calhoun, the wise compromiser, sensed the danger and feared the Mexican War because of its effect on the cohesion of the Union. But there was no turning back. Compromise is a state of mind that is rarely compatible with conscious imperialism. ([Location 2226](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=2226)) - Tags: [[blue]] - In 1844, Britain and France offered Mexico a plan for a joint guarantee of both Texas and Mexico against the United States. The Mexicans unwisely turned it down and paid for it with the subsequent loss to the United States of half their territory. Even when the alarmed Americans had finally made up their minds to annex Texas. ([Location 2242](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=2242)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Europe had long believed that if something was not done to restore order in Mexico, the United States would incorporate the entire country down to Central America and become an even more formidable power. The Civil War seemed a unique opportunity for action and in the fall of 1861, France, Britain, and Spain dispatched an international army— quickly reduced to a strictly French expedition when Britain and Spain became aware of Napoleon’s unrealistic megalomania. ([Location 2256](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=2256)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The Monroe Doctrine implied a virtual American protectorate over the entire Western Hemisphere. The Latin Americans never appreciated this, knowing perfectly well that they owed their national freedom to the Polignac Agreement, imposed by Britain’s naval power on reluctant French and Spanish monarchs. Britain alone ruled the waves and policed the modern “Hellenistic” world. It was only in the course of time that America’s growth and economic power began to seem threatening to the Latin Americans and that the Monroe Doctrine acquired definite imperialistic undertones. ([Location 2279](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=2279)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Until and including James Monroe’s Presidency, all the Chief Executives belonged to the “Virginia dynasty,” Virginian aristocrats who provided the bulk of America’s political leadership from the Revolution onward. 1 New England provided the substance of the ideology but the South provided the outstanding men; and it was under their leadership that democracy rose steadily until it felt strong enough, with Andrew Jackson, to discard the aristocracy altogether. ([Location 2294](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=2294)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The first sign of the Industrial Age to come was the invention and introduction of the cotton gin in the South. The social result of this shot-in-the-arm administered to a sick cotton economy was to reverse the trend toward a gradual abolition of slavery. The hope of liberal Jeffersonians that this institution could be done away with and the blacks eventually shipped back to Africa was shattered by a powerful resurgence of pro-slavery feeling largely based on new economic prospects. ([Location 2299](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=2299)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The North was industrializing rapidly and was the main instigator of high tariffs. The South wanted low tariffs or, better, none at all, to sell its raw cotton unhampered in overseas markets. These conflicting economic interests were to plague the Union until the Civil War. ([Location 2307](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=2307)) - Tags: [[blue]] - America’s rising democracy owed a great deal to the new type of American, the westerner—a staunch, rough democrat who was both an irrepressibly self-reliant individual and yet was permeated by the strong social spirit, which was becoming the distinctive trait of American civilization. Voluntary cooperation and logrolling cemented the solidarity of widely scattered communities in the immense forests of the west. ([Location 2319](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=2319)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Alexis de Tocqueville has left us a memorable picture of the pioneer in his log cabin: “Nothing can offer a more miserable aspect than these isolated dwellings. The traveler who approaches one of them towards nightfall sees the flicker of the hearth flame through the chinks in the walls; and at night, if the wind rises, he hears the roof of boughs shake to and fro in the midst of the great forest trees. Who could not suppose that this poor hut is the asylum of rudeness and ignorance? Yet no sort of comparison can be drawn between the pioneer and the dwelling that shelters him. Everything about him is primitive and wild, but he is himself the result of the labor and experience of eighteen centuries. He wears the dress and speaks the language of cities; he is acquainted with the past, curious about the future, and ready for argument about the present; he is in short a highly civilized being, who consents for a time to inhabit the backwoods, and who penetrates into the wilds of the New World with the Bible, an axe and some newspapers.” 2 ([Location 2325](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=2325)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Roman aristocrats, like wealthy eastern Americans, were rarely expansionist-minded, comfortably ensconced as they were in their old lands. But the pioneers and the rising power of democracy in Rome and America imposed this expansion from sheer biological vitality—ruthless expansion whenever ruthlessness became unavoidable. Rome’s drastic policy toward Senones, Picini, Celts, and countless other semi-barbarians was matched by the terrible punishment inflicted by Americans on the Indians, overcoming the scruples and reluctance of Roman and American conservatives. As Tocqueville expressed it when this policy was in full swing: “The Spaniards were unable to exterminate the Indian race by those unparalleled atrocities, which brand them with indelible shame, nor did they succeed in wholly depriving it of its right; but the Americans of the United States accomplished this twofold purpose with a singular felicity, tranquilly, legally, philanthropically, without shedding blood and without violating a single great principle of morality in the eyes of the world. It is impossible to destroy men with more respect for the laws of humanity.” ([Location 2347](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=2347)) - Tags: [[blue]] - In the old days of Jackson’s successful wars against Seminoles and Spaniards, “Jackson returned, to be acclaimed once more a hero by the West; but Easterners thought of Roman history and trembled. ‘It was in the provinces that were laid the seeds of the ambitious projects that overturned the liberties of Rome,’ said Clay. ([Location 2362](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=2362)) - Tags: [[blue]] - In the Roman and American religiosity, one can find an extreme tension between a ruthless materialism and an ethereal idealism. The psychological pendulum swings wildly from one extreme to another. In Greece and Europe, on the other hand, one finds an intermediary stage between materialism and spir-itualism, suffused with mild skepticism. The opposition is fundamental. This Greek and European skepticism had a compensation that was largely denied to Rome and America and could substitute up to a point for religion. It had a culture in which true religious feeling could find an outlet—in poetry, art, even scientific speculation. In Rome and America, lands of developing civilization without profound cultural life, there was no such outlet and religious feeling had to express itself through purely religious channels. ([Location 2400](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=2400)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Except in foreign affairs, James Monroe was not a strong President, and Congress, quite naturally, made a new bid for political leadership. Jefferson’s magic ability had devised the caucus to extend Executive power down to Congress. But now, the legislative branch was going to attempt to reverse the process and use the caucus in order to overpower the Executive. Since the Federalist party had collapsed, there was no organized opposition, no restraining discipline, no constructive criticism. ([Location 2416](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=2416)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Realists are always willing to combine with others and compromise for the sake of obtaining power. This automatically puts the extremists out of the federal picture, relegating them down to state or county level where they are relatively harmless. The higher the politician rises on the political ladder, the greater the need for diplomatic tact, for a plastic mind, for an ability to compromise skillfully. Political parties established the needed hierarchy through which alone the countless, conflicting, parochial extremisms could be filtered, rid of their destructive implications, gradually worked into a constructive pattern on the national scale and cemented into a consistent, practical policy. ([Location 2425](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=2425)) - Tags: [[blue]] - A last attempt to rule without political parties was carried out by John Quincy Adams and it led to a frustrating deadlock. The great bitterness provoked by his unsavory election, the flaring up of personal hatreds, which were to poison American politics for a generation, all prompted the defeated Andrew Jackson to build a political machine in the spring of 1825. ([Location 2439](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=2439)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The election of Andrew Jackson had a profound significance. For some time already, the state legislatures had been gradually forgoing their privilege of appointing the presidential electors themselves and had handed them to the popular vote. By 1832, all states save one had adopted this new method. This, plus the vastly expanding electorate, was swiftly changing the whole scope of the presidency and transforming it into a new institution. The President was becoming a tribune of the people and as such, his already great constitutional powers and privileges were going to be considerably augmented and completely metamorphized. This evolution had been gradual, but it found its dramatic expression in the Jacksonian revolution. A rising democracy was to demand a strong Executive as the living expression of the popular will against the vested and sectional interests represented in the legislatures and Congress. The new democratic political machine crystallized this rising feeling, injected party discipline and mass propaganda into the electoral campaigns, and at the same time brought to a pitch of perfection the spoils system—federal and state patronage being the bounties that were to reward party discipline and obedience. ([Location 2449](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=2449)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Since the Tribunate had become the most powerful office in Rome as in America, the struggle was on to capture it—a struggle between the democrats and the new oligarchy of wealth that was substituting for the vanishing gentry. It could be captured by the business and financial oligarchy, as it was in Rome after the Second Punic War, or in America after the Civil War, or recaptured by the Democrats as it was under the Gracchi in Rome and under Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt in America. It had become the supreme political prize. ([Location 2465](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=2465)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Tacitus saw long ago that the source of the Roman emperors’ power lay in the tribunician office, which entailed inviolability, the right of summoning the Senate and directing its debates, nominating candidates, vetoing the acts of all magistrates and, indirectly, controlling the judiciary. The seeds of Caesarism lay buried for a long time in the tribunician office before they burst forth in the open. ([Location 2471](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=2471)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The declining aristocracy was gradually replaced or absorbed by a new upper class based exclusively on wealth and that no longer aspired to be a ruling class. The enduring traditions of England’s aristocracy in its full splendor were able to mask this transformation in Britain. But in America, the contrast was stark. Against the elusive and tentacular power of money, no longer controlled by traditional ethics, the powerless people appeal to their elected tribunes and the road to Caesarism is open. The stage was especially well prepared in America because the President attracted from the days of Jackson onward a personal following, which often cut across party lines— ([Location 2486](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=2486)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The great men of the Revolution were admired and revered as iron-willed Roman Senators used to be, who placed duty and patriotism and public service above all personal considerations. Washington inspired awe, Hamilton admiration, and Jefferson both. But with Jackson, mass emotionalism began to play a preponderant part in American politics. As a contemporary Senator put it: “The people believed in general Jackson as the Turks in their prophet.” 3 With Jackson, democracy put an end to the oligarchic rule of a respected gentry and in the process revolutionized the presidency itself. ([Location 2497](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=2497)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Andrew Jackson—”King Andrew” to his enemies—knew exactly where he stood. He told the Senate that the President alone is “the direct representative of the people, and responsible to them,” the Senate itself being “a body not directly amenable to the people.” 4 Until then, in 40 years of American political life, only nine bills had been vetoed by the Executive. Jackson alone vetoed twelve—and thus started the steady rise of executive pressure on the legislative branch, the transformation of the negative veto into a positive force at the Executive’s disposal, until the days when Franklin Roosevelt would veto 631 acts of Congress. ([Location 2502](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=2502)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The Senate protested vehemently and Henry Clay could rightly point out: “Really and in practice, the veto power drew after it the power of initiating laws, and in its effects must ultimately amount to conferring on the executive the entire legislative power of the government. With the power to initiate and the power to consummate legislation, to give vitality and vigor to every law, or to strike it dead at his pleasure, the President must ultimately become the ruler of the nation.” And he added: “The government will have been transformed into an elective monarchy.” 