12.1Recapitulation via Locke: The liberal conception of government, its critique and socio-ontological grounding in the power interplay of civil society

The ground covering the question of legitimate government has been turned many times since Plato and Aristotle. John Locke, for instance, one of the prime historical sources of liberal thinking, i.e. a liberal cast of world, makes one of the most famous contributions in his Two Treatises of Government, in which he argues for the natural rights of man and government only by “Agreement which every one has with the rest to incorporate, and act as one Body, and so be one distinct Commonwealth”230 against the pretensions of absolute monarchy with its hereditary claim to legitimacy. The issue of political philosophy in the narrower sense always turns upon the government of men by men and whether this government is legitimate (and not merely lawful; cf. Chapter 10.3). The absoluteness of absolute monarchy is that the monarch rules autocratically without any relation to the concurring will of the subjects whom he rules.

We continue to live in the modern liberal age in the West with the conviction that only government by consent of those governed, no matter how this consent is institutionally arranged, can be justified and is therefore just and legitimate. Strictly speaking, it is best to distinguish legitimacy of government from justice, which latter concerns both the question of fair interplay in civil society and that of each individual member and each group in society having and enjoying its due share of the goods of life in the broadest sense, both tangible and intangible, positive (beneficial goods) and negative (deleterious bads; cf. Chapter 6.1f). This conviction of government only by consent corresponds to and springs from an historical casting of the sociating in the world within which society exists solely for the sake of its individual members and their ways of life who each must have some sort of say in how and by whom they are governed. Human beings in the modern age are social subjects, i.e. they underlie society as its ground in terms of which society and its governing institutions are rendered their reason, their very raison d’être. This makes them also political subjects underlying government, and not merely subject to, i.e. literally, thrown under, the state.

The divine right of kings, by contrast, was grounded on the Christian God as the ultimate subject underlying the totality of beings, which in turn were God’s created objects. The superiority of the Christian God already pre-empted any need to legitimize government specifically in terms of its good for those governed. In medieval times, in accordance with the metaphysical cast of the totality of beings, government was legitimized in terms of some sort of correspondence to the ultimate underlying subject, God, say, as the expression of His will through His chosen monarch. In the modern age, however, the Christian God as supreme being gradually has given way to humankind itself as the ultimate, underlying subject — an ostensible ‘we’— that must render to all beings their reason. Government can now only be legitimized if it proceeds ultimately in some way from the collectivity of individual human subjects making up society and for their good.

In the modern age, each individual human subject is now experienced and cast as an ultimate, free ἀρχή and any higher ἀρχή (an ἀρχός, a ruler) now has to justify itself to the human subject members of society and be estimated as such by them. Not only is individual consciousness, the ego cogito, now the ultimate locus of self-certain truth where the world is represented in its truth, but the individual, free, fathomless will is now the ἀρχή for all actions in the world, even if this act be an act of consent to submit to a superior authority in society. The individual as ultimate subject has to consent to being governed and only freely gives this consent because of an insight into what is necessary and beneficial for its own well-being and no longer as an act of submission to superior, divine will, to a superior stratum of society, i.e. an aristocracy, or to paternal figures legitimated by traditional patriarchal and tribal social orders.

The individual subject understands (pre-ontologically) that it is necessarily sociated in society with other individuals in a unified “Body Politick” (TTG. p. 459) so that its own freedom and well-being can only be realized, furthered and secured as part of the general well-being of society at large. Locke states many times that men only enter into society to preserve and secure their “Estates, Liberties and Lives” (TTG. p. 452) as the precondition for any individual or social well-being. This major premise of Locke’s treatise stands opposed to the divine right of an absolute monarch to rule, against which both of Locke’s treatises are directed and by which, therefore, all his arguments are held in tension. Locke’s treatises (and, before him, Hobbes’ writings) signify a shift in Western understanding of the totality of beings in which the supremacy of the Christian God gives way to humankind itself as the underlying subject of all that is. This recasting of world runs in parallel to Descartes’ casting of the self-certain subject that first and foremost is conscious of, i.e. co-knows, itself. Locke’s thinking also plays midwife to a world that is twisting free of subjection to a supreme being, i.e. a highest power and cause, acting through a divine representative, the absolute monarch, to ground instead individualized humankind itself as the ultimate subject and ground. An epoch of humanization of the world has begun.

Locke, of course, remains nominally Christian in his thinking, but he appeals fundamentally to man’s putative God-given “Reason”, which is synonymous with the “Law of Nature” (TTG. p. 311), a shift which effectively makes humankind and its insightful reasoning the ultimate subject of how society is to be. Locke’s entire argument throughout both treatises is held in its orbit by the pull of the position asserting the legitimacy of absolute monarchy which he is opposing. He aims to demonstrate that there cannot be any legitimate absolute monarchy precisely because a monarch’s legitimate power must be relative to the end of government, which is the preservation of the life, liberty and estate of the members of society. This end of government is posited. It is a metaphysical positing which posits groundlessly individualized humankind as the ultimate subject, in line with the ultimately individualized nature of freedom, albeit that the nature of this individualization as a mode of sociation via reified power interplay remains hidden. The posited metaphysical casting of individualized humankind can be called humanism. The way society is set up has now to justify itself to “Reason” (not just to understanding or mere opinion), i.e. to the insight of men considering the constitution of society as a unified, governing body politic in the light of their own nature as free beings, their interests (especially private property interests), welfare and well-being, in short, their “happiness”, or at least the pursuit thereof.

The opposition between the two hermeneutic casts can also be stated in terms of the opposed theses on the opening pages of Locke’s first treatise. These are: “Men are not born free, and therefore could never have the liberty to choose either Governors, or Forms of Government.” (1TG. § 5) as opposed to the admission of “the Natural Liberty and Equality of Mankind”. (1TG. § 4) Mankind is either subject to an absolute monarch who rules absolutely by divine right, or it is the subject of all social institutions and government, underlying and therefore providing their very reason for being, thus making all government relative to the ultimate, underlying individualized subjects. Freedom here does not mean the freedom to do arbitrarily what one wants and wills, but the freedom arising from insight (which is necessarily ultimately individual) into human being itself and thus (ultimately individual) consent to the way society is set up and governed. Freedom has to accord with the necessary “Law of Nature”, which is “Reason”. Reason, however, is, properly speaking, ontological, speculative insight into the being of beings.

