Part I: The Cult of Sameness
“We are not a Christian civilization; democracy is not a Christian invention.” — Freda Kirchwey in The Nation, November 3, 1940.
“I say that democracy can never prove itself beyond cavil, until it founds and luxuriantly grows its own forms of art, poems, schools, theology, displacing all that exists, or that has been produced in the past, under opposite influences.” — Walt Whitman, Democratic Vistas.
I. Identity Versus Diversity
“It is surprising to observe how constantly we find all our political questions complicated with theology.” — Proudhon.
II. Ochlocracy and Democratism
“Dix millions d’ignorances ne font pas un savoir.”
III. The Bourgeois and Capitalism
“The true nature of the Reformation is not found in its intention but in its result. Modern democracy is the child of the Reformation and not of the reformers. Of the latter, inconsistency is the chief characteristic.” — G. P. Gooch, English Democratic Ideas in the Seventeenth Century.
IV. Ochlocratic Culture
“There are only three respectable human beings: the priest, the warrior, and the poet. To know, to kill, to create.” — Baudelaire.
V. Woman Today
“It is life one loves in woman.” — Jacques Chardonne, in Aimer c’est plus que l’amour.
The term “equality” in this connection is used neither in the metaphysical nor in the legal sense. We use “equality” here rather with a meaning of functional identity — which may have some connection with the legal term but lacks practically every metaphysical aspect.
Part II: Identitarianism in Time and Space
“I desire that one govern by the light and with the light, provided one looks for light where it is, namely, outside the masses, the instincts and the prejudices of the mob; I want the examination made clear from above, the discussion tempered by belief, liberty held in check by duty.” — Montalembert.
I. Monarchy
“The absolute ruler may be a Nero, but he is sometimes a Titus or Marc Aurelius; the people is often Nero, but never Marc Aurelius.” — Rivarol.
II. The Age of Parliamentarianism and Republicanism
“Europe has become the apostle of her own apostasy.” — Douglas Jerrold, England.
THE headway which egalitarianism and identitarianism made after the revolution of 1830 and 1848 is intimately connected with the rapid increase in importance of two geographical-social units. Europe of the nineteenth and the beginning twentieth century is a continent ruled by money, and money comes from the rich plains (regardless whether they are industrial or agricultural) and the cities.
III. World War I
Austria-Hungary remains the cornerstone of Europe. — Leroy-Beaulieu, in 1903.