5 The Senate mourned its diminished stature but the House lost even more power and prestige. The democratic revolution had considerably damaged the practice of representative government, but it was the inevitable counterpart of the changing social and psychological landscape. ([Location 2507](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=2507)) - Tags: [[blue]] - But Alexis de Tocqueville, who was a contemporary observer, and probably the most penetrating of all, remarked: “It has been imagined that General Jackson is bent on establishing a dictatorship in America, introducing a military spirit, and giving a degree of influence to the central authority that cannot but be dangerous to provincial liberty.” Then he added those ominous words: “But in America the time for similar undertakings and the age for men of this kind, has not yet come.” ([Location 2525](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=2525)) - Tags: [[blue]] - A ticklish problem had to be solved. Since it became imperative that each party concentrate on one single candidate, how was this candidate to be chosen? The former nomination by Congressional caucuses was as discredited as the Congressional attempts to overpower the Executive. The solution was found in the Nominating Convention in 1832. Here was the supreme test and triumph of party discipline over personal jealousies and bitterness. Apparently created for the sake of free discussion, it became in reality a dramatized platform on which stood the party bosses and the supreme boss of all: the President, who could have himself renominated or virtually designate his successor. Then and there, its real purpose was to make sure that Jackson was unquestioningly obeyed by his disciplined followers; and Jackson’s blunt, autocratic nature fitted this new presidency like a custom-made glove. ([Location 2550](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=2550)) - Tags: [[blue]] ## New highlights added February 7, 2025 at 9:25 AM - No constitutional means had been provided for the enforcement of the presidential will on a reluctant legislative branch, but the party machinery filled the gap so carefully laid out by the Founding Fathers. This gap, narrowed and covered up by the rule of an oligarchic gentry until then, had become glaringly wide after the gentry’s downfall and begged to be filled. This extra-constitutional device filled it and became a sort of connective tissue that grew organically out of sheer necessity and imposed itself when it became obvious that there was no other solution. Through this connective tissue, the presidential will could flow down into Congress and manipulate it—if the will was strong enough. ([Location 2559](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=2559)) - Tags: [[blue]] - the rise of political parties was as inevitable in Rome as it was in America, that it took place simultaneously with the rise of Roman democracy (2nd and 1st Centuries BC)—but with the major difference that no single office as powerful as the American Presidency had been devised and that Roman politics were in consequence more disorderly. ([Location 2565](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=2565)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The decline of the traditional ruling classes and the rise of democracy always lead to the same results. From being an art and a vocation, politics becomes a business and falls into the hands of professionals. With the rise in the standard of living, the wealthy, financial, and commercial classes look upon politics with contempt as being a “dirty” business that has to be manipulated in the interest of “clean” business. ([Location 2570](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=2570)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Radicalism often flourished on the local level, shedding its virulence as it went up from precinct to county to state, to become almost conservative on the federal level. Compromise is by essence conservative and compromise was the stuff of American politics. The party machines had to be repeatedly greased and oiled and repaired if they were to function efficiently and establish the indispensable liaison between President and Congress. ([Location 2587](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=2587)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The root of the problem was that, behind the defense of states’ rights, lay concealed the last-ditch defense of the southern aristocracy and way of life. The increasing divorce between an industrializing North falling into the hands of Big Business and a patriarchal, agricultural South with its old-fashioned code of ethics, was threatening to tear the nation apart. ([Location 2611](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=2611)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The main fault lay in the South’s failure to industrialize and throw its own railroads up north fast enough to retain its grasp on the slipping West; and this lack of economic progress was primarily due to the lethal influence of slavery. As it was, by the time the Civil War broke out, the North and West were firmly welded, with good communications and a rising industrial power amounting to 92 percent of the national capacity, leaving the South way behind in its feudal agrarianism. ([Location 2656](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=2656)) - Tags: [[blue]] - From 1840 onward, the vast increase in presidential power and prestige was curbed by the only device left at the disposal of oligarchies and vested interests: the election of obscure men who could be manipulated by the political machines. It took wars and economic depressions to break down the systematic endeavor of the politicians to put the lid on the tribune of the people. ([Location 2674](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=2674)) - Tags: [[blue]] - A short-lived attempt by Webster and Clay to restore to Congress the power and authority, absorbed by the Jacksonian Presidency failed through the untimely death of President Harrison. ([Location 2680](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=2680)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The injection of moral principles into the already serious economic problem of slavery aroused tempers and passions that should have been left dormant, and overshadowed for a time America’s great political asset: the spirit of compromise. Sooner or later, politics would have to give way to arms. Between two societies drifting apart, between northern industrial democracy and southern slave-owning aristocracy, war became inevitable. ([Location 2699](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=2699)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The outbreak of the war was preceded by a collapse of the party system in the 1850s. The slavery issue could not have disrupted the Union if it had not smashed the unifying Democratic Party beforehand. It was in party conventions and nowhere else that the basic issue, war or compromise, was settled. As a Mississippi delegate said: “We are for principles, damn the party,” which meant virtually “damn the Union.” 4 Whenever one or the other of America’s two major parties decided to adhere to hard and fast principles, the breakup of the vast Union was predictable; and this collapse was accelerated by the succession of weak and ineffective Presidents—Pierce, Buchanan— who no longer knew how to instill the feeling of party loyalty and impose discipline on their followers. ([Location 2708](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=2708)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The result of the Democratic Party’s collapse and of the Whig’s breakdown was the rise of the new Republican Party, a crystallization of industrial capitalist philosophy and Puritan moralism, which grew up in those days of executive weakness. The new party combined railroad potentates, northern protectionists, western homesteaders, and abolitionists. ([Location 2714](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=2714)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Emerson’s appeal for cultural independence had hardly any more success than Cato’s in Rome, and this for profound historical reasons. New England did have what Santayana called an “Indian summer of the mind” but it came to an end fairly soon; it was a “moonlight” reflection of Europe’s last brilliant upsurge of literary and philosophic culture. ([Location 2727](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=2727)) - Tags: [[blue]] - A share of the blame for this failure to develop an autonomous culture must be attributed to an old and enduring trait of American psychology: its fundamental anti-intellectualism, its profound distrust of needless abstractions, philosophies, and doctrines in which the more unstable Europeans had been indulging but without which there can be no true culture. ([Location 2734](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=2734)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Abraham Lincoln’s imperishable greatness came from the fact that he was never carried away by the abolitionist fever, that his cool judgment clung steadfastly to the cardinal virtue of American political life: moderation and conciliation. ([Location 2746](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=2746)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The Civil War produced a new nation over the ruins of the old federation, a far more centralized Union—and most of the increase in central power devolved upon the presidency. Lincoln brought to full maturity the immense potentialities built up by his predecessors in the White House and added more of his own. ([Location 2753](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=2753)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Once the war started, Lincoln was inflexibly determined to win it by any and every means available, even though he intended to be generous and forgiving after the war was over. Unsure of his Union party’s standing with northern voters, he even went so far as to condone fraudulent elections in 1864 in order to insure his retention of power. He condoned unconstitutional pressure on the wavering border states. He shouldered immense responsibilities alone during the hostilities, made all the basic military decisions as Commander in Chief. He suspended the writ of habeas corpus over the protests of the Chief Justice, asked for troops without legal authority, started the war before calling Congress in 1861, built a national army instead of relying on local militias, issued his Emancipation Proclamations in 1862 and 1863 without previous legislative sanction, indeed without even consulting his cabinet. 9 Never in American history had so much power been concentrated in the hands of one man. In stark contrast, power was so diffused in the aristocratic South that southern political leadership was almost unconsciously guiding its followers toward a parliamentary regime. ([Location 2764](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=2764)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The Civil War destroyed the last remnants of aristocratic rule and way of life in America—and was instinctively understood in this sense by the entire English-speaking world. Britain, the greatest world power in those days, viewed the whole struggle with mixed feelings. ([Location 2778](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=2778)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The South that went down in the Civil War had many faults—the greatest and most unforgivable of which was that it was simply no longer in tune with the times. It was anachronistic. But the South also had a good many virtues that might have been preserved if the North had proved more generous and understanding. The southern gentleman, stubborn on the slavery issue, was remarkably more tolerant and liberal than the narrow-minded Yankee business leaders. Southerners were, for instance, far more hospitable to Jews and the only Jewish members of the United States Senate came from the South—Judas P. Benjamin of Louisiana, and David Levy Yulee of Florida. Many Jews fought valiantly in the Confederate army. This liberalism was largely the attitude of self-confident aristocrats who did not have to bow to the pressure of democratic public opinion with its erratic fanaticism, conformity, taboos, and prejudices. Only one southerner in ten owned slaves and most of the slaves were held by a small group of a few thousand wealthy planters who perpetuated the manners and traditions of the Virginian Founding Fathers, the aristocratic gentlemen whose remarkable qualities had made America’s independence possible. ([Location 2790](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=2790)) - Tags: [[blue]] - It was a feudal way of life that was destroyed by the Civil War, with its good and its bad side, its lords living in their “Plantation Greek” mansions, in their rice, sugar, and cotton palaces overlooking the Mississippi. It is quite certain that it was not an economically sound structure and that it was financially inefficient. It was a way of life, not a road to wealth. The South was static and did not believe in democracy. General education was poor but the universities for the social elite were splendid. Potentially, the South was “cultured” rather than “civilized.” ([Location 2798](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=2798)) - Tags: [[blue]] - When John Wilkes Booth murdered Lincoln he was merely reenacting once again, but in real life this time, the theatrical role of Brutus. Like the Roman aristocrat, he wanted to kill the democratic Caesar who had destroyed the chivalrous South. Caesar’s death plunged the Roman world in chaos for another decade, leading to the slaughters of the Proscriptions and the liquidation of the Roman aristocracy at Philippi, while Lincoln’s death was a disaster for the South. Lincoln knew well and feared his own radicals, feared the demagogic passions of legislative assemblies unrestrained by a strong Executive. At his last cabinet meeting Lincoln said that he “thought it providential that this great rebellion was crushed just as Congress had adjourned and there were none of the disturbing elements of that body to hinder and embarrass us. If we were wise and discreet, we should reanimate the states and get their governments in successful operation, with order prevailing and the union reestablished before Congress came together in December.” 12 Lincoln was prepared to use his dictatorial powers to put an end to bitterness and crush the spirit of vengeance before more harm was done. By his death the South lost its best friend and paved the way for the rise to power of the northern radicals. ([Location 2807](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=2807)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The South came out of the war largely ruined, a quarter of its productive white men killed or out of action, its small industrial establishment a shambles, its territory devastated. The world had to wait until the following century to see any greater destruction and demoralization. The North, on the contrary, came out more prosperous and powerful than ever, its economy greatly stimulated by war contracts, its losses in men well compensated by an immigration that was never interrupted. Industry and agriculture prospered to an unprecedented degree. ([Location 2821](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=2821)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The southern aristocracy had gone the way of the rest of America’s old gentry. The rule of money was now firmly established in conjunction with a victorious democracy, and Big Business rose to social and financial supremacy. ([Location 2828](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=2828)) - Tags: [[blue]] - the remarkable technological power of America was created at the expense of the mechanized human being who remained psychologically undeveloped, robot-like. Having atomized man’s productive capacity, analyzed in great detail his minutest reflexes and gestures, and having found gadgets to duplicate them, Americans then proceeded to treat intellectual knowledge in the same way, breaking it up into separate, disconnected fragments. Americans were taught increasingly to live in a world of encapsulated facts, rather than ideas. And this, in turn, was nothing more than the extreme development of the atomistic explosion, which had started with the Reformation itself. ([Location 2847](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=2847)) - Tags: [[blue]] - After four years of virtual executive dictatorship, Congress was burning with an impotent feeling of revenge. Kept in total subjection during the hostilities, unable to make policy, the legislature was determined to cancel all those changes and recapture part of its former influence. An incompetent President was all that was needed and in Andrew Johnson, Congress found its victim. Johnson was as unintelligent and tactless as he was stubborn, and from the very first, antagonized Congress by declaring emphatically: “Your President is now