Originally, in Locke’s conception, a “State of Nature” prevails which is “a State of perfect Freedom [of men] to order their Actions, and dispose of their Possessions, and Persons as they think fit, within the bounds of the Law of Nature, without asking leave, or depending upon the Will of any other Man”. (2TG. § 4) This “State of Nature”, however, is not to be thought as an hypothetical prior state of humankind back in the mists of time, but as an a priori, groundless metaphysical positing and casting of human freedom as individual freedom, and of society as compatible with the realization, i.e. the interplay, of individual freedom (cf. Chapter 10.7). To posit that “all men are born free” is not to state any sort of fact, but to cast human being itself into freedom, which is a thoroughly two-edged gift/poison eventuating from the open truth of being’s temporality. Accordingly, reason dictates also that society be governed by laws passed by an elected legislature (to maintain the underlying, ultimate subjectivity of the people and the free expression of its will) under which each member of society is treated equally as a formally, abstractly equal bearer of rights, i.e. a person, rather than being subjected to the arbitrary decision of a divinely empowered absolute monarch, even though this monarch may decide wisely, paternalistically and benevolently to further the good of his people. Such an elected legislature, which places demands and obligations on the citizens in the exercise of their individualized freedom of movement, is a concrete realization of reason in the sense that it is the way in which the idea of individual human freedom in its interplay gains objectivity as an institution, which is a Gestalt of ethical life in such a society based on individual freedom (and not on a promise of assured happiness conceived as material well-being).

Human being is still conceived by Locke along the traditional metaphysical lines of an Aristotle, with Christian admixtures: “God having made Man such a Creature, that, in his own Judgment, it was not good for him to be alone, put him under strong Obligations of Necessity, Convenience, and Inclination to drive him into Society, as well as fitted him with Understanding and Language to continue and enjoy it.” (2TG. § 77) Human being for Locke, too, is animal rationale, ζῷον λόγον ἔχον, as articulated in Aristotle’s Politics and wedded inextricably with that other essential determination of human being, viz. ζῷον πολιτικόν, and the way society is governed also has to be according to and accessible to reason, i.e. rational, and ultimately open to no-longer-metaphysical questioning and grounding in the light of truth as disclosed in the 3D-temporal clearing.

In both Plato’s and Aristotle’s thinking, society is originally engendered by the exigencies of satisfying need in some kind of division of labour (and not for the sake of the freedom of interplay itself). Society is set up to bring what is good and useful for living into presence and to keep what is bad and harmful for living at bay, in absence. The securing of a material way of life, both positively and negatively, thus stands at the focus of attention, a pragmatic concern. Humans’ relations to beings as a whole are marked by the (use-)value or otherwise they have for leading a good life. What is positively valuable and good is desired; what is valuable in the negative sense, i.e. harmful and bad for living, is repelled and must be warded off. The securing of the things necessary for a good life, no matter what shape this good life assumes in its concrete usages in various places at different times, requires safe possession, which is one of the functions society has to fulfil: that of guardianship to protect its citizens’ property against the incursions of others from within (theft, robbery, fraud, etc.) or without (war, confiscation, brigandage, freebooting, piracy, etc.). Such protection of private property, however, is necessary in the light of reason not for the sake of the good life, but ultimately for the sake of freedom itself in its exercise as freedom of movement in leading a life.

For Locke as a father of liberalism, individual insight into the need to protect individual freedoms and the private property rights associated with them is a ground for consent to be governed in society by a government. The privacy of private property arises in the first place from the individual’s having the freedom to enjoy what it has fairly acquired through an expression of free will and is in its possession, i.e. within reach as immediately present, and to deprive others of access to these things. The individual’s private sphere therefore represents a limit and injunction to what can be made a public, shared good, and is the correspondence in the practical sphere to the individualization of truth as discussed in Chapter 10.6. Classical liberalism emphasizes the freedom of the private individual, although it argues on the basis of “the Natural Liberty and Equality of Mankind” in general. There is an ambiguity between the human being as a free individual and humankind as generically free with the consequence that the ontological structure of the freedom of human beings in their plurality does not come to its concept. The sociation of individual freedom is dealt with as the intercourse of contract which, however, remains dependent upon the caprice of two individual wills, as if it proceeded from entirely dissociated individual wills, and as if it were a matter of capricious individual will, as an expression of individual freedom, whether sociation took place at all or not.

This leads inevitably to the liberal dilemmas of the individual versus society and the individual versus the state. But such dilemmas are spurious insofar as the private individual on its own is a merely imagined abstraction, just like the worldless subject of subjectivist epistemology, i.e. the private individual who withdraws from society is always also the social individual already sociated through the interplay with others, and it is the (abstract, reified) form of sociation through (money-mediated) exchange that historically enables the private individual as a sociated human being in the first place. The historical-metaphysical liberal casting of human being as individually free was only possible at all because the form (idea) of sociating through interchanges among individuals had historically gained visible contour as a way of sociating human being in the world, thus calling on thinking to think this look of being as a possibility of human social being in line with freedom.

One could say that humankind had become strong enough to claim its freedom. Freedom as sociated cannot be thought merely as a possibility of withdrawal into privacy, nor as the individual’s being free to express its capricious will, but only as the freedom, or free-for-all, of the sociating interplay of powers itself, which involves a plurality of players embodying a plurality of wills which nevertheless find room for play with one another in interchanges of all kinds. Classical liberalism has neglected the ontological structure of the interplay of powers in the practical realm of a plurality of wills, and thus the ontological problematic of esteem, estimation, evaluation, validation, recognition, etc. among both human beings and things. In short, like its successor, non-speculative analytic philosophy, it is blind to the ontological difference and to the ontology of whoness in particular. Instead it has imagined the free individual as a subject without a social world, and then tried to derive society from a bunch of atomistic individuals. Human being, however, is always already being-in-the-world, and this means in the present socio-ontological context, that it is being-in-the-social-world through definite forms of sociation.

In the liberal conception, government exists only for the sake of the “life, liberty and estate” of the individual, free members of society; it has no raison d’être in itself nor in a collective entity called a people or a nation. The liberal conception, however, does not include the realization of individual liberty in an interplay of powers as essential to its casting of a “State of Nature”. In doing so, it would have had to take into account that, on the basis of private property, economic interaction unfolds, which is marked essentially by the competitive, uncertain striving to earn a living in the gainful game (cf. Chapter 6.8). The free exchange of goods and services on competitive markets is tantamount to a state of anarchy, or rather, to a state of a polyarchic interplay among free, individual origins of power, which the state is not empowered to quell or interfere with, but only to enable and enhance in its fairness. Anarchy is to be understood here in the strict sense that economic exchange is not governed by a single, unified superior ἀρχή, but emerges from the interplay of self-interested movements of many ἀρχαί (cf. Chapter 5). The term ‘polyarchy’ (cf. Chapter 5.6) is therefore more apt and perhaps less misleading than ‘anarchy’ that is often equated with lawlessness. The ‘anarchy’ that arises from ‘polyarchy’ is not chaos, but a spontaneous ‘playful’ order that orders itself through corrective cybernetic feedback loops transmitted by a multitude of markets that tell the individual players whether their strivings for gain are being esteemed and enjoying success or not.

