"European Perspectives" by Alexander Jacob

In European Perspectives: Essays (2020), Dr. Alexander Jacob seeks to differentiate Jewish-derived Marxist socialism from the German-derived spiritual socialism. Although “a professed anti-Semite,” Marx had a “Jewish mentality” that manifested itself in a “materialistic view of life”. This is in contrast to what might be called the communitarian ethos of Werner Sombart’s German socialism and Oswald Spengler’s Prussian socialism. One useful feature of European Perspectives is its assessment of a number of important European thinkers: Werner Sombart, Oswald Spengler, Erik von Kuehnelt–Leddihn, Julius Evola, Theodor Adorno, Hans–Jürgen Syberberg, Max Weber, Hannah Arendt and Theodor Herzl. Sombart, one of Jacob’s favorite scholars, believed “that the modern system of commercial capitalism was due not mainly to English Protestantism as Max Weber had proclaimed but to Judaism.” Jacob is an admirer of Spengler’s Prussian socialism which does not seek to destroy capitalism. Early on, Spengler saw that “democracy, in general, is an unholy alliance of urban masses, cosmopolitan intellectuals, and finance capitalists. 

The masses themselves are manipulated by the latter two elements through their specific agencies: the press and the parties.” Jacob’s ideology synthesizes Kuehnelt-Leddihn and Evola’s beliefs. He accepts Evola’s criticism of modern Jewry and the bourgeoisie, but appears to reject his disparagement of Catholicism. Jacob concludes that Syberberg wanted to use “art as a redemptive influence on society,” while Adorno used it “as an instrument of revenge.” In the fourth essay Jacob shifts gears to examine two books, both written in 2011, that analyze the success of Western civilization: The Uniqueness of Western Civilization by Ricardo Duchesne and The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson. Duchesne’s thesis is that the West has always been different, more creative, than other civilizations. The source of this creativity is the “aristocratic egalitarianism” of Indo-European societies. 

This unique aristocratic egalitarianism was made possible by a political arrangement that provided “relative freedom and autonomy from centralised authority”. For Ferguson, the West’s greatness can be found in: “science, competition, property rights, medicine, the consumer society, and the work ethic”. Like Duchesne, Ferguson sees a lack of centralized power as a Western asset as opposed to the centralized bureaucracy of China. He believes property rights are closely associated with “the rule of law and representative government”. Ferguson is not, however, completely sanguine regarding the future of the Occident. He warns that the greatest threat to the West is “our own loss of faith in the civilization we inherited from our ancestors,” while Duchesne expresses similar concerns about the “nihilism, cultural relativism, and weariness” of the West.

To Jacob’s thinking, what Fukuyama considers 'the end of history' is Jewish “economic utopianism which manifested itself in the twentieth century as totalitarian Communism and was transformed in the new ‘promised land’ into totalitarian liberalism of the ‘American Dream.’” Jacob concludes that “Fukuyama’s neo-conservatism illustrates the incompatibility of the American system with genuinely European systems of political thought.” Jacob traces how the English, and later the Americans, deviated from traditional European values. In essence: the rise of Puritanism led to the English Civil War, the Revolution of 1688, the American Revolution, and the French Revolution. Puritans with their individualism and industry came to see “citizens as economic units of production not unlike those of the later Communist utopia of Marx.” Then, increasingly during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Jews in America were able to transform the remnant of Puritanism into their own political/economic system, with the end results that we see today. There is a desperate need for a new aristocracy in Western societies. At present we are ruled by elites who are hostile to the interests of Western peoples. Before an aristocracy can develop, we need to create a revolutionary cadre from which a new elite will emerge. The historical peoples of the West are now slated to become minorities in their own homelands. We need new elites to propagate a new ideology and that is a monumental task. Nothing could be more difficult, yet nothing less will do. Alexander Jacob obtained his doctorate in Intellectual History at the Pennsylvania State University. His publications include Nobilitas: A Study of European Aristocratic Philosophy from Ancient Greece to the early Twentieth Century (2000), and Richard Wagner on Tragedy, Christianity and the State (2019). Source: unz.com