the Tribune of the people, and thank God I am, and intend to assert the power which the people have placed in me.” 1 The clash was inevitable and the outcome predictable. ([Location 2886](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=2886)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Through Johnson’s ineptitude, the leadership in Congress was promptly captured by the radicals, the bigoted anti-southerners who intended to keep the South as a conquered colonial area as long as they could. ([Location 2893](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=2893)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Overshadowing an incompetent although well-meaning President, the radical leader Thaddeus Stevens dominated Congress with his diabolic fanaticism for the next two years. Johnson’s vetoes were consistently overruled. A South that was well on the way to pacification and reconstruction was reoccupied by federal armies and its governments declared illegal when Congress reconvened in December, 1865. A new social revolution was carried out by the radicals, leaving a legacy of bitterness that was to last for generations. The carpetbaggers devastated what remained of the South and northerners took an almost sadistic pleasure in humiliating the southern “gentleman,” in ridiculing his code of honor and way of life in the name of democracy. ([Location 2904](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=2904)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The attempt to establish a parliamentary form of government and transform the Executive into a powerless figurehead had failed. A last attempt of the Senate to brush off Hayes’ cabinet appointments provoked such a fierce explosion of popular anger that the intimidated Senators yielded immediately. The people had come to the rescue of their new tribune who dared stand up against the powerful vested interests—the silver, tobacco, or railroad Senators. ([Location 2987](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=2987)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Garfield completed Hayes’ victorious struggle against the legislative branch and set up the presidency on the high pedestal to which Lincoln had previously raised it. During the course of the conflict over presidential appointments, Garfield had to restate once more that the President alone is the tribune of the people. The presidency “represents a whole independent function of government. The other is 1/76 of 1/2 of another independent branch of the government with which compound vulgar fractions the President is asked to compromise.” 3 ([Location 2995](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=2995)) - Tags: [[blue]] - From 1883 onward, the spoils system on the federal level declined steadily without ever being completely abolished. The fast-expanding federal bureaucracy—rising from 3,000 in 1800 to 126,000 in the 1880s, and to more than 2-million in 1948—has been increasingly withdrawn from sheer politics to become the huge impersonal machinery through which executive policy is carried out and over which Congress can exercise virtually no influence. ([Location 3005](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=3005)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The new Union reached the zenith of its Victorian splendor under President Cleveland. These were the days of unadulterated capitalistic rule at its best and worst, when the government was used to resist inflation and break strikes, but not to help farmers in their tragic plight or enforce social legislation for the protection of workers. Energetic, bold, and ruthless, this Victorian capitalism knew how to develop the country economically and efficiently. But it was merciless in an age when social Darwinism ruled supreme, when Herbert Spencer’s amalgamation of the old Puritan creed with a pseudoscientific biological outlook was almost unchallenged. The iron-willed Puritans saw the seal of Divine approval stamped on economic prosperity and their less religious descendants felt the need to bolster their secularized beliefs with the help of some philosophic or scientific argument less sordid than naked self-interest. ([Location 3017](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=3017)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Nor were they brilliant upstarts, as the famous legend of rags-to-riches has led so many Europeans and Americans to believe. Business was largely controlled by the older patrician families of the East, many of whom had turned to economic activities when politics had forsaken them. At the turn of the century, three out of four came from old colonial families, four out of five belonged to business and professional families and only 2 percent came all the way up from the working class. ([Location 3032](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=3032)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The rise to social supremacy of the American businessman was never duplicated in Europe. There business remained at all times the servant and not the master of politics, and the most powerful and wealthiest businessmen still sought admittance into the ranks of traditional upper classes and absorbed many of their aristocratic traits. Nowhere in Europe could the highest legislatures fit the description James Bryce gave of the American Senate of those days: “The Senate now contains many men of great wealth. Some, an increasing number, are Senators because they are rich; a few are rich because they are Senators; while in the remaining cases the same talents which have won success in law or commerce have brought their possessors to the top in politics also.” 5 ([Location 3046](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=3046)) - Tags: [[blue]] - America became a land of supreme individualism based on the priority of the individual’s private interests rather than on his own inner freedom—a freedom that was anyway meaningless, since he was entirely geared to a life of action and had reduced his inner life to a bare minimum. In Europe, man was always part of a social, political, economic, and religious hierarchy but the full development of his individuality and therefore of his inner freedom was always stimulated by the variety of his social and national expressions and functions. In America, man wanted to live out his private interests, a thing he never could do in stratified and congested Europe. American freedom did not imply a strong development of originality and personality but freedom from social hierarchy, government, military draft, polite manners, and every other sort of compulsion. ([Location 3068](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=3068)) - Tags: [[blue]] ## New highlights added February 8, 2025 at 9:25 AM - In 1880, there were 50-million Americans, 40-million of them living in rural areas. The next fifty years witnessed the dramatic metamorphosis of a predominantly rural America into an overwhelmingly urban society. The flight from the land was partly masked by the steady increase in immigration from the Old World, but the flight had nonetheless become alarming in the eastern United States. ([Location 3101](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=3101)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The older, smaller farms of the East and the wooded West were ruined by the large-scale farming of the plains. New England’s barren fields could no longer support its traditional sheep-raising and sent thousands of impoverished farmers to city slums and industrial work, where they had to compete with Irish immigrants at depressed wages. Mechanical devices were doing to old-fashioned agriculture what the imported slaves did to Roman farmers. They lowered production costs and priced non-mechanized individual farming out of the market. The days of the farm as a self-sufficient economic unit providing its owner with food, clothing, and building material were gone forever. ([Location 3121](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=3121)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Neither Rome nor America took those sweeping changes unconcerned. Wise statesmen knew that what might be a sound economic transformation might also be a social disaster. Rome attempted time and again to recreate a class of small independent farmers through grants of land and settlement of retired legionaires on new land, only to find that Roman capitalists and bankers mined them by cornering grain markets. In America, the Homestead Act of 1862 solved the problem of the resettlement of the Civil War veterans by granting them free land. Hundreds of thousands of veterans settled beyond the Mississippi on their 160 acres. Nearly 226-million acres thus passed into private ownership. (For purposes of comparison, the total area of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is only 62-million acres.) But most of this land eventually fell into the hands of the large corporations, while another 158-million acres was given directly to the railroads. 1 The Nebraska Territory before statehood, for example, was largely settled by homesteading veterans. Less than a generation afterward virtually the entire state was owned by railroad corporations and insurance companies. Union Pacific Railroad alone was given almost 5-million acres of the best land, and under its leadership eastern capitalists came to control the state government, giving them dictatorial authority over all phases of existence in Nebraska. ([Location 3138](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=3138)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The rise of unbridled capitalism was perhaps the most demoralizing social factor in America in the period 1880–1890, especially now that the counterbalancing influence of a service-minded aristocracy of the British type no longer existed. ([Location 3152](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=3152)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Since the grip of capitalism could not be loosened by economic means, it had to be done politically. The rise of western radicalism was inevitable. Williams Jennings Bryan’s Populist party arose in the downcast South and swept the vigorous West where contempt for the easterners was rife. ([Location 3159](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=3159)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The first ominous signs of the coming evolution of public sentiment, the bartering away of freedom against security, were sounded when Bryan declared: “I come to speak to you in defense of a cause as holy as the cause of liberty—the cause of humanity.” ([Location 3167](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=3167)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The Populists was the most, indeed almost the only, influential third party in the history of America and its success was made possible by the fact that both major parties had been largely captured by Big Business. A popular revolt that could no longer express itself through regular party channels had to create a new outlet. Most of its actual program—a flexible currency controlled by the government and not by private banks, a progressive income tax, restriction of immigration in order to protect American labor, the direct election of Senators instead of their election by state legislatures, the eight-hour day—were later incorporated in the programs of either the Republican or the Democratic parties as soon as they were able to develop their progressive wings. ([Location 3173](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=3173)) - Tags: [[blue]] - In 1860, the total population of the United States was 30-million. In the following seventy years, another 30-million European immigrants came to America. The absorption of this staggering influx was in itself a tremendous problem, but it was made more difficult by the change in the sources of immigration. The ethnic homogeneity of the American people began to be affected as the similar immigration of slaves and freemen from all over the Mediterranean world had affected Rome. American industrial leaders began drawing on eastern and southern rather than northern Europe for new sources of cheap manpower. The troublesome Irish were no longer welcome in the coal mines and Germany’s quick industrialization kept her citizens at home. Nordic immigration dried up and was replaced by a steadily mounting flood from Italy, Greece, Poland, Hungary, and other parts of Eastern Europe. Northern Europeans had been inclined to settle on the land but the latter immigrants conglomerated in the cities and stayed there. Viewing the cosmopolitan masses of Mediterranean and Eastern European immi-grants streaming into the United States and congesting most of the large cities, native Americans could echo Juvenal’s alarmed cry in Rome: “The Orontes is flowing into the Tiber,” and recall that in the days of Julius Caesar almost 90 percent of the population of Rome was of foreign extraction. ([Location 3180](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=3180)) - Tags: [[blue]] - They had fled from Europe, at first, for the same idealistic reasons—religious or political—that had motivated the earlier settlements of the Pilgrims: the desire to materialize their ideas in a new world. But as the 19th Century drew to a close, escape from economic adversity became the prime motive and the quality of the immigrants declined, making legal limitations unavoidable. The “melting pot” was no longer equal to the task. ([Location 3194](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=3194)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The legal mind is conservative; it moves slowly and is not always adaptable to fast-changing conditions. It frowns on political and social revolutions, but it was totally unprepared for the Industrial Revolution. The Supreme Court’s main duty was to protect the property and privileges of the citizens against state and federal encroachments, but it was psychologically unable to protect them against giant capitalist corporations, trusts, cartels, and monopolies because they were phenomena without precedents. ([Location 3203](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=3203)) - Tags: [[blue]] - In 1895, the Supreme Court decided that the income tax was unconstitutional. Western agrarians and the Eastern poor joined in denouncing a decision that favored capital. Yet, the court was in good faith and branded the income tax as “class legislation.” To this Justice Field added: “Whenever a distinction is made in the burdens a law imposes or in the benefits it confers on any citizen by reasons of their birth, or wealth or religion, it is class legislation and leads inevitably to oppression and abuses...the present assault upon capital is but the beginning. It will be but a stepping stone to others, larger and more sweeping, till our political contests will become a war of the poor against the rich; a war constantly growing in intensity and bitterness.” 