The state is only legitimately empowered to guarantee the proper forms of intercourse, or rules of play according to which this economic activity takes place and, at the most, to regulate the workings of the markets for the sake of untrammelled interplay for the sake of the economic participants’ well-being by smoothing out its conflicts, frictions and anomalies; it has no legitimation in the liberal conception to set positive aims for itself, since it is regarded as only the facilitator and (negative) guarantor of the individual liberties of the members of society in motion as interplay, based as it is on “the principle that all supreme power must be confined to essentially negative tasks”( Hayek LLL3:149.), and these liberties must only be curtailed insofar as the individual liberties of others are infringed, that is, insofar as the vieing and rivalry of the interplay overstep the bounds of fairness, including endangering the playing of the gainful game itself, especially by undermining the very medium of reified value through which it is played (financial crisis).

The liberal state has no legitimate power to curtail the polyarchic play of a capitalist market economy, to interfere with its metabolism as it happens spontaneously through the individualized, unco-ordinated strivings of the members of civil society, for this would be to quell and constrain the play of individual freedom itself in favour of substantial ends posited by the state itself.231 If happiness is to be attained at all, it must be through the hap and chance of good fortune in the power interplay. This impotence of the state in the face of the play of competitive capitalist markets is felt to be inacceptable by many, including above all those in government, who call for the state to intervene positively to revise the outcome of the free play of exchange in favour of realizing something called the ‘social good’ or (redistributive) ‘social justice’ (cf. Chapter 6.4 and 6.5) that the state itself posits by will. Such a call for intervention amounts to clipping the wings of (the plural interplay of) individual freedom for the sake of a substantial good called ‘social security’, i.e. a secure state of affairs in actualized standing presence, that is achieved through the positings of State power, which is now written with a capital ‘S’ because it has arrogated to itself the status and the power to posit and impose what it thinks best for society, which are substantial aims with which individual citizens may be in agreement or not. As we shall see in Chapter 13, the citizen of a democracy will be free to engage in the political power struggle over what the State posits as its will for the general good. A state of secure welfare of society as a whole in standing presence is to be erected, and this is the aim of politics as opposed to allowing and enabling the fair play of individual freedom in sociating interplay.

The kind of interchange that Locke has in view is principally the contractual exchange of property, which takes place in the striving of individuals to earn a livelihood. We can add the interchanges of all kinds of mutual estimation in which individuals have intercourse with each other and affirm each other in their social standing at least formally as persons, as investigated in Chapter 5.6, and more concretely within the ethos of civility, and more concretely still in the interchanges in which individuals strive for the good of being esteemed by others. The superior power of government exists only232 to ensure fair rules of interplay among individuals, namely, that their personhood be respected and their private property ownership not be infringed. Disputes over property and personal honour among free individuals require an adjudicator who must be equipped with a superior power to be able to arbitrate effectively and pronounce judgement.

The liberal conception of the state could arise historically only within an hermeneutic cast of human being itself as individually free that re-emerged in the modern age with major figures such as Hobbes, Locke and Descartes, but which harks back to Greek philosophy insofar as the questioning and quest for truth in which philosophy engages is itself only possible through the exercise of individual freedom. The casting of human being itself as individually free makes each individual human an ἀρχή, an origin or ‘whence’ (ὅτι) governing its own freedom of movement, a source of power among many, to be exercised freely in the interplay with other free sources of power. This casting of human being casts human beings as free individuals also back onto themselves, so that they have to answer for and rely on themselves through the exercise of their own powers in mutually estimating power plays with others. They can no longer rely on a superior authority to whom they can turn for answers or prescriptions how to live. They also have to care for themselves. The cast of individual freedom pits individuals in competitive, rivalrous play against each other and also allows them to appreciate each others powers, The exercise of individual freedom in power intplay also demands of them insight that they must acknowledge and respect each other as free sources of power, and that this acknowledgement and respect must be guaranteed by a superior adjudicating power, if the power interplay of individual freedom is not to be snuffed out in internecine destruction.

The hermeneutic casting of human being as the free individual is not the metaphysics of modern subjectivity per se, — which is rooted in the traditional ontology of productive movement — precisely because it is thought as a casting of sociating human being that has to think a plurality of free individuals fathomlessly in interplay with one another, which demands another ontology of movement. This goes entirely against the grain of the metaphysics of modern subjectivity with its will to gain certain effective control of all kinds of movement, including sociating movement, through the mathematizing reduction of all that is, both whats and whos (i.e. of whos conceived as whats). The modern individual subject is not of its own positing but is itself an historical, ontological destiny into which we in the West have been cast that has opened up not only through questioning who we are as human beings in our human mode of being, but also in historically practising the usages of free interchange of both goods and thoughts. Moreover, neither the individual human subject nor individual human subjects in a collectivity is the underlying instance in control, but is itself entwined in the uncontrollable, groundless power interplay among a plurality of free human individuals.

The metaphysics of subjectivity, with its still theological orientation toward a supreme principle of will to effective power over all kinds of movement, tacitly adopted by the liberal conception of society and government overlooks not only that the subject always already ‘stands out’ in the world in its ek-sistence, and is therefore embedded in the world and never merely an isolated ego-point, but also that it is always already in the world with others, entangled in the fathomless interplay of a plurality of many subjects, each of whom is (striving to be) somewho and striving for gain. Because the individual human being in what it has depends upon the uncertain, playful metabolism of value-exchanges and because it depends to its core as who it is, i.e. in its worth as somewho, upon mirroring interchanges of recognition and estimation, this takes away the ground from under the feet of the modern, knowing, self-conscious Cartesian subject as the purported bedrock for the metaphysics of modern subjectivity, which is still a variant of productionist metaphysics rather than a metaphysics of groundless interplay.

