Ten Books Required to Understand the Modern World, Part I

When I got back on Twitter last time (incognito) I posted a list of ten books that I said were required to understand the modern world. Recently, on a stream with AA, this list came up and people asked for it in the comments, so I will share it again and elaborate on the choices.

There are of course more than ten books required to understand the modern world. My goal in sharing this list originally was to shine a light on some valuable lesser-known texts. Some of them, like Filmer and Maistre, are correctives for perennial bad ideas; others, like the Dictionary of IE Concepts, are ostensibly for specialists in a narrow field, but have wider implications that deserve to be brought to light; some are just good pieces of art with political implications—some are all of these.

1) The Ancient City (Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges):

I can count on one hand the books that marked a turning point in my development and this is one of them. I found Ancient City in a dusty old list of ultra-royalist texts, and didn’t think much about it but downloaded the PDF and filed it away. Then one day I was essentially forced to read it by circumstances, as I was at an isolated post when the power went out for a few hours. So I cracked it open, and by the time the power came back on I had been changed.

On the face if it, Ancient City is not that revolutionary of a text. The basic thesis of it is that the shape of the classical world and its historical developments are to be explained not by material or economic or so-called “mystical” factors (we will return to this), but by religion. But this is not just any religion. It is not even the paganism you’re familiar with as the worship of Zeus and Jupiter. It’s something much older and deeper than that.

The originary Aryan social order was the family, and this family was a society unto itself. Its constitutive principle was a shared worship, and the worship was of the line of fathers reaching back to the high gods. The father of the family was the high-priest—he presided over the rites he had received from his fathers. He was the supreme magistrate—he alone judged members of the family and could even pronounce death on them. And he was the sole proprietor—no one in the family owned anything but through him. This is the ultimate patriarchy, to a degree that makes even the most hardcore dissident blush.

What’s more, the religion had very little in the way of dogma or propositional content. This is not to say “do what thou wilt”—quite the reverse. These people were concerned with ritual exactitude to a degree that we can hardly grasp. Take as an example the multi-day Roman festival that had to be repeated because someone zigged when they should have zagged. Think also of the Greeks drawing up for battle, where even with the enemy bearing down, the sign to attack would not be given until the sheep entrails had arranged themselves just so. This was exactly the opposite of antinomianism, and in fact, it was the introduction of propositionality that opened the door for lawlessness. This was a command-based religion—the spirit counted for very little, the letter for everything. The ultimate traditionalism.

Of necessity, two families could have no socio-religious relation to one another, except if in tracing the line of worshipped fathers both families met a common ancestor. This made them part of a clan, and the eldest¹ father among the family heads the clan chieftain. No two clans could have relations except that they shared a yet remoter ancestor, with the eldest clan head being the tribal chieftain. At one further level of remove doing the same genealogy, we reach the “ancient city”, the city-states of antiquity. At no stage was anything like mass immigration thinkable; at even a late time it was nigh impossible to become an Athenian citizen. At every stage the boundaries between citizen and foreigner, family and enemy, one property and the next, were perfectly clear. If you should accidentally drive your ox into the boundary stone of a neighbour, the punishment was immolation²—that’s how seriously these people took keeping shit separate. We have here the ultimate nationalism.

This is the Tyrrhic in its primordial strength and vigor. Everything exoteric, all rooted to the earth, all ancient, venerable, and light. For most of us, when we think of right-wing, we think of this Tyrrhism. Nothing could be more right-wing than the vision presented in Coulanges’ Ancient City. And yet, all things must pass. How could this be so? How could the most patriarchal, the most traditionalist, the most ethnonationalist social order die? This book has many lessons for understanding the modern world.

2) Mitra-Varuna (Georges Dumézil)

As with Coulanges’ Ancient City, the thesis of this book is much narrower than its implications. It’s not often that a work of comparative mythology has concrete applications in the modern world, but such is the power of Dumézil’s Mitra-Varuna.

In it, Dumézil uses comparative evidence to draw out a conception of sovereignty common to the Indo-European world and thus ancient. He begins by noticing the parallels between the Romans and Indians. The Romans had essentially two classes of public religious figure: a) the Luperci who presided over the Lupercalia, and b) the flamines who presided over the state cult—he then draws parallels between these and the Gandharva/brahmins in the East. The Lupercalia was an extremely archaic annual festival that involved unruly and bloody fertility rites of an esoteric nature which connected it to the traditional founders Romulus and Remus; the Luperci were youths who formed an initiatic war band, carrying out these bizarre rites and wearing animal disguises—the parallels with the Germanic wolf-cults are clear, as with the Indian Gandharva. The state cult, on the other hand, was the centre of the religious life of the city, which was carried out by a priestly couple, the rex-flamen. This was what most Romans would encounter in everyday life, and which provided a sense of stability, continuity, and social cohesion. The two are oppositional, though not antagonistic—the Luperci appear only one day a year, the flamines daily; the flamines represent divine order, the Luperci divine disorder; the flamines are radically familiar, the Luperci radically other. Above all, the Luperci represent speed and violence (celeritas), the flamines majesty and solemnity (gravitas). The Luperci are the type of the magician-king, the flamines that of the jurist-priest.

This dichotomy runs through notions of sovereignty throughout the various Indo-European branches. I have already drawn out some of the political implications of this framework in my article The Odinic vs. the Tyrrhic, so I will refer you there for those. This book, when read a little below the surface (and there is a lot below the surface), reveals itself to be the ultimate work of political theology, exhaustively describing our social reality from the Bronze Age to now. It is of course more than that—it is a set of theological categories which have political implications, not a set of political categories. I hope to draw out more of the theological implications of this framework in the future if I ever get time to write a book between all the other things IP demands.

3) Metacritique on the Purism of Reason (Johann Georg Hamann)

Many of the worst aspects of the modern world can be traced back to the Enlightenment, and so it’s comforting to learn that the centrepiece of Enlightenment epistemology, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, was roundly refuted shortly after it was published. Discomforting, though, to see that definitive refutation was not enough to stop it—but if we had read Vico we might not be surprised.

Kant’s Critique is not all bad; he was essentially a kind of conservative trying to rein in the excesses of the Enlightenment and to place it on secure footing—he wanted to “make room for faith” by describing the limits of reason. Hamann won’t even let him have that. Turns out your reason is a fuck of a lot more limited than you thought.

Anyone who has argued with someone too in love with reason has met with the Enlightenment Trump Card—b-but-but-BUT… aren’t you using reason to critique reason?? *tips fedora*—even venerable figures like Maistre are susceptible. Hamann ain’t having any of that shit—he offers a critique of critique (a metacritique) by means not entirely critical. He doesn’t accept reason’s frame; he uses non-rational terms to undermine the very notion of critique. His is an, if not purely, then ultimately, performative argument—he makes you look like a retard by your standards, not his.