4 ([Location 3214](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=3214)) - Tags: [[blue]] - From Grant to McKinley, Republican Presidents had given little political leadership. America had to wait until Theodore Roosevelt for a new offensive of executive leadership—due rather to the great personality and Gargantuan energy of the man than to compelling circumstances. His vitality and will stamped him as the typical man of action, while his remarkable sense of publicity and his profound intuition made him a first-rate politician. ([Location 3226](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=3226)) - Tags: [[blue]] - What was new was Roosevelt’s intention to bring the independent power of Money and Business under the supervision of the administration and reverse the trend that had lasted since the Civil War. Political democracy was not enough. Economic democracy became the new goal. ([Location 3236](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=3236)) - Tags: [[blue]] - As time went on, Theodore Roosevelt became more conscious of the potential power of the presidential office. Writing to the historian George Trevelyan, he said: “I have a definite philosophy about the presidency. I think it should be a very powerful office and I think the President should be a very strong man who uses without hesitation every power that the position yields.” And he added in his autobiography: “I did not usurp power but I did greatly broaden the use of executive power.” ([Location 3241](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=3241)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Quickly sobered, America began to realize that her power, indeed her very existence, depended more than ever on the British fleet. Then and there, the decision was made to rehabilitate the United States Navy. ([Location 3262](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=3262)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Britain was about to become America’s main bastion across the ocean, and Western Europe her new overseas frontier. As Henry Adams expressed it in 1905: “We have got to support France against Germany, and fortify an Atlantic system beyond attack; for if Germany breaks down England or France, she will become the center of a military world and we are lost.” 9 ([Location 3270](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=3270)) - Tags: [[blue]] - although Cuba was granted conditional independence two years later, the island became part of another American empire—the invisible but powerful empire of the Dollar. Belonging largely to New York banks that had invested $1.5-billion in her rich crops, Cuba joined the select group of “banana republics” that were virtual satellites of Wall Street. ([Location 3283](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=3283)) - Tags: [[blue]] - It was Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan who expressed most clearly America’s geopolitical imperialism, who was conscious of the overwhelming importance of sea power for the Anglo-American world and who advocated global supremacy for America’s fleets. ([Location 3309](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=3309)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Mahan inspired America to seize Hawaii, to extend its influence in Central America and the Caribbean, explaining to his compatriots what was already becoming evident: America was a continental island endowed with a higher civilization than the rest of the world, in urgent need of a powerful navy that would one day displace Britain’s Royal Navy as the supreme ruler of oceans. We can now look back at Tocqueville’s prophetic words: “When I contemplate the ardor with which the Anglo-Americans prosecute commerce, the advantages that aid them, and the success of their undertakings, I cannot help believing that they will one day become the foremost maritime power of the globe. They are born to rule the seas, as the Romans were to conquer the world.” ([Location 3314](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=3314)) - Tags: [[blue]] - What really limited America’s latent colonialism was not so much a generous idealism as the realization that the old formula of statehood no longer worked where large alien populations were concerned. Racialism stood in the way; and what is more, open colonialism implied great responsibilities as well as privileges that discreet economic imperialism did not entail. Puerto Rico or the Philippines could never be admitted as states within the relatively homogeneous, white, and overwhelmingly Protestant Union without disrupting the whole structure. America began to face her limitations as Rome had in the past. Italy could be Romanized, and so could Spain and Gaul to a certain extent; but there were stringent limitations to the Romanization of Africa, Egypt, or Syria. ([Location 3324](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=3324)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Writing at the turn of the century, James Bryce remarked: “The tendency everywhere in America to concentrate power and responsibility in one man is unmistakable.” 17 And this in a time of peace and world prosperity. Nothing more would be needed than the great era of wars and revolutions and national emergencies of the 20th Century to bring this long-term trend to its natural conclusion. Rome was saved time and again by her temporary constitutional dictators as America had been by her strong Presidents—until Caesars came along to establish their personal rule on a permanent footing. ([Location 3352](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=3352)) - Tags: [[blue]] - against Theodore Roosevelt’s prophetic vision of the social and economic world to come, arose Woodrow Wilson’s middle-class attempt, with agrarian and labor support, to backtrack, to destroy the big corporations altogether by enforcing the rules of competition. Both agreed that government should step massively into the economic sphere, and this was already a revolution by 19th Century standards. But while Roosevelt saw clearly that the government would find it more convenient to use and control the colossal corporations, Wilson attempted to break them up and inject more competition into the industrial structure. ([Location 3367](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=3367)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Democracy was also making further progress. The most important change took place in the recruitment of the Senate, hitherto an assembly of ambassadors chosen by state legislatures, with the faintly aristocratic flavor attached to such indirect elections. In 1913, the adoption of the 17th Amendment provided for the direct election of Senators by the people. This put an end to the Senatorial “millionaires’ club”; however, it did not end the Senate’s most characteristic feature: that of over-representing the slowly dwindling rural population. ([Location 3376](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=3376)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Nothing could have been more brilliant than European life in the Victorian and Edwardian periods. It was an age of great wealth accumulated during a century of peace and fabulous economic development, the age of Viennese waltzes and dazzling court life, of relative social stability, of courtesy and culture, aristocratic leadership and middle-class prosperity. Europe dominated the world, her pre-eminence unchallenged, powerful in the physical might of her huge armies and colossal industrial structure, powerful as the acknowledged fountainhead of ideas, art, literature, and philosophy. Few could hear the premonitory rumblings of the earthquake that was to destroy it all. ([Location 3395](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=3395)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Long before the World War broke out physically, it had broken out in Europe’s mental life. No conflagration of such magnitude can take place if the mental balance of the culture has not been disrupted beforehand, if it’s soul is not profoundly seared by some secret disease. ([Location 3418](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=3418)) - Tags: [[blue]] ## New highlights added February 9, 2025 at 9:25 AM - powerful exponents of cultural union lived in Europe throughout the 19th Century. Goethe, Beethoven, Saint-Saens, Chopin, were not specifically German, French, or Polish. They were Europeans, just as Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle were Hellenes rather than citizens of specific Greek states. They thought, felt, and created within the framework of the same culture, shared its world outlook, and felt like distant cousins, like offspring of a common ancestor. But the steady rise of virulent nationalism—implicit in the Protestant Reformation, becoming explicit with the French Revolution—was inescapable. ([Location 3423](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=3423)) - Tags: [[blue]] - There was no place in Bismarck’s Germany for great philosophy or great art but only for the furnaces of the Ruhr. Clemenceau’s France was no longer congenial to great literature nor was Victorian England to great music or great painting. Economic development and politics were absorbing what was left of European vitality. It did not matter whether their political structures were liberal or authoritarian, whether their social structures were aristocratic or democratic. The spirit of culture was dying out, leaving nothing in its wake but discordant nationalisms—and after the Age of Pericles, there was nothing but senseless Peloponnesian and Hellenistic wars and revolutions. ([Location 3430](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=3430)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Europe reached the peak of exasperated nationalism early in the 20th Century. No feeling of European brotherhood could restrain the clashing secular creeds that conferred upon state and nation the supreme religious aura of deification.1 Christian internationalism had been breaking down steadily since the Reformation, communicating its own dislocation to one sphere of human activity after another. The Socialist International was now about to be betrayed by its adherents, overcome by patriotic passions. The excited French jingoism, the superb pride of the insular British, and the arrogant complex of superiority of the Germans were no longer curbed by a common feeling of cultural solidarity. Stimulating rivalry and creative competition had given way to bitter hatred and destructive antagonism. It was truly the end of a great historical epoch. And when the First World War broke out, Britain’s Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, said prophetically, “The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our own lifetime.” 2 ([Location 3435](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=3435)) - Tags: [[blue]] - To the modern world, the German surrender in 1918 was as significant as the Macedonian defeat at Cynoscephalae. It was not merely the downfall of Macedonia and Germany but also the prelude to the twilight of the Hellenistic and European world orders. Germany had been no more able to establish a European unity based on national equality and an all-European patriotism than Macedonia had been able to unite Greece against the growing power of Rome. They both remained inveterate oppressors imbued with the superiority complex of younger nations, glorying in their greater vitality, discipline, organization, and martial pride, but without generosity, without power of absorption, and therefore without capacity for organic growth. Macedonia and Prussia were both close to their barbarian origins, while France and Britain were old, enfeebled, tired nations like Athens and the Aetolian League, who spent their remaining strength resisting the onslaughts of their younger and more barbaric neighbors. ([Location 3448](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=3448)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Rome and Macedonia, America and Germany: these were the real antagonists struggling for world domination, and in both cases it was just as much geography as national character that determined the outcome. A much greater geographical base, wealth and population on the part of the great overseas republics as opposed to the autocratic monarchies, and also a certain psychological greatness adapted to their broader physical environment and their essentially “ethical” and legalistic outlook—these advantages, on which, alone, a world civilization can be securely based, paved the way for victory. Rome and America were fluid, pragmatic, adaptable, and endowed with a capacity for organic growth and absorption. Macedonia and Germany were essentially rigid military structures, unadaptable, and incapable of organic growth. The world power they sought ended by devolving upon the great republics that did not want it. Macedonia was just as bent on outright world domination as Germany and their ruthless behavior initiated the terrible “total” wars of their respective ages. Neither Rome nor America could let them pursue their aggressive careers; both intervened in order to save their natural allies. ([Location 3455](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=3455)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Under such inauspicious circumstances, peace could only be precarious; and a student can well be amazed to learn that Greeks and Europeans, far from being chastened by their bitter experience and by the closeness of Macedonian and German servitude, felt more imperialistic than ever—as if they could compensate for their dreadful weakening by grasping some ghostly shadow. ([Location 3491](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=3491)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Mommsen could aptly remark: “History has a Nemesis for every sin—for an impotent craving for freedom, as well as for an injudicious generosity.” 4 The nemesis in the classical world was the rise of Parthia and the coming war of Rome against Mithridates—in the context of our own century, the rise of Soviet Communism and World War II. ([Location 3512](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=3512)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Rome had contributed to the downfall of the Seleucid Empire, bulwark of Greek influence in the East, but having provided no substitute, reaped the Parthian threat that was to last for centuries. On the ruins of the Tzarist and Central European empires, of which America so righteously disapproved, arose the threatening power of a Soviet Russia backed by an Asia in full revolt against the West; and Mommsen’s comment about Rome could apply dramatically to our modern world: “The Roman Senate sacrificed the first essential result of the policy of Alexander, and thereby paved the way for that retrograde movement whose last offshoots ended in the Alhambra of Granada and in the great mosque of Constantinople.” 