The problematic of how government can be justified at all and reconciled with the mutually estimative power play of (individual) freedom is a problem not only for a liberal thinking, tacitly rooted as it is in the modern metaphysics of subjectivity that proceeds from a worldless ego. It is a problem for any thinking that confronts itself with the historical possibility of human freedom as social freedom at all, and thus continues as a weighty concern for any genuine philosophical thinking today. Even an anti-liberal thinker such as Heidegger, who undertakes a thorough deconstruction of the metaphysics of subjectivity, can formulate the problem of shared, social being as a problem of freedom, at least in 1928: “Being-together in a genuine relationship of existence is only possible if each co-existing human being can be and is properly him or herself. This freedom of being together with one another, however, presupposes first of all the possibility of self-determination of a being of the character of Dasein, and it is a problem how Dasein as essentially free can exist in the freedom of factically bound togetherness.” (Das Mitsein als eigentliches Existenzverhältnis ist nur so möglich, daß jeder Mitexistierende je eigentlich er selbst sein kann und ist. Diese Freiheit des Miteinander aber setzt die Möglichkeit der Selbstbestimmung eines Seienden vom Charakter des Daseins überhaupt voraus, und es ist ein Problem, wie das Dasein als wesenhaft freies in der Freiheit des faktisch gebundenen Miteinanderseins existieren kann.233) The question of how power of one human being over another can be reconciled with human freedom to cast its own self (which is always an expression of power) remains a moving issue for us in the West for as long as we are not seduced by the yearning for an unquestioning, secure identity into submitting ourselves willingly and wilfully to something greater such as a State, a Nation, a Church, an Ideal, a God, etc.

12.2The totalitarian state as a counter-casting to liberalism – The yearning for a totally controlled “organic construction” at the pinnacle of productionist metaphysics (Ernst Jünger)

One example of a voice opposed to bourgeois, individual freedoms and the associated polyarchic interplay of civil society and a capitalist market economy is provided by Ernst Jünger’s Der Arbeiter (The Worker 1932)234 which has been described by some as “the bible of totalitarianism”.235 It was published at a specific conjuncture in German history, at the turning-point from the collapse of the Weimar Republic to the rise of the National Socialist State, and many readings of Jünger concentrate on this vibrant, unsettled, turbulent historical context. Here, however, the interest is solely in what kind of thinking is contraposed to liberal thinking about society and its government. It is important to get the totalitarian flavour of this strange book. Hence a long quote to start with. According to Jünger, in the bourgeois, liberal conception of civil society,

Gesellschaft ist der Staat, dessen Wesen sich in demselben Grade verwischt, in dem ihn die Gesellschaft ihren Maßen unterwirft. Dieser Angriff findet durch den Begriff der bürgerlichen Freiheit statt, dessen Aufgabe die Umwandlung aller verantwortlichen Bindungen in Vertragsverhältnisse auf Kündigung ist. Im engsten Verhältnis zur Gesellschaft steht endlich der Einzelne, jene wunderliche und abstrakte Figur des Menschen, die kostbarste Entdeckung der bürgerlichen Empfindsamkeit und zugleich der unerschöpfliche Gegenstand ihrer künstlerischen Bildungskraft. Wie die Menschheit der Kosmos dieser Vorstellung, so ist der Mensch ihr Atom. Praktisch allerdings sieht der Einzelne sich nicht der Menschheit gegenüber, sondern der Masse, seinem genauen Spiegelbilde in dieser höchst sonderbaren, höchst imaginären Welt. Denn die Masse und der Einzelne sind eins, und aus dieser Einheit ergibt sich das verblüffende Doppelbild von buntester, verwirrendster Anarchie und der nüchternen Geschäftsordnung der Demokratie, welches das Schauspiel eines Jahrhunderts war. Es gehört aber zu den Kennzeichen einer neuen Zeit, daß in ihr die bürgerliche Gesellschaft, gleichviel ob sie ihren Freiheitsbegriff in der Masse oder im Individuum zur Darstellung bringen möge, zum Tode verurteilt ist. (Arb. p. 23)

society is the state whose essence is blurred to the same degree in which society subjects the state to its yardsticks. This attack takes place through the concept of bourgeois/civil freedom whose task is the transformation of all ties of responsibility into contractual relations subject to termination at any time. In the closest of relations with society stands ultimately the individual, that strange, abstract human figure, the most precious discovery of bourgeois sensibility and at the same time the inexhaustible object of its artistic formative power. Just as humanity is the cosmos for this idea, the human individual is its atom. Practically, however, the individual is not confronted with humanity but with the masses, its precise mirror image in this highly strange, highly imaginary world, for the masses and the individual are one, and from this unity results the perplexing double image of the most motley, confusing anarchy and the sober standing orders of democracy which [double image] has been the theatrical spectacle of a century. But it is one of the hallmarks of a new age that in it, civil society, no matter whether it prefers to present its concept of freedom in the form of the masses or the individual, is condemned to death.

According to Jünger, this bourgeois or civil society is “condemned to death”. By whose agency? Through the rise of “the Gestalt of the worker” (die Gestalt des Arbeiters, Arb. p. 89) which, as a Gestalt of “being” (Sein, Arb. p. 92) representing a “mastery of the world” (Meisterung der Welt, Arb. p. 89) through “the emergence of a new principle to be designated as labour” (das Auftreten eines neuen Prinzips, das als Arbeit bezeichnet werden soll, Arb. p. 89), is destined to shape the world anew in a “total mobilization” (Totale Mobilmachung, Arb. p. 40). “The total work character, however, is the way in which the Gestalt of the worker begins to permeate the world.” (Der totale Arbeitscharakter aber ist die Art und Weise, in der die Gestalt des Arbeiters die Welt zu durchdringen beginnt. Arb. p. 103) Society will then be composed of workers from bottom to top.

The inevitable emergence of the Gestalt of the worker signifies for Jünger the rise of a “metaphysical power” (metaphysische Macht, Arb. p. 119) which “as technology, mobilizes matter” (die als Technik die Materie mobilisiert, Arb. p. 119). This metaphysically underpinned historical prediction is expressed in the form of a critique of the bourgeois individual and civil society according to which the bourgeois conception of the state attacks the latter’s true essence by subjecting it to its own “yardsticks”, namely, the form of contractual intercourse which can provide no basis for the state because the contractual form of intercourse purportedly lacks that binding tie of responsibility which the state needs. Jünger is proposing instead something solid and binding and also does not refrain from expressing some ironic contempt for “bourgeois sensibility”. The abstractness of the “strange, abstract human figure” is due to the atomistic nature of civil society composed as it is of private individuals, each with their own individual interests and strivings which result in a “motley, confusing anarchy” (which elsewhere in this study I call the power interplay of free individuals in civil society) that is apparently antipathetic for Jünger, lacking the unity of a single, superior state will that is truly in control. The bourgeois individual with its associations and parties, which is a merely “abstract figure” of the human, is to be replaced by workers inserted into “organic constructions” (organische Konstruktionen, Arb. p. 119) which presumably allow humans to become more concrete and rooted:

Einer organischen Konstruktion gehört man nicht durch individuellen Willensentschluß, also durch Ausübung eines Aktes der bürgerlichen Freiheit, sondern durch eine tatsächliche Verflechtung an, die der spezielle Arbeitscharakter bestimmt. So ist es, um ein banales Beispiel zu wählen, ebenso leicht, in eine Partei einzutreten oder aus ihr auszutreten, wie es schwierig ist, aus Verbandsarten auszutreten, denen man etwa als Empfänger von elektrischen Strom angehört. (Arb. p. 119f)

One does not belong to an organic construction through an individual decision of will, that is, by exercising an act of civil freedom, but through a factual involvement which the particular work character determines. To take a banal example, it is just as easy to join or leave a party as it is difficult to leave those kinds of association to which one belongs, say, as the recipient of electricity.

