The Anglo and His Destiny, Part I
Ancient Precedents for a Folk in Crisis
I’m never quite sure how my takes are going to land. Sometimes, I find that what I see as my most basic, obvious takes end up being the most controversial. This might be one of those.
I recently went on Academic Agent’s Cigar Stream to discuss a series of articles starting with this one about whether the left will indeed be able to “put woke away”. In this article, Anacyclosis comes up, the Polybian view of cyclical history which owes something to Plato, and which was influential on Spengler and others. On the Cigar Stream we touched on exactly where in the cycle we are today, but only at the end of the stream and very incompletely. This article will lay this out in some detail.
Polybius says there are three essential forms of government, the traditional Aristotelian forms: rule by one, rule by a few, and rule by many. In healthy times these manifest as kingship, aristocracy, and democracy respectively, although each is less healthy than the last. However, as each ages and deteriorates, it enters into a pathological state—these are tyranny, oligarchy, and mob rule respectively. The pathological state gives way to the next form in its youth and strength, until mob rule crashes the whole thing and the cycle starts again with a new civilization.1
Some form of this is accepted by many people of cultivated common sense who are not progressives. And among them, it’s generally agreed that we’re somewhere quite late in the game, well into the democracy phase and verging on mob rule. In Spenglerian terms, winter is coming, and the age of Caesar looms. The civilizational “we” in question is typically “the modern West” which tends to be America and her empire. I think this is a mistake, and we would do much better to think of America as a continuation of, not a break from, England. When we do, many things become clear—and most worryingly, we find out that we are much deeper into winter than we thought.