5 ([Location 3535](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=3535)) - Tags: [[blue]] ## New highlights added February 10, 2025 at 9:25 AM - The Marxist hatred of the “bourgeois” middle class conceals in Russia a primitive, instinctive hatred of Western-type city life as it had developed in the past century, and therefore of all the elements that go into making a civilization. ([Location 3553](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=3553)) - Tags: [[blue]] - This deep-rooted antagonism that springs outside the area of a given civilization always coincides with a social disintegration inside it—with a period of revolutions and social upheavals that always accompanies the collapse of a culture and symbolizes the loss of that precious self-confidence of former times. The declining cultures themselves provide plenty of fuel for this anti-bourgeois feeling by bringing out in bold relief the selfish, cynical, and irreligious character of the Greek and European middle classes. ([Location 3562](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=3562)) - Tags: [[blue]] - History makes it quite plain that as the dominant West becomes more unsure of itself, the Orient slowly regains a new self-assurance. Yet, in those portions of the West that are most remote from the stages on which their drama is played—in Rome and America—such events take place almost unnoticed. ([Location 3569](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=3569)) - Tags: [[blue]] - the Europeans were not blind to the immense threat implied by a Soviet victory in Russia. They even made some half-hearted attempt to influence the course of Russia’s civil war by sending token expeditionary forces. But the will to retrieve immense Russia was no longer there. Exhausted by World War I, corroded by internal social conflicts that at times even paralyzed their military forces through mutinies, they gave up the struggle. And when they gave up the struggle in Russia, they unwittingly made sure that, sooner or later, they would lose all their colonial empires, and, ultimately, their own political independence. ([Location 3572](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=3572)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Translated into the language of politics, the result of this cultural evolution was that the anti-Greek and then anti-Roman rebellions of the Jews and western Semites coincided more than once with Parthian offensives against Greeks and Romans. In fact, they were all allies in a long struggle against a classical world whose civilization they rejected, united in their common effort to build a new world based on the apocalyptic visions of their great prophets—Zoroaster, Moses, Isaiah, Mithra, Mani, and others. The stage was being slowly set for an awakening of the Orient that was eventually to smash classical civilization itself by destroying its cultural foundations. ([Location 3594](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=3594)) - Tags: [[blue]] - When Rome destroyed Carthage and Macedonia, and when America entered World War I, there was no turning back for either. The miscalculation of the Roman Senate, unable to rise to the occasion and face entirely new problems, was matched by the blindness of the American Senate when it turned against Woodrow Wilson. American isolationists were to learn, as did their Roman predecessors, that there is no power without responsibility. The mere existence of such entities as Rome and America upsets the balance of power, attracts and antagonizes simultaneously their weaker neighbors and associates. They can no more exist without upsetting the gravitational structure of the world than a new star can fail to upset the astronomical structure of the universe. In the long run, both are driven for the protection of their own safety and ideals to step in forcibly and rule with an iron hand. ([Location 3609](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=3609)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The First World War signified the destruction of the old aristocratic structure that had been patched up by the Congress of Vienna and still prevailed almost everywhere. The collapse of the Austro-Hungarian and German empires led to the downfall of former ruling classes although, here and there, some hereditary aristocracies still held their own, clinging desperately to power and tradition. The most powerful and clannish, the Prussian Junkers, still controlled Germany’s armed forces. But Britain’s ruling class accelerated its decline after the war. For the first time, Britain had fought as a “nation,” no longer as a remote home base for “colonial” wars with limited expeditionary forces—whether in Europe, Asia, or Africa. Her ruling class had failed to foresee that, mobilized for war as a nation, the British people would remain politically mobilized in peacetime and would attempt to take matters in their own hands. Everywhere, the old social order was collapsing along with the antiquated political structures—which seemed to Americans to be all to the good. ([Location 3621](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=3621)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The collapse of the old social order did not give away to democracy on the Anglo-Saxon pattern nor to liberal parliamentarism, but to an entirely new type of despotic leaders who were misnamed “dictators.” Crowns fell everywhere, but only to be replaced by far more autocratic rulers who styled themselves Duce, Fuhrer, Caudillo, the fanatical “Leaders” of nations that had lost their souls and did not know where to turn. ([Location 3629](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=3629)) - Tags: [[blue]] - European “dictators,” in fact, were the modern replicas of the last crop of Greek tyrants and Hellenistic potentates, erratic, Machiavellian or fanatical, drunk with power, bombastic and theatrical. They were obvious symbols of a profound malaise that no one could diagnose accurately. ([Location 3633](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=3633)) - Tags: [[blue]] - America became fully conscious of her individuality during World War I. Until then, her history had merely been a chapter in the history of European expansion throughout the world. It took the momentous shock of a global war to start an entirely new phase of America’s evolution, to emancipate her from European tutelage and to make her conscious of being something different and apart from the rest of the Western world—no longer a marginal society but a dominant factor in world politics and economics. ([Location 3644](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=3644)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Many farsighted Americans felt that a German victory would deal a fatal blow to democracy as they conceived of it, besides forcing America to build a large military machine against her own profound inclinations. The safety of the Atlantic Ocean required that America help preserve the independence of the old European nations on the opposite seaboard, ([Location 3655](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=3655)) - Tags: [[blue]] - In order to destroy Wilson, American political leaders had to adopt a paradoxical attitude—as the Romans did after Cynoscephalae. The old 19th Century isolationism had, in fact, been dealt a death blow by the Americans themselves since the imperialistic development of the 1890s. But it was artificially revived by all those who rebelled against Wilson and were frightened by any form of involvement in the European nightmare from which they had been warned by the Founding Fathers. They had to justify their illogical attitude by attempting a radical withdrawal from all the foreign commitments in which they were already deeply engaged. ([Location 3682](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=3682)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Hurt by European suspicions and ingratitude, Americans attempted to cut off all but economic relations with Europe, as if economics and politics could ever be divorced. Since Americans have a tendency to view situations separately rather than as part of an organic whole, they refused to see how hopelessly and inextricably world politics were mixed up with world economics. ([Location 3688](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=3688)) - Tags: [[blue]] - America was experiencing a change of historical phase. The end of the frontier and of immigration signified the end of the dynamic settlement of the country. America was cutting off the flow of European immigrants that had linked the Old and New Worlds for centuries. Now followed the drowsy lull of digestion, of prosperous contentment in the 1920s, of acute indigestion and despair in the 1930s. From the 1940s onward, the lull was at an end and World War II started a reverse process: American expansion throughout the world. ([Location 3707](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=3707)) - Tags: [[blue]] - True individualism and originality, already weak in Tocqueville’s America, was sinking under the weight of a psychological socialization exceeding anything known in the past. Industrial standardization had fostered its psychological counterpart and every social phenomenon of the 1920s, from Prohibition to the moral breakdown and the speculation hysteria, assumed gigantic proportions. Everything became massive—bootlegging, gangsterism, vice, corruption, industrial corporations, buildings, financial speculation. ([Location 3716](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=3716)) - Tags: [[blue]] - For the first time the seeds of moral decay became clearly visible in America’s leading social stratas. Prohibition was as symptomatic of this decay as Rome’s amazing Sumptuary Laws, the result of the same moralizing psychology and same belief in external compulsion as a substitute for inner strength and conviction. ([Location 3729](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=3729)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Roman and American civilization’s stand on ethical bedrocks from which they could never be removed without collapsing altogether. Rome’s Sumptuary Laws are a remarkable example of legislation applied to the minutest details of private life and no more felt to threaten personal liberty than America’s lingering puritanical laws. They regulated with minute precision the permissible private expenditures on housing, banquets, funerals, women’s clothing, and a multitude of other details. Such puritanical stringency made the better- balanced and more individualistic Greeks shudder. There is no such thing as crass immorality for easygoing Epicureans, no great inner tension, and therefore no spectacular breakdown of morals such as affects Puritans and Stoics. ([Location 3740](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=3740)) - Tags: [[blue]] - the first outstanding economic and financial revolution in the international field had come about largely unnoticed in its profound implications: from being an international debtor, America had become the greatest creditor nation in the world. Her industries vastly expanded by the tremendous European demand for supplies and armaments, America entered the postwar era without noticing the grave symptoms of economic disequilibrium introduced by the world conflagration. For America was now both a creditor and a predominantly exporting nation. Europe was considerably impoverished and could no longer buy American goods with the returns on investments that had been liquidated to pay for the war. In order to re-establish the balance, European exports to the New World should have been substantially larger than the imports, but America’s high tariffs stood in the way; and nothing could induce the Americans to lower those tariffs. Big Business was in control and blindly resisted the normal trend. Inevitably, European gold began to flow in steady streams to America in exchange for her exports, compensating for Europe’s liquidated prewar investments in the New World. On the other hand, massive American loans went to Europe—largely to Germany where they were eventually used to build up the Nazi war machine. The glaring incompatibility between an interlocking world economy and America’s political isolationism should have seemed ludicrous, but it did not. Americans did not, and indeed had not wanted to understand the profound causes of the war. ([Location 3764](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=3764)) - Tags: [[blue]] - When the speculative bubble was pricked at last and the stock market began to collapse on “Black Thursday,” an era came to an end—not merely the end of the speculative fury, but the end of seventy years of Big Business prestige and authority. It was a dramatic ending. The demoralization produced by the great crash in America amazed the rest of the world. But in a society that stakes most of its thoughts, actions, and pride on economic progress, such a collapse was shattering. To many in those awful days, it look-ed like the end of America itself. ([Location 3816](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=3816)) - Tags: [[blue]] - by the spring of 1931 there were signs that the worst might be over and that the economy was beginning to pick up. But by now, isolationist feelings had spread to economics, fanned by the psychological urge to discover some scapegoat. Turning their backs on the rest of the world, America’s frantic business leaders compelled Congress to vote the disastrous Hawley-Smoot tariff of 1930. President Hoover did not dare impose his veto and the world was informed that the outflow of American loans and the inflow of American imports were being drastically curtailed, affecting the entire world economy and dragging it down into the abysmal slump. Europe’s weak structure could not stand up to this last blow. ([Location 3835](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=3835)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The fundamental element of the crisis being moral and emotional rather than economic, the people wanted moral comfort and reassurance as much as wise decisions. They received neither. Herbert Hoover was a typical self-made man of the old stamp, a self-reliant man of the dynamic West who believed in the old virtues that had made America great but were no longer applicable to a gigantic industrial machine of great complexity in which everything seemed to have gone wrong. Hoover’s was still the America of unlimited opportunity for the individual, the America where failure was not society’s fault or responsibility, but the individual’s alone. It was the America of independent men of bold temperament, men who did not indulge in self-pity and who despised weakness. Those were democratic men who did not believe in class distinctions and therefore could not have any strong emotional feeling for the underprivileged. This lack of feeling paralyzed them when the time came to deal with the political implications of mass emotionalism. An engineer and not a lawyer, Hoover belonged to an age of empire builders who did not know that the era of unlimited opportunities was past, that vitality had declined under the impact of a rising standard of living. A lawyer, familiar with history and human psychology, might have understood, if only by instinct. But an engineer like Hoover, who was described by the Philadelphia Record as “easily the most commanding figure in the modern science of ‘engineering statesmanship,’” 5 was lost in his mechanics. Hoover and his Republican associates had mentally accepted the predominance of economics over politics and when economics failed, the Republican Party lost an emancipated political power for a full generation. They did not believe in strong executive power and Hoover himself failed to give firm leadership to his own Republican Party. Through their failure to grasp the situation as it really was, these men ushered into the White House the first of the outstanding pre-Caesarians. ([Location 3843](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=3843)) - Tags: [[blue]] - President Hoover’s complete lack of authority and imagination. Hoover’s views on the limited role of the presidency were outdated, not merely in terms of the early 1930s but in terms of the office as Theodore Roosevelt had reshaped it; and in view of the rising temper of the American people, such presidential leadership could not long be delayed. ([Location 3884](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=3884)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Franklin Roosevelt was determined to establish a semi-dictatorial rule, a personal rule such as none of his strong predecessors would have dared contemplate in their wildest dreams. ([Location 3890](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=3890)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Victorious democrats often seem to find their greatest leaders among the remnants of former aristocracies in whom lurks the intense if unconscious dislike for money-making and sheer plutocracy. This pattern was quite in evidence in Rome among the intensely aristocratic leaders of Roman democracy: the Gracchi, Drusus, and Caesar. It was just as evident in the selection of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It is these aristocratic leaders who, having been raised in an atmosphere of social privilege, apart from the people, can be moved by popular misfortune because they are not part of it but look at it from the outside. ([Location 3905](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=3905)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Leadership was asserted immediately after Roosevelt’s inauguration with the proclamation of a “bank holiday” under a War Enabling Act dating back to Wilson’s days—and Congress fell in line immediately, intimidated, cowed into complete submission by the catastrophic nature of the financial crisis. The people responded with an absolute faith in a man whose theoretical views were largely unknown but who was able to act boldly and decisively. ([Location 3914](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=3914)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Throughout the first year of his rule, Roosevelt concentrated an increasing amount of power in his hands, overriding the reluctance of a disgruntled Congress. Administrative agencies assumed a degree of power and independence that left the legislative branch with very little influence on the dizzy course of events. Final decisions rested with a President who