The “banal example” is in fact telling, because the ease with which consumers can change their electricity supplier is in fact a basic feature of bourgeois, capitalist market interplay, including a multiplicity of competing electricity suppliers. Jünger apparently wants individuals to be bound organically through responsibility and objective ties into a larger, unified, controlled whole and to be unable to exercise their merely individual will. A larger, more encompassing, totalizing will and central power is obviously envisaged to which individual will can only submit. The totality is particularized, into its particular organs into which individual workers are inserted. The economy itself, Jünger predicts, will not remain untouched by the rise of the Gestalt of the worker:

Der geheime Sinn jedes Wirtschaftskampfes unserer Zeit läuft darauf hinaus, die Wirtschaft auch in ihrer Totalität in den Rang einer organischen Konstruktion zu erheben, als welche sie der Initiative sowohl des isolierten als auch des en masse auftretenden Individuums entzogen ist. Dies kann aber erst geschehen, wenn der Menschenschlag, der sich in anderen Formen als in diesen gar nicht begreifen kann, ausgestorben oder zum Aussterben gezwungen worden ist. (Arb. p. 120f)

The secret meaning of every economic struggle of our time amounts to elevating the economy even in its totality to the status of an organic construction which as such is withdrawn from the initiative not only of the isolated individual but also of individuals appearing en masse. But this can only happen once the human type or breed of humans who cannot conceive of themselves at all in anything but in these terms has become extinct or has been forced into extinction.

The elevation of the economy to “the status of an organic construction” is the same totalizing aim of history envisaged by revolutionary socialism in which individual initiative is to be extinguished in favour of total state economic control, the pinnacle of a productionist metaphysical conception in the socio-political realm. The bourgeois individual with its individual civil liberties and entwined in interplay is to be replaced by the “type” of the worker, which is the stamp which the metaphysical Gestalt of the worker imprints upon a new “race” or “breed of humans” or “human type” (Menschenschlag, Arb. p. 295), where race “has nothing to do with biological concepts of race” (mit biologischen Rassebegriffen nichts zu schaffen hat, p. 152). The forced “extinction” of the bourgeois individual and its individual freedom signals political repression and violence. The “type” of the worker is the “impression of the Gestalt” (Abdruck der Gestalt, Arb. p. 151) and “one must make an effort to see through the steely and human masks of the times to surmise the Gestalt, the metaphysics which moves them” (..., muß man sich allerdings bemühen, durch die stählernen und menschlichen Masken der Zeit hindurchzusehen, um die Gestalt, die Metaphysik, zu erraten, die sie bewegt. Arb. p. 130). In the transformation of all collectivity into “organic constructions” within a “genuine state” (im echten Staat, Arb. p. 264) lies the totalitarian streak in Jünger’s conception, since “the type knows no dictatorship because for it freedom and obedience are identical” (Der Typus kennt keine Diktatur, weil Freiheit und Gehorsam für ihn identisch sind. Arb. p. 151).

In contrast to the liberal conception of freedom in which the bourgeois individual is guaranteed freedom from interference by others, including above all by the state, thus enabling the ongoing, fathomless power interplay that is civil society, the rise of the Gestalt of the worker signifies “another kind of conception of freedom, for which rule and service are synonymous, [and which ME] is to be melted down into the state as the most important and most comprehensive means of change” (...ein andersartiger Freiheitsbegriff, dem Herrschaft und Dienst gleichbedeutend sind, in den Staat als das wichtigste und umfassendste Mittel der Veränderung eingeschmolzen werden soll. Arb. p. 247). Jünger’s totalitarian conception of “freedom” does away with mere individual freedom, which is merely “bourgeois”. In this totalitarian conception of “freedom” as synonymous with “obedience”, the individual in its singularity is a priori welded or ‘closed together’ with the universality of the totality, i.e. singularity is eliminated through a sham identification that has extinguished all contradiction, all gainsaying. This is the kind of language familiar also from Marxism, Stalinism and Maoism. Freedom of the individual from the state is denounced as a sham and becomes freedom to serve and obey the state to which the worker belongs in a totalitarian identity as part of an “organic construction” that provides room for difference only through the controlled particularization of the totality. Unlike the bourgeois individual, which is said to be the product of “abstract reason” and “virtue”, and who finds its place in the totality through playing in the competitive interplay, the worker as type is said to be the embodiment of “purely elementary currents” (rein elementaren Strömungen, Arb. p. 255) and “instinct” (Instinkt, Arb. p. 265, a Nietzschean term); indeed, in the case of the German people, it is said to “possess a sure instinct for command and obedience” (einen sicheren Instinkt für Befehl und Gehorsam besitzt, Arb. p. 263).

Another way of putting this is to say that the German people is the Western people most ‘thoroughly’ (gründlich) enamoured with productivist metaphysics’ ideal of total control and a correlative abhorrence of free interplay of individual powers. The irony of Heidegger’s critique of the Gestell (set-up) as the essence of modern technology is that the German people itself is the people par excellence of the set-up, even and especially to the extent of transferring the mathematico-technological way of thinking of the modern sciences to the setting-up of society itself as a Gestell for caring for and thus ruling over a people. This is so even and especially today in the much-applauded sozialstaatlichen Gestell, when the Germans are supposedly now become a free, democratic people. Heidegger’s notorious remark that “agriculture is now motorized food industry, in its essence the same as the fabrication of corpses in gas chambers and extermination camps” (Ackerbau ist jetzt motorisierte Ernährungsindustrie, im Wesen das Selbe wie die Fabrikation von Leichen in Gaskammern und Vernichtungslagern, ‘Das Ge-Stell’ GA79:27) has a special significance for a people so lacking an historical instinct for freedom and whose estimated standing in historical time is indelibly sullied by its mass murdering in the gas chambers of the Second World War.

In 1932, Heidegger, who enthusiastically, energetically, but also critically, took up Jünger’s book when it first appeared at that time, characterizes “liberalism” (in the form of Neo-Kantianism which “is tailored to liberalism”) similarly as a way of thinking in which the “human essence was dissolved into a free-floating consciousness in general and this ultimately thinned into a universal logical world-reason”, thus “deflecting the view from humans in their historical rootedness and the folk-bound tradition of their origins in soil and blood” (Das Wesen des Menschen wurde da [im Neukantianismus, der “dem Liberalismus auf den Leib zugeschnitten ist”,] aufgelöst in ein freischwebendes Bewußtsein überhaupt und dieses schließlich verdünnt zu einer allgemein logischen Weltvernunft. Auf diesem Weg wurde unter scheinbar streng wissenschaftlicher philosophischer Begründung der Blick abgelenkt vom Menschen in seiner geschichtlichen Verwurzelung und in seiner volkhaften Überlieferung seiner Herkunft aus Boden und Blut.236). There is a swipe in this passage at modern philosophical thinking from Descartes through to Kant and even Hegel (Weltvernunft). Ironically, Hegel is here classified as a liberal. Let us return to Der Arbeiter.

There is a yearning in Jünger for an identity in totality, a longing for overcoming τὰ πολλά in τὸ ἕν, i.e. the many in the one, in which “bourgeois”, individual will and freedom are suppressed and extirpated:

Viele Anzeichen lassen erkennen, daß wir vor den Pforten eines Zeitalters stehen, in dem wieder von wirklicher Herrschaft, von Ordnung und Unterordnung, von Befehl und Gehorsam die Rede sein kann. Keines dieser Anzeichen spricht deutlicher als die freiwillige Zucht, der die Jugend sich zu unterwerfen beginnt, ihre Verachtung der Genüsse, ihr krie-gerischer Sinn, ihr erwachendes Gefühl für männliche und unbedingte Wertungen. (Arb. p. 246)

There are many signs indicating that we stand at the gateway of an age in which one can again speak of genuine domination, of order and subordination, of command and obedience. None of these signs speaks more plainly than the voluntary discipline to which the youth is beginning to subject itself, its contempt for enjoyment, its warlike intent, its growing sense for manly and absolute values.

What is interesting here is not Jünger’s prediction (and whether it has been fulfilled), nor simply his political views, nor merely his authoritarian, militarist, masculinist language, nor even the fact that he “welcomes this work” (wir begrüßen diese Arbeit, Arb. p. 307) on the historical emergence on the Gestalt of the worker, but, firstly, the purported metaphysical underpinnings of the entire work, Der Arbeiter, and secondly, in what way Der Arbeiter is to be understood as a decisive, totalitarian answer to the bourgeois, liberal conception of freedom and the corresponding liberal conception of state.

As has been shown, the liberal conception of state is that government is based on the consent of the individual members of society to subject themselves to a superior power for the sake of protecting the individual’s “life, liberty and estate” and hence the interplay of powers that is the metabolism of civil society enabled by the æther of fair play in the medium of reified value as investigated in previous chapters.

The metaphysical, i.e. onto-theological, Gestalt of the worker is not only an answer and retort to “that anarchic-individualist element which is characteristic of all the formations of liberalism” (jenes anarchisch-individualistische Element [...], das allen Bildungen des Liberalismus eigentümlich ist. Arb. p. 252), but is also the constitution of a unified totality in which the singularity of the individual is suppressed, extinguished, absorbed into and made congruent with the universal whole through relations of subservience and obedience that insert the individual into its particular slot in the organic totality. This figure of a diremption or disjunction between singularity and universality or the individual and the state as the governing instance of society, and the overcoming of this diremption, runs throughout the entire political philosophical thinking of the modern age. Jünger resolves it by pronouncing, in militaristic fashion, obedience to a totalitarian state to be freedom itself in a simple, non-dialectical identity. The final act of individual freedom is thus the individual’s ‘free’ submission to total state rule, its binding commitment to a superior, authoritarian will.

What is the metaphysical origin of the diremption between the individual and the state? It lies in the essence of human sociation itself which, as laid out in detail in preceding chapters, resides ultimately in the mutually estimating power interplay among whos, and therefore requires an explicit socio-ontology of whoness to come into clear focus. Already the elementary form of practical sociation represented by exchange of goods (if we leave to one side the ontologically more fundamental interplay of estimation among individuals), as has been shown in the pivotal Chapter 5, depends on the concurrence of two governing starting-points, which may be considered as two individuals who are free in the sense that the exchange only takes place if the two individual wills concur. Exchange is an-archic in the sense that it does not have a single ἀρχή, but two, and is thus ‘bi-archic’. A market economy has myriad initiating starting-points for economic action through exchange and is thus in the literal sense ‘polyarchic’ or ‘multiarchic’.

A single ἀρχή in sociating interplay can only be achieved if one ἀρχή submits to the other, allowing it to command. The relation of command and obedience is the alternative elementary ontological paradigm for human sociation (cf. Hegel’s dialectic of master and servant, Chapter 11.1) complementing the elementary ontological paradigm of exchange interplay of powers. Submission reinstitutes a single ἀρχή, for the one submitting is no longer a free starting-point of its own self-movement but only an extension of the other, commanding ἀρχή. This power relation results in social hierarchy in which there are those who wield power and those who submit to it and are therefore nominally ‘powerless’ (but in truth are only repressed). The word ‘hierarchy’ comes from Greek ἱεραρχία meaning ‘the power to rule of a high priest’, derived from ἱερός and ἀρχή, hence ‘super-human, divine, wonderful, holy rule’, but today the word has a completely secular signification. Hierarchy is a model, an ontological mode, of human sociation which allows a single ἀρχή to rule through a chain of command and obedience, and thus it engenders order and predictability as long as subordinates obey (or can be enticed or coerced to obey).

The liberal conception of society concedes that the form of sociating interplay represented by exchange is not sufficient for the constitution of society and that there is thus the necessity for government, which can be regarded as a kind of superior ἀρχή for the whole of society that is to guarantee and enforce only its forms of intercourse, its formal rules of competitive power interplay as fair rules of play. The driving motive of liberalism, however, is to keep the necessity for rule and all sorts of hierarchy to a minimum in order to preserve and enable as much as possible the many ἀρχαί of initiating individuals as the multiple, free, governing starting-points for social interplay. For this reason, in liberal thinking, individuals have to consent to and have insight into the necessity of being ruled, thus insofar relinquishing their individual freedom. This, however, does not amount to overcoming the diremption between singularity and universality, the individual and the state, but only their power-playful mediation. Rule is consented to only insofar as it preserves and ensures the forms of intercourse of exchange and the interplay of mutual estimation. Social freedom itself is only possible socio-ontologically as this interplay of powers.