handled his huge power with increasing assurance as time went on. Roosevelt was not carrying out a constitutional revolution, as his enemies asserted, but was merely leading America back to the one and only path along which her history had been proceeding: the path toward growing executive power. ([Location 3929](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=3929)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The psychological change was profound and it made the emergence of an all-powerful, paternalistic state inevitable. It was not this welfare state that weakened the individual’s self-reliance, as its critics contend. The “welfare state” merely sanctioned what had become a fact, a psychological change of profound scope, to which it adapted new social and economic institutions. The emergence of the welfare state as a controlling apparatus, operating both on a gigantic scale and in a minutely differentiated field, was as much a result as a contributing cause of the gradual decline in the average individual’s self-reliance and initiative. Individual man was increasingly trapped in the complex network of a colossal machinery of which he saw and understood only a very small part. This psychological evolution indicated a change of historical phase in the individual’s outlook, from the dynamic to the static. Dwarfed by the size and complexity of modern society, he became willing to surrender a large part of his stimulating but dangerous freedom for the sake of economic security. ([Location 3937](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=3937)) - Tags: [[blue]] - However, endowed with true political genius like all Caesarian figures, Roosevelt always knew how to give to the American people the feeling that his power and his decisions were theirs. ([Location 3951](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=3951)) - Tags: [[blue]] - What Roosevelt had to a supreme degree was a charismatic charm that poured out naturally, the irresistible charm of a born leader of men. As soon as he was in office he communicated with the American people through his fireside chats, a remarkable exercise in mass hypnotism. The fact that he came, in time, to have the major part of the press against him did not make a dent in his popular appeal. A new device, the radio, had prevailed over the older printed word; and when his magnetic voice purred its way into the ears of millions of his compatriots, he managed to cast an unbreakable spell on America. Logical argumentation could no longer prevail, as it had in the days of the Founding Fathers. Political speeches had already long ago become what rhetoric and diatribe had become in the classical world when they displaced eloquence: they were used for effect, not for content. They conjured emotions but did not appeal to the intellect; and at this game, Franklin Roosevelt was unrivaled. ([Location 3955](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=3955)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The Caesarian flavor of this highly personal rule was partly masked from his contemporaries by the easygoing familiarity of the man. As a New Dealer remarked: “The New Deal is a laughing revolution. It is purging our institutions in the fires of mockery, and it is led by a group of men who possess two supreme qualifications for the task: common sense and a sense of humor.” 8 Certainly this leadership was closer to that of popular pre-Caesarian Rome than it was to the Wagnerian tyranny of Germany’s Nazism with its terrifying Gotterdammerung atmosphere. But its humane and humorous aspect was only a mask, a psychological compensation for the almost absolute power behind it. It was not issued of a brutal revolution as was the fashion in the unstable worlds of the Hellenes and the Europeans; it was the actualization of an old trend and those who lived through it and trembled for the safety of their republican institutions could always attempt to comfort themselves by pointing out its familiar, even traditional features. But the lengthening shadow of growing Caesarism was unmistakably there. ([Location 3965](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=3965)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Washington gradually became the seat of the world’s greatest business enterprise: the Administration of the United States. A strange new world came into being, dwarfing and shattering the prestige of the old business world of bankers and industrial magnates. It was a world of pure politics and bureaucracy emancipated from business control, a world in which men competed for power and prestige, not for financial profits, a world of mandarins and brain-trust intellectuals. For the first time in the history of the United States, the despised intellectual reached a position of substantial power and even respectability. ([Location 3986](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=3986)) - Tags: [[blue]] - In 1935 the Supreme Court found that the National Industrial Recovery Act was unconstitutional because it granted too many legislative powers to the President; other acts were soon invalidated by the same judicial procedure. Emboldened by his tremendous success at the polls in 1936, Roosevelt overreached himself with his Supreme Court “packing” scheme—Congress refused to sanction it. But the Justices had been impressed by the demonstration of electoral will as well as alarmed by this undisguised threat to their autonomy. The Court virtually capitulated and approved the National Industrial Recovery Act—and with this the executive branch moved boldly into the legislative arena and carved out for itself an absolute predominance over the “fourth branch” that was coming into being: the autonomous agencies and commissions such as the Tennessee Valley Authority in which executive, legislative, and judiciary powers were inextricably intertwined. Henceforth the political parties were no longer the sole connective tissue joining together the separate powers of government. A new autonomous bureaucracy under executive control towered over them. ([Location 3998](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=3998)) - Tags: [[blue]] - in this conflict, the President had unquestionably weakened the prestige of the Court among the people. In this sense, it is doubtful whether it could or would dare resist a new presidential assault, which might be launched during some future emergency; and this psychological evolution further weakened the vanishing separation of powers. ([Location 4012](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=4012)) - Tags: [[blue]] - it was World War II and nothing else that put an end to massive unemployment and set the gigantic machinery of America humming again. ([Location 4025](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=4025)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Roosevelt now determined to tighten his iron grip on the Democratic Party by purging it of all rebellious elements and accentuating the predominance of its liberal wing. In so doing, he completely altered both political parties by standing up before the electorate as a national leader rather than a party nominee. He was a tribune of the people, the “indispensable man” without whom his own party could not hope to win, whose lengthening shadow encompassed all other personalities and who, in fact, needed no party for support. In him, we can now see the true pre-Caesarian figure whose rule is no longer partisan but personal. ([Location 4027](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=4027)) - Tags: [[blue]] - New Deals take place when dynamic expansion is over, when the frontier comes to an end, when expansive sources of new wealth are exhausted, when the problem becomes one of distribution and organization rather than bold creation. The New Deal started in Rome when Caius Gracchus pushed through his Lex Frumentaria, providing for distribution of corn to the poor at half its market price. Accusations of undermining the old Roman way of life were at once hurled at him. But the undermining had been proceeding for generations, ever since the successful conclusion of the Punic Wars, with the increase in wealth and leisure, the loosening of the old moral fiber, the increasing demoralization entailed by great riches, the virtual disappearance of the self-sufficient farmer. The apparition of the Gracchan New Deal was not the cause but the result of this psychological trend. It was a fateful step, nevertheless, one upon which there was no turning back, the beginning of the concept of “welfare state,” the end of a rugged individualism that had no place in a far more complex world. In Rome as in America, psychological conformity had in any case sharply limited individualism in all except economic matters. But when the latter were taken in hand by the state, an outcry went up whose intensity cannot be understood by nations that do not concentrate so exclusively on economic factors. ([Location 4056](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=4056)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Henry Ford was a “rugged individualist” but unwittingly he did more to cripple individualism among his own workers caught in the grip of mechanized mass production than any other man. The step from individual Fordism to social New Deal and welfare state is as unavoidable as the step from Big Business to Big Government. And in Rome, the Gracchi’s partial failure lay in their inability to recreate the class of small individualistic farmers, not in their welfare-state measures that no one dared repeal after them—any more than the essence of Roosevelt’s New Deal can ever be abolished. ([Location 4066](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=4066)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Drusus, Marius, and then Caesar, leaders of the Democratic Party, were to take their stand on the Gracchan platform as Roosevelt’s New Deal incorporated many features of Bryan’s Populism. ([Location 4077](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=4077)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Under Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, America took a decisive step toward Caesarism. The remarkable feature of this subtle evolution was that it could take place constitutionally, without any illegal move, simply by stretching the extremely pliable fabric of America’s political institutions. Romans had a far greater distrust of concentrated power than the Americans and they had so fragmented political authority that any man who aspired to full executive power had to hold, simultaneously and unconstitutionally, the official positions of Consul, Proconsul, Tribune, Quaestor, Censor, and Pontifex Maximus—never forgetting that each one of those offices, save the last, was split between several incumbents. In America, the existence of the presidency makes the transition far easier and wholly constitutional. Where constitutional obstacles appear insurmountable—the hostility of the Supreme Court, mostly—intimidation can usually be just as effective if it is backed by public opinion. ([Location 4109](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=4109)) - Tags: [[blue]] - It is essential to keep in mind that all this is the result of profound historical trends, not of any one man’s dictatorial ambitions. Circumstances, not conscious desires, create Caesarism. In the case of America, it is clear that psychological reasons favor this historical evolution. Americans are hero worshipers to a far greater extent than any European people. Concrete-minded and repelled by the abstract, they always tend to personalize issues, and in every walk of life they look up to the “boss.” They are led by insensible degrees to foster a Caesarism that historical evolution favors anyway. ([Location 4117](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=4117)) - Tags: [[blue]] - European-type dictatorship, like Greek tyranny, is usually the result of brutal revolutions, Caesarism the result of a long secular trend. One is temporary and often short-lived, the other as lasting as the secular trend that fosters it. Caesarism is the natural counterpart of the leveling process of democratic equality. ([Location 4125](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=4125)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Europe’s background, as we have already seen, is one of Time, America’s one of Space. The major psychological disability of America in the 20th Century was the failure to understand historical connections and the teachings of the past—not that Europeans were so much wiser, but at least they could see quite clearly in their sober moments that their insane passions had upset their mental balance, that blind and unrestrained emotions had overcome reason, and that it was their own undigested past, their historical knowledge distorted by fierce nationalism, ancestral hatreds, jealousies, and lethal memories that had led to the disastrous conflicts. European faults were those of weakness unable to control passion, American faults were those of willful incomprehension. ([Location 4136](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=4136)) - Tags: [[blue]] - An International Economic Conference was held in London in 1933 in which the participation of America was obviously to be the most important feature. Roosevelt had been an outspoken internationalist ever since he entered politics. But now, sensing both the profound isolationism of the American people and the psychological impossibility of linking the recovery of America with that of the world, he ended by scuttling the Conference in his July 3rd message known as the “Bombshell.” The response in the United States proved that he had correctly sensed the mood of the people. The greater part of the American press hailed this “second Declaration of Independence” with undisguised enthusiasm. ([Location 4157](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=4157)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Roosevelt’s new strategy was then to convince the American people that the only way to avoid participation in the hostilities was to extend aid to the Atlantic democracies on the opposite seaboard. More farsighted than his predecessor Wilson, he was able to prepare public opinion gradually, urging his compatriots to remain neutral in action but not in thought, urging them in fact to search their conscience and align themselves emotionally with Britain and France. ([Location 4197](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=4197)) - Tags: [[blue]] - When he prodded Congress to ratify the destroyer deal with Britain, Roosevelt pointed out: “This is the most important action in the reinforcement of our national defense that has been taken since the Louisiana Purchase. Then, as now, considerations of safety from overseas attack were fundamental.” 4 The long historical trend was evident. When Secretary of State Hull said, “an Allied victory was essential to the security of the United States,” 5 it implied not merely aid to beleaguered allies but growing control over those allies who would never have found themselves in such straits if they had not been fundamentally weak to start with. Thus were formerly strong world powers to become weak dependencies of America. ([Location 4202](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=4202)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The basic American issue in 1940 was the coming presidential election and the third term dilemma. Roosevelt’s decision to run a third time was a shattering blow to a revered tradition, although absolutely constitutional. In a country where precedents are all-important, this fateful decision must be seen as marking a turning point in constitutional history. The war emergency, of course, justified the decision. But then, there were also eight years of Roosevelt’s overpowering leadership, the total disorganization of the Republicans, and the purging of the Democratic Party. The party, in fact, had become inconceivable without Franklin Roosevelt. As an American historian put it: “The national Democratic Party, as such, had disappeared, although the forms and names remained.” 