At the other end of the spectrum, authoritarian thinkers such as Jünger and Heidegger make the case for or are inclined to the paradigm of hierarchy as the mode of sociation since hierarchy creates a consistent, orderly, precalculable social whole governed by a unified superior will, an admired ‘strong hand’, which is therefore, apparently, more capable of acting in a unified way. Individual consent to and insight into the necessity of being ruled is replaced by the call to subordination and obedience, to commitment and obligation, and freedom itself is seen to lie in the act of submission to a superior, commanding will, a ‘necessity’ spuriously opposed to the alleged ‘mere caprice’ of individual freedom. Authoritarian thinkers therefore invariably express admiration for organizations such as the military or the Roman Catholic Church which is a highly successful historical example of hierarchical sociation in a literal sense, since in this organization it is truly the ‘high priests’ who rule by virtue of embodying holy, divine, unified truth. The Pope’s supposed infallibility with respect to the one, unified, revealed truth goes hand in hand with super-human, holy, divine rule by authority. For many, such unity and submission are seen as remedies to a splintering of truth whose tensions and contradictions are experienced as insufferable (cf. Chapter 10.6).

When Jünger claims that the Gestalt of the worker is emerging as a shaping metaphysical force, he is expressly delineating another hermeneutic cast of being, for otherwise the worker’s Gestalt would not be metaphysical; it would not be a shape of “being” (Sein, Arb. p. 92). A cast of being is always totalizing, encompassing the totality of beings and how the world opens up, presenting itself in its truth within historical time. The singular individual, the germ of the bourgeois form of society and of civil liberty, is to be dissolved in this new cast of the beingness of beings, which is also a cast of mind, and absorbed into an authoritarian totality in which the state commands its people.

The bourgeois individual is a private individual, i.e. it is withdrawn from the realm of the state and maintains an independence and freedom which the bourgeois-liberal state cannot legitimately touch, and it practises a self-reliance and self-responsibility in competitive interplay, in which it exercises its powers, which the bourgeois-liberal state is bound to only encourage, support and facilitate with fair rules of play that the state is obliged to posit and enforce as law. In its legally guaranteed private sphere the bourgeois individual thus deprives the state of control, mastery and command which, however, Jünger predicts will give way to “the possibility of new, terrible invasions of the state into the private sphere which are afoot under the mask of hygienic and social care” (die Möglichkeit neuer, furchtbarer Einbrüche des Staates in die private Sphäre, die unter der Maske der hygienischen und sozialen Fürsorge im Anzuge sind. Arb. p. 107). Private property, which likewise essentially characterizes the bourgeois individual, also represents a limitation and deprivation of state control and command which, however, will no longer be respected. The thin end of the wedge in this process that erodes individual freedom and its private sphere, thus effectively dissolving liberalism, is the care which the state provides for its citizens in the name of public health, social welfare (including especially healthcare) and (redistributive) social justice. Private property will be subordinated to the exigencies and requirements of the total, organic work-plan.

Es gehört zu den Kennzeichen des liberalen Denkstils, daß sowohl die Angriffe auf das Eigentum wie seine Rechtfertigungen sich auf einer ethischen Grundlage vollziehen. In der Arbeitswelt handelt es sich jedoch nicht darum, ob die Tatsache des Eigentums sittlich oder unsittlich ist, sondern lediglich darum, ob sie im Arbeitsplan unterzubringen ist. (Arb. p. 288)

One of the hallmarks of the liberal style of thinking is that both attacks against and justifications of property take place on an ethical foundation. In the work world, however, it is not a matter of whether the fact of property is ethical or unethical, but solely of whether it can be incorporated into the work-plan.

The total work-state regards private property in a purely functional way according to its appropriateness and efficiency for total mobilization. Ethical considerations of justice and the preservation of individual freedom are dispensed with as lacking substance, as ontological figments. In this totalitarian cast of social being, technical, functional, efficiency considerations of “objective connections” (sachliche Zusammenhänge, Arb. pp. 127, 147) under the totalizing command of the state gain predominance. The total, organic construction of the state with its particularized functional organs and workers with their “rational and technical masks” (den rationalen und technischen Masken, Arb. p. 127) must work coldly and efficiently. Efficiency replaces individual freedom as criterion.

Somewhat paradoxically, the total control and calculability of the work-plan which are to overcome and replace the anarchy of markets and competition are supposed to be compatible with establishing “a new relationship with the elemental” (ein neues Verhältnis zum Elementaren, Arb. p. 48) which has two faces: “the world, which is always dangerous” (die Welt, die immer gefährlich ist, Arb. p. 52) and “the human heart, which longs for games and adventures, for hate and love, for triumphs and falls, which feels a need just as much for danger as for security” (im menschlichen Herzen, / das sich nach Spielen und Abenteuern, nach Haß und Liebe, nach Triumphen und Abstürzen sehnt, das sich der Gefahr ebenso bedürftig fühlt wie der Sicherheit, Arb. p. 52f). The bourgeois individual, by contrast, is said to be incapable of these elemental extremes and instead “acknowledges security as a highest value and determines its way of living accordingly” (... der Bürger, [...] der die Sicherheit als einen höchsten Wert erkennt und demgemäß seine Lebensführung bestimmt. Arb. p. 50).

The bourgeois individual, Jünger claims, has no inner urge to risk danger, i.e. to enter into uncertain power interplays. Instead, it endeavours to achieve an “ideal state of security” through a “world dominion of bourgeois reason which is supposed not only to diminish the sources of danger but ultimately to dry them up” (Der ideale Zustand der Sicherheit [...] besteht in der Weltherrschaft der bürgerlichen Vernunft, die die Quellen des Gefährlichen nicht nur vermindern, sondern zuletzt auch zum Versiegen bringen soll. Arb. p. 51). This striving of bourgeois reason is said to be apparent in “the comprehensive set-up of an insurance system through which not only the risks of foreign and domestic politics, but also those of private life are to be evenly distributed and thus subordinated to reason, in strivings in which one tries to dissolve destiny by means of probability calculations” (im umfassenden Aufbau eines Versicherungssystems, durch das nicht nur das Risiko der äußeren und inneren Politik, sondern auch das des privaten Lebens gleichmäßig verteilt und damit der Vernunft unterstellt werden soll — in Bestrebungen, in denen man das Schicksal durch die Wahrscheinlichkeitsrechnung aufzulösen sucht. Arb. p. 51).

But precisely the longing and striving for social security, and perhaps also a secure, functional social identity, could be said to be a hallmark of the “totalitarian social welfare state” (totalitärer Sozialstaat, Otto Graf Lambsdorff) whether it be erected on a capitalist base or not. Jünger’s “heroic realism” with its closeness to the elemental seeks out the challenge of danger and has nothing but contempt for the attempts of bourgeois reason to make risk and danger calculable for the bourgeois individual. Ironically, it is precisely the bourgeois individual, and especially the great or small entrepreneurial bourgeois individual, that is prepared to accept the risky challenges and tough competitive fights of the polyarchy of the markets and the dangers and incalculable risks of competition which, in ever-new and surprising constellations of play that recur at irregular intervals, can mean bankruptcy and financial ruin. Even the existence of insurance companies and probability calculations does not rid the capitalist economic system of risk and danger, but at most contains it, so much so, that the economic annihilation of participants in a capitalist economy, both individual and corporate, is a normal, recurring phenomenon of capitalism, often lamented and criticized as ‘inhuman’. In being responsible for itself, the individual must seek its own way through the maze of market exchanges and power plays. The risk-averse bourgeois individual (who tends to seek shelter under the state’s all-encompassing umbrella) is such precisely because the world is essentially risky in its individualized forms of the sociating interplay of powers.

Not even “bourgeois reason” is able to master this risk, even though it may delude itself that this is somehow possible, say, through the models of economic theory. Nor can it be mastered by technology, since the sociating movement of human beings brings the fathomless, unpredictable interplay of freedom into play. Nor can even the social welfare state provide the rock-solid social security it promises if it ignores the continually changing challenges of a world market economy. Jünger does not see, or simply despises, the dangers that lie essentially within a way of life based on uncertain market exchanges and civil interchanges. Nor, at the other pole, does he consider the security of existence and identity that resides in obeying and serving a totalitarian state. Instead, he remarks contemptuously that “the citizen has almost succeeded in persuading the adventurous heart that danger does not exist at all and that an economic law rules the world and its history” (Fast ist es dem Bürger gelungen, das abenteuerliche Herz davon zu überzeugen, daß das Gefährliche gar nicht vorhanden ist und daß ein ökonomisches Gesetz die Welt und ihre Geschichte regiert. Arb. p. 55). This is a curious, self-contradictory remark, considering that the “economic law” of capitalism is market “anarchy” which very well provides room for an “adventurous heart” to risk danger, whereas the totalitarian state promises the abolition of the uncertainties and incalculabilities arising from individual freedoms and also the secure identification of the singular individual with its function within the organic totalitarian whole.

In Jünger’s cast of a world conforming to the metaphysical Gestalt of the worker that overcomes the “lack of totality” (Mangel an Totalität, Arb. p. 156), “the total work-character [...] is the way in which the Gestalt of the worker begins to permeate the world” (Der totale Arbeitscharakter aber ist die Art und Weise, in der die Gestalt des Arbeiters die Welt zu durchdringen beginnt. Arb. p. 103) and “technology is the way in which the Gestalt of the worker mobilizes the world” (Die Technik ist die Art und Weise, in der die Gestalt des Arbeiters die Welt mobilisiert. Arb. p. 156). The total work-character of the world and technology as the means for total mobilization of the world thus go hand in hand in Jünger’s conception. What is removed is the adventure of the free interplay of singular, individual human powers.

Totalization is thought here as total control and calculability on the basis of a total work-plan, and technology is regarded as the means par excellence for exercising total control. But it is doubtful whether the totalization of the work-character of human existence has to assume the form of total control and whether technology is the appropriate ultimate means for total mobilization of the world. For, the totalization of work as mode of living conforms to the way in which the movement of capital itself in its striving for profit, as one major moment in the overall striving for gain, mobilizes the world in its totality without, however, such totalization requiring or allowing total control and calculability, since not only does capital’s movement of self-augmentation always have to contend essentially with the incalculability of interplay, but the very movement of self-augmentation under entrepreneurial leadership is stimulated by incalculability in the guise of competitive struggle. Moreover, technology itself is only a (productivity-enhancing) means for capital in its competitive, ‘playful’ striving to which the totalitarian state with its striving for total control is antithetical.

Can a totalitarian state do better than competitive capitalism in achieving efficiency in the deployment of technology? Capital employs technology as a means to increase productivity and thus enhance the chances of its self-augmentation. Each capital is particular and exposed to the uncertainties of the (world) market, so that the results achieved in the striving for profit feed back into the way the capital can and does act, finding and re-finding its niche in the totality. Moreover, each individual economic agent is motivated by the incentive of individual gain and is mobilized thus to form part of the power-playful totality of capitalist economic activity. Such total mobilization does not require the identification of the worker (now conceived as encompassing all the capitalist economic agents right up to chief executive officers) with the state in a total organic construction demanding subservience and obedience.

Rather, on the contrary, it can even be questioned whether obedience is an adequate, efficient form for total mobilization237 since it requires that individuals deny and suppress their individuality (and individual initiative) and instead subjugate themselves to serving an explicitly authoritarian hierarchy, with all its inevitable inertia, friction and inefficiency, strangely called “work-democracy” (Arbeitsdemokratie, Arb. pp. 268, 270, 271) in which “the breakthrough from work as a kind of life to life-style takes place” (vollzieht sich der Durchbruch von der Arbeit als Lebensart zum Lebensstil. Arb. p. 270). Such self-denial and suppression of individual interest and initiative re-emerges surreptitiously in phenomena such as lassitude and corruption which are only the reverse side of the coin to obedience and the willingness to serve. Or does Jünger, like many other totalitarian thinkers on the left or right, envisage that the “new breed” of worker-humans will have overcome petty individuality? It can also be asked whether it is not precisely bourgeois capitalism within which work becomes a kind of “life-style”.

Totalitarian thinking, exemplified here by Jünger, is characterized by a suppression and elimination of individual will and individual freedom in favour of a total “organic” construction of command and obedience. This is a crude and violent ‘solution’ to how singularity could be mediated with universality. In Jünger’s cast of the worker, there is still room for an elite of mandarins, a kind of latter-day aristocracy consisting of the ‘best’ who have the task not so much of obeying and serving, but of leading and commanding. Intellectuals proposing totalitarianism and enamoured with totalitarian solutions of social unity invariably count themselves among this commanding elite rather than on the side of the willingly subjugated.