6 Roosevelt had become the indispensable man without whom victory at the polls was more uncertain than with his tradition-shattering third term nomination; and his control of the party was such that there was no democratic leader of sufficient stature to challenge him. ([Location 4230](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=4230)) - Tags: [[blue]] - At the same time, he emphasized his personal rather than partisan democratic leadership by avoiding Wilson’s mistakes and creating a bipartisan policy, keeping constantly in touch with Republican leaders in Congress, appointing such outstanding Republicans to his cabinet as Henry Stimson and Frank Knox. He had so completely reshaped all the basic issues that, inevitably, the Republicans campaigned under Wendell Willkie almost in his own terms, on his own platform. ([Location 4239](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=4239)) - Tags: [[blue]] - An incident of the 1940 campaign epitomized this popular feeling: “In the Cleveland speech, he made his first and last reference to the third term issue. It was a glancing reference and produced a surprising reaction from the crowd. Roosevelt said that, when the next four years are over ‘there will be another President’—at which point the crowd started to shout ‘No! No!’ Thinking remarkably quickly, Roosevelt thrust his mouth close to the microphone and went on talking so that the shouts which suggested that he might be elected permanently should not be heard over the radio.” 7 The first ghostly contours of Caesarism were appear-ing and, as always, welling up from the people themselves. ([Location 4244](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=4244)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Without being conscious of it, America was now going to rise to a new and unpredictable stature—that of a world power whose role is not merely to preserve the independence of democratic allies but actually to set up Western Civilization on a durable basis. World War II was the ultimate phase in the collapse of Europe’s “Hellenistic” order. What was required now was a true “Roman” order—no longer a precarious balance of power between Western nations but a compact unity of the entire Western community against a new challenge aiming at the total destruction of its civilization. ([Location 4275](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=4275)) - Tags: [[blue]] - it also provoked strategic and political errors of judgment, which were to prove catastrophic. The principal error was naively expressed by Roosevelt, “Now comes this Russian diversion. If it is more than just that, it will mean the liberation of Europe from Nazi domination—and at the same time I do not think we need worry about any possibility of Russian domination.” ([Location 4281](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=4281)) - Tags: [[blue]] - America had begun to look upon herself as a superpower, standing over and above all European nations, the main bastion of a civilization in danger of being wiped out in the rest of the world. It was no longer Wilson’s idealistic view of the United States as a mere nation among others, participating in a loose League of Nations on terms of democratic equality, but that of a superstate entitled to assume forceful leadership of the United Nations at war. ([Location 4307](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=4307)) - Tags: [[blue]] - There were unquestionably many Congressmen who fervently hoped that he would do it this way and thereby absolve them from all responsibility for decision on such a controversial issue (it was an ironic fact that many of the Congressmen who were loudest in accusing Roosevelt of dictatorial ambitions were the most anxious to have him act like a dictator on all measures which might be unpopular with the people but obviously valuable for the winning of the war).”12 This fear of responsibility is perennial in all democratic assemblies, and nothing contributes more to the rise of Caesarism than this factual abdication masked by verbal denunciations. ([Location 4319](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=4319)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The fact that the British bulwark had been able to stand against the Nazi onslaught masked a fact of primary importance. This was the virtual dissolution of the British Empire into its component parts. One section (the Asian possessions) was soon to become independent, and the other (the scattered English-speaking dominions) were beginning to revolve around Washington and no longer around London. Had Britain fallen, of course, a great impetus would have been given this gradual redistribution of power. Canada had long been intimately connected with the United States for obvious geographical reasons and was not even part of the Sterling Area. But with the war against Japan, Australia and New Zealand began to depend increasingly on America’s armed support, now that the hard-pressed Brit-ish could no longer extend their imperial protection to the South Pacific. At the outbreak of the Far Eastern war, the alarmed Australians decided to recall their armed forces from the Middle East and Churchill’s anxious pleas were curtly turned down. Churchill then induced Roosevelt to intervene and the President was able to convert the Australians to his point of view by promising to dispatch considerable American forces “down under.” Further disputes between Britain and the Dominion induced Roosevelt to write bluntly to Churchill: “I sense in this country a growing feeling of impatience at what publicly appears to be a rather strained relationship at this critical time between the United Kingdom and Australia.... I say this to you because I myself feel greatly responsible for the turn of events.” ([Location 4327](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=4327)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Just as in Roosevelt’s exceptional power and authority there was a premonition of the Caesarism to come, there was in his conceptions of world organization after the war a faint outline of the global “Roman” order to come. As he saw it, the United Nations Organization would replace the former precarious balance of power whose breakdown had finally shattered the modern “Hellenistic” order. His idealistic views prompted him time and again to advocate the voluntary dissolution of all colonial empires, with some form of international trusteeship to take over in case of need. Robert E. Sherwood states in his study on Hopkins that Roosevelt “believed in a system of strategic bases—he gave as examples Dakar, the tip of Tunisia and Formosa— which would be under United Nations control.” He then goes on to state that Roosevelt also believed “that France and other occupied countries in Europe should not have to bear the economic and physical burden of rearmament after the war—that the burden of ensuing postwar security should be borne by the nations that were of necessity already armed for combat purposes.” 17 These, of course, were the English-speaking world and Russia. ([Location 4361](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=4361)) - Tags: [[blue]] - But if the United Nations Organization was to police the world who would police the United Nations? Then and there, a new problem was born. As usual, those who establish enduring institutions have only a dim perception of the true historical implications of their own doings. Roosevelt, in his idealistic mood, thought that he was laying the basis of world peace through voluntary cooperation of the victorious powers. He was, in fact, laying the basis of a very different world, of a new “Roman” order revolving around a strong American leadership. ([Location 4373](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=4373)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Stalin and Roosevelt agreed that they had entered an age of great superpowers who should take charge of policing the world. In justification of the steady stream of concessions made to Soviet Russia, the argument was consistently put forward that Stalin could make a separate peace with Nazi Germany—ignoring the fact that under the most autocratic dictatorship, the exacerbated passions of a Russian population that had fought an utterly ruthless invader on its own territory could never tolerate such a thing. Paralyzed by illusory fears, Roosevelt and his advisers found themselves at the mercy of the Orient’s most skillful negotiator. But behind the profound mistakes made by the West lay the unquestionable reality of Russia’s colossal land army and of the inability of the West to limit its floodlike progress in Europe except by matching its military power on the spot. Far more than the bombings or the landings in Normandy, it was the Russian military machine that had destroyed Hitler’s Wehrmacht and the most skillful negotiators in the world could not have altered this fact. But there was another reality that was not sufficiently taken into account by the pragmatic Anglo-Saxons. Behind the armed might of Soviet Russia lay another active force in the realm of ideas and passions, the religion-like force of Marxist philosophy extending to many lands from France to China, shading off into many different hues on its periphery but always linked by ruthless discipline to the Kremlin. And behind Marxist philosophy lay a deep distrust of Western Civilization as such. In this the rustic patriotism of the Russians joined the widening revolt of Asia’s crippled civilizations against the West. ([Location 4394](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=4394)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Though nominally a monarchy, Britain was in fact an aristocratic republic, whereas, though nominally a republic, the United States was gradually becoming a Caesarian monarchy under Franklin Roosevelt. Britain and America represent, respectively, the modern equivalents of different phases of Rome’s social evolution. ([Location 4432](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=4432)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Such remarks, repeated generation after generation, can never fail to alter the psychological climate and induce the democratic leaders to assume gradually the trappings of Caesarism. Sooner or later, the political coloring of the East begins to come off on the West. The transition from Sulla to Caesar and from Caesar to the absolutism of Vespasian was partly the result of the growing orientalization of Rome and the decline in prestige of elective institutions. In the modern instance, it is clear that “democrat” Roosevelt was not half as much repelled by Stalin’s views on strong executive power and ab-solute supremacy of the great superpowers as “conservative” Churchill was. ([Location 4447](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=4447)) - Tags: [[blue]] ## New highlights added February 10, 2025 at 11:26 AM - The great collapse of European values that started with World War I accelerated during and after World War II. A world in full rebellion no longer looked up to Europe for creative inspiration as in the past—no more than it feared the military might before which all the people of the globe had trembled for so long. Europe’s physical power was smashed. ([Location 4469](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=4469)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The social order of civilization is the end result of the striving toward democratic equality, the long-standing effort to standardize and raise ever higher the general living conditions of the population, rather than to emphasize the cultured refinement of the few at the summit of the social pyramid. That was the profound trend of America’s social evolution, long before the full impact of the Industrial Revolution was felt, a new social outlook, which focuses on the prototype only to the extent that it can be standardized for the benefit of the majority. ([Location 4477](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=4477)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Nietzsche, who saw civilization coming with terror, warned us: “...among the Greeks, it was the ‘individual’ that counted,” he explained; “The Greeks are interesting and extremely important because they reared such a vast number of great individuals.” 1 But his fulmination against the rising “herd” men was pathetically ineffective. The trend was obvious: Greece had been compelled to bow to Rome, as Europe would be to America. Nietzsche’s exasperated attempt to destroy Western culture’s traditional morality was the last outburst of intense individualism based on an aesthetic outlook before it goes down before the ethical standpoint of civilized society. He thundered that “the object of mankind should lie in its highest individuals,” but with the onset of civilization, society inevitably predominates over the individual. In Nietzsche, we have the last, most conscious and passionate exponent of anti-civilization to rise in a declining Europe. ([Location 4481](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=4481)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The social basis of a civilized order rests on the final rise to supremacy not of an oligarchy or proletariat but an immensely broad, town-dwelling middle class. Society is no longer a hierarchical pyramid but a vast middleclass plateau. ([Location 4489](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=4489)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Civilization implies also the rise to supremacy of economic thinking and the decline of truly creative culture, whose conflicting ideas and theories, stimulating when formulated, end up causing the breakdown of a culture’s political and social structure because they are taken too seriously. ([Location 4494](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=4494)) - Tags: [[blue]] - with exhaustion comes a desire for the harmony of compromise, for a constructive peace devoted to economic welfare rather than cultural pursuits that always spill out into the political world, become monstrously distorted, and end in bloody disaster. The age of Nazism’s monstrous Wagnerian drama comes to a close in a cataclysmic Twilight of the Gods. From now on, culture will no longer be taken in dead earnest but rather as a marginal activity that will not be allowed to interfere with civilization’s serious pursuit—the establishment of security and economic well-being for as many human beings as possible. It will be a secondary culture of Ciceros and Senecas growing in the shade of the greatness of the original culture. ([Location 4499](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=4499)) - Tags: [[blue]] - This miracle of civilized order was made possible by men who, at first sight, did not seem to be blessed by great gifts. The worst features of the Romans—heaviness, poor imagination, little sensitivity, indifference to form, instinctive distrust of individuality and originality—were, however, well compensated for. It was their other qualities—a taste for action rather than thought, practicality, a concrete rather than abstract outlook on men and things, precision, taste for teamwork, discipline, tenacity, genius for efficient organization and sound government, strong patriotism and indestructible belief in the superiority of the Roman way of life, a powerful faculty of absorption and assimilation—that made the Romanization of the classical world possible. More than anything else, it was what Pliny the Elder described as “omnium utilitatum et virtuum rapacissimi,” the remarkable ability to borrow and adapt anything invented by others that could possibly be used in a practical way. ([Location 4516](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=4516)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Americanism is to the modern world the equivalent of what Tertullian called “Romanitas” was to the classical: the sum total of all the psychological traits, customs, habits of thought that their respective civilization men take for granted. Americans are civilization men, and not culture men. All their characteristics point to organization, productive efficiency, and earthly success. In a chaotic world where sensitive men are baffled and often despair, they are not easily baffled and never despair. They can be nonplused, checked by what seems to them irrational reactions of other nations—but only temporarily. Their basic vitality is too great. The shape of things to come depends on many different factors. But one is of transcendent importance: the mind and soul of modern America, as shaped by several centuries of historical growth. ([Location 4525](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=4525)) - Tags: [[blue]] - A gradual fusion of the spirit of the Puritan, the pioneer, and the business leader has given American society its typical leader. ([Location 4537](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=4537)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Culture thinks in terms of quality, civilization in terms of quantity, and no people in the world today think so much in purely quantitative, statistical terms as the Americans. The background of America, after all, is space and the Americans are sensitive above all to bigness, size, the lateral extension of immensity rather than depth. The background of Europe is time, history, and what strikes the European, conservative or revolutionary, in praise or condemnation, is the depth and antiquity of an idea or institution. ([Location 4538](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=4538)) - Tags: [[blue]] - What American civilization stands for is symbolized by John Dewey’s philosophy—belief in the overpowering influence of environment, a thorough study of practical psychology and its application to mass education. This philosophy is democratic institutionalism pushed to an extreme, based on the premise that there are no differences in essential being among men but only of practical ability. Now, being implies a harmonious synthesis of spirit and matter. It is essentially the “word made flesh,” and the primary goal of man, as an individual rather than as a member of society, is to reach a higher state of being through strenuous self-improvement—not social “adjustment.” It is the opposition of the Greek arete, all-round excellence, the full develop-ment of the cultured individual in every respect, the dislike of specialization, contempt for mere efficiency—and the Roman virtus, which is largely a moral and social quality. Culture means the generalization of this higher state of arete among the elite. It means a new world outlook embodied in concrete matter, whether it be men or works of art. As opposed to this, civilization is the product of pure intellect, the triumph of conscious intelligence applied to social organization. ([Location 4550](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=4550)) - Tags: [[blue]] - American civilization, like the Roman, is based on an ethical system that defines what one’s moral attitude toward the universe should be rather than on a speculative philosophy that attempts to understand the metaphysical structure of the universe. Its outlook is essentially “behaviorist.” ([Location 4570](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=4570)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Americans are not intellectual logicians but highly intuitive men who think in headlines and pictures, very much like the Chinese with their ideograms. This quality gives them a remarkable flair for reality, which is at the root of their political and economic life and largely accounts for their success as men of action. They have a genius for condensing and digesting what the Europeans have been trained to develop, and they reach the heart of a problem with far greater speed than Europeans, who plod along intellectually and often become lost in their own abstractions. ([Location 4579](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=4579)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Very much like the Romans, the Americans are remarkably unindividualized. Group consciousness among them is paramount, with its attendant worship of quantity, masses, collective impulses, with generalized stereotypes such as the “man in the street” or the “common man.” This implies not an advanced but on the contrary an early stage of development, since individualized stages in history evolve out of this primitive phase with the growth of culture. The dawn of civilization, therefore, represents a partial return to the unindividualized stage in which group consciousness and social concerns predominate, but on a far higher technical level. Psychologically, it is the primitive tribal collectivism blown up to mammoth dimensions. ([Location 4607](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=4607)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The result is that, since nothing is done to enhance and develop the exceptional creative talent for its own sake, American man is static in an individual sense although American society as a whole is dynamic. Americans hardly ever make basic discoveries but can endlessly adapt, improve and mass-produce European discoveries. They research endlessly but rarely contemplate. Fundamental scientific discoveries are the result of disinterested contemplation. A psychological attitude, which tends to concentrate on immediate usefulness is not conducive to the birth of profound thoughts and basic discoveries, since their practical applications are not immediately apparent. ([Location 4636](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=4636)) - Tags: [[blue]] ## New highlights added February 11, 2025 at 11:26 AM - An artist, professor, or government official in Europe can be and usually is badly remunerated. Yet, the European belief in qualitative differences gives them a prestige and consideration that are ample compensation. This has never been the case in America, where mediocre financial returns indicate almost invariably social inferiority. In an equalitarian society, financial income is the only index that is geared exclusively to quantitative standards, and its exclusive domination has had devastating effects on American society. If a title is conferred on a British physician, an academic degree on a German scholar, or a decoration on a French artist, the prestige value of money is destroyed. It implies the recognition that along with democratic equality there is a hierarchy of talent that rises above it. ([Location 4648](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=4648)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The result is that Americans consistently mistake causes for effects. The democratic habit of considering the verdict of a numerical majority as evidently the best has practically eliminated the notion that the majority can be wrong after all, that an autonomous spirit can have different claims. In their wisdom, the Founding Fathers made provision against such tyranny of the multitude because they still lived in an aristocratic age when the feeling for differences in being was vivid. Today, however, the psychological pressure of conformity is overwhelming and contributes to the degradation of activities that are not strictly businesslike. As a consequence, the constitutional safeguards of the Founding Fathers are being bypassed by the increasing psychological standardization of the American people. ([Location 4654](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=4654)) - Tags: [[blue]] - More than a hundred years ago, Alexis de Tocqueville had already remarked: “I know no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America.” 9 And he added: “In that immense crowd which throngs the avenues to power in the United States, I found very few men who displayed that manly candor and masculine independence of opinion which frequently distinguished the Americans in former times.... It seems at first sight as if all the minds of the Americans were formed upon one model, so accurately do they follow the same route.” 10 A psychological disposition that reaches as far back as the Jacksonian era is not going to be reversed easily. ([Location 4666](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=4666)) - Tags: [[blue]] - American democracy does not give free play to the development of exceptional talent— as had been fondly hoped by 18th Century Democrats—but on the contrary to the peaceful destruction of all nonconformist elements. Americans are highly differentiated in their abilities and specializations but they are more uniform as beings, more true to type than any other people in the world. ([Location 4676](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=4676)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Europe in the 20th Century knows its past but no longer possesses enough vitality to dominate it and use it constructively. Europe sighs and groans with the pain of thousands of grievous self-inflicted wounds that can no longer heal because the European body is organically old. America is free from such pain and wounds, free to face a new world optimistically and shape it. With all its limitations the psychological disposition of Americans is a happy one. Through voluntary limitation of its possibilities and interest, through a partial immolation of individualism, American society today comes closer to the utopia men have been dreaming of for thousands of years than any other in the world. ([Location 4685](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=4685)) - Tags: [[blue]] - European societies—when they were healthy, which is now rarely the case—saw in the original individual a living cell participating in an organic whole, different from all other cells and competing with none. But American society, pervaded with the spirit of Protestantism and John Locke, is not an organic entity so much as a gigantic machinery of checks and balances in which the spirit of competition between equal, similar, and interchangeable parts is essential. ([Location 4737](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=4737)) - Tags: [[blue]] - There are no shades between the hard-working man and the useless playboy because the very notion that leisure is essential to culture is rarely acknowledged in America. The Puritan roots are still visible. “Those that are prodigal with their time despise their own souls,” said the Puritan divine.11 From Puritan days the worship of productive activity for its own sake is clear. Alexis de Tocqueville had already noticed it in the quieter days before industrialization: “Nothing is more necessary to the culture of the higher sciences or of the more elevated departments of science than meditation; and nothing is less suited to meditation than the structure of democratic society.... In the midst of this universal tumult, this incessant conflict of jarring interests, this continual striving of men after fortune, where is that calm to be found which is necessary for the deeper combinations of the intellect? How can the mind dwell upon any single point when everything whirls around it, and man himself is swept and beaten onwards by the heady current that rolls all things in its course?” 12 ([Location 4746](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=4746)) - Tags: [[blue]] - No alteration has been as great as that which metamorphosed those self-reliant, iron-willed men into the contemporary American male who is meekly subservient to mother and wife. As fathers and husbands American men are not revered or looked up to. They never appear to embody the superhuman strength and wisdom that children have to look up to if their natural taste for hero worship is to be gratified. Of the two poles between which upbringing always swings, the principle of loving intimacy of the mother and the principle of respectful distance embodied in the father, only one rules, and the childish desire for love that Americans display in their contacts throughout the world is a direct consequence of the absolute predominance of the feminine principle. American men remain basically children and the only grown ups are the women—mainly because they are always born adults. ([Location 4788](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=4788)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The democratic idea that any man is as good as his neighbor automatically destroys the vital tension, the desire to emulate and “reach up to.” Even when practiced with as much engaging friendliness as in America, its main result is to nip in the bud any form of self-improvement. The iron-willed Puritan was accustomed to raise his eyes to God, look at Him with reverence and, in his striving, become more spiritualized. His modern descendants have lowered their sights and look horizontally at the “common man.” The steady process of humanizing and vulgarizing has destroyed a great deal of vital and creative tension. ([Location 4795](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=4795)) - Tags: [[blue]] - This is a subtle metamorphosis of the Puritan creed, according to which worldly success is a concrete symbol of God’s love, and of the corollary belief that lack of success is due to one’s sinful nature. Of course, as times changed and as religion lost its former influence, this psychological trait became secularized. Success became a goal in itself, shedding its symbolic meaning, and love became in turn the symbol of success. By this token, dislike or hate implies a frightening failure. If America is not loved abroad, it implies that she is not as successful as she thought—and far back in the subconscious, the old religious fears of spiritual rejection and damnation shape up dimly. The gnawing feeling that America is not worthy of love and that Americans are not lovable provokes understandable reactions—usually a horrified recoiling from ungrateful allies, followed by exasperated isolationism. ([Location 4803](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=4803)) - Tags: [[blue]] - From this growing feminine ascendancy arose many of the great changes in 20th Century America: the steady bartering away of precarious freedom for security, the basic conservatism, the idolization of the child, the instinct for the preservation of property, the distrust of individual originality, the increasing fear of personal risk, and the ideal of social respectability. More than ever, the strictly utilitarian, matter-of-fact atmosphere of America is allied to the predominance of women—women always embodying these traits against man’s more creative and artistic temperament. In turn, this leads directly to women’s monopoly of relations with “human beings,” leaving the American men full disposition of the world of inanimate “things.” ([Location 4818](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=4818)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The growing ascendancy of women always heralds the dawn of civilization, emphasizing preservation and security. There was no greater revolution in Rome than the metamorphosis of women’s social position at the close of the Hellenistic Age. They became emancipated in the 2nd Century BC, not merely in an economic sense but in every way. They interfered in every department of life, “invaded the realm of politics, attended political conferences,” 13 went into business, and took as much liberty as men. Divorces became outrageously frequent. The former despotic authority of the pater familias was shaken to its foundations and eventually swept away altogether. “The meek and henpecked Roman husband was already a stock comedy figure in the great days of the Second Punic War.” 14 It was left to that old reactionary, Cato the Censor, to exclaim bitterly: “All other men rule over women; but we Romans, who rule all men, are ruled by our women.” ([Location 4826](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=4826)) - Tags: [[blue]] - American public opinion has become largely feminine and its profound impact on the political evolution of the United States can never be overestimated. The disintegration of republican institutions geared to a more patriarchal age and the steady march toward Caesarism are largely their doing; an increasingly feminine public opinion will look increasingly for a virile Caesar. ([Location 4842](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00HPB57N2&location=4842)) - Tags: [[blue]]