The Restoration of Political Science, Restored.

Finally at long last, and for the very first time in history, the complete English-language translation of the first and most important volume is available now.

THE hour has come. What was lost, is now found; who was last, is now first; and Haller’s immortal science of politics has been restored to its rightful place at the forefront of all truly serious social critique and debate about the problems and prospects we face as the vaunted Liberal experiment in so-called “democracy” reaches its natural terminus. It has finally been rescued and resuscitated from the near-total oblivion to which it had been condemned in the English-speaking world, motherland of political Liberalism, where Haller’s name is known only from a few scurrilous libels in passing. The scales of Liberal ideology that have blinded us for nearly half a millennium shall finally fall from our eyes, so that we may behold the brilliant countenance of exact knowledge as it casts its cold clear light on the mental debris of a crumbling political order in its death-throes that continues to obstruct the path before us- debris we surely would be forever doomed to trip and fall over, as we have until now, had we been left to grope and stumble in the dark without the lamp of science to light up the way around it.

Details and order-form here

I have just said quite a mouthful, and the reader may understandably be asking himself whether or not any this or any other book could really live up to such a level of arm-flailing hype. So as long I’m here advertising it, I might as well take the opportunity to make a few desultory remarks on how I first encountered Haller, and how the project came about, all in the interest of shedding some light on why I have come to think the Restoration is as epochal in its importance as I have made it out to be.

I first became interested in the subject-matter of politics and society as a young adult in the 1990s, in the immediate wake of the dramatic conclusion of the Cold War. For all the triumphalist bluster about the End of History, the decisive Final Victory of Freedom, Democracy and the Rule of Law over the Evil Empire in a New World Order, and so on to nausea, it was starting to become evident that the Liberal order was unable- or perhaps, unwilling- to make good on all of these fabled boasts. Putatively sacrosanct individual rights, above all freedom of political speech, were undergoing what seemed to be unprecedented assaults, what with the early rise of contemporary cancel culture (back when it was known as “political correctness”). Moreover, it was becoming abundantly clear that the very political activists who had spent the preceding thirty years lecturing us all on the paramount importance of “civil liberties” not only had no intention of extending them to anybody else, at least not once they had ascended to positions of power, but were in fact the most vocal and the most active in demanding their abrogation. The hallowed written Constitutions, with their solemn guarantees of individual rights, were generally impotent against these assaults; and they proved absolutely impotent against the dramatic inflation of the administrative apparatus of the State and the corresponding rise of a “nanny-State” in which “expert” technocrats demanded that the State regulate and restrict every aspect of the private life of the legally free citizenry, all in the name of “public health”, the “public interest”, or something else with the word, “public” in it. And the very State supposed to have been created for no other purpose than to secure the right to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and all that freely (if often, grudgingly) acquiesced to more and more of these demands to e.g. outlaw smoking in public, the private possession of firearms, lawn darts (that’s right lawn darts), and a host of other things; the domain of regulation-prohibition inflated so as to encompass the entirety of physical reality (a definition public-health technocrats in particular literally and openly professed).

In short, it was becoming painfully clear that State totalitarianism- something my generation had been taught was an affliction confined exclusively to Communist, Fascist, Monarchical, and other insufficiently “democratic” States, a sort of disease of States that could be instantly cured with the universal franchise, and to which the so-called “free world” was naturally immune- was a phenomenon of the Liberal State as well. Moreover, little by little I began to suspect that totalitarianism was not some kind of deformation or pathology, no mere “illiberal” aberration of the modern State, but something that inhered in the very nature of the thing itself- notwithstanding, or perhaps even because of, its much-vaunted “Constitutional” form of organization.

Opposition to all this was feeble, and an absolute intellectual train-wreck. There was an underground demi-monde of folksy conspiracy theorists of the most naive sort, actual White supremacists and indeed, actual neo-Nazis, and other crackpots and haters that unfortunately continue to infest the dissenting underground, and who seem determined to unintentionally confirm Lionel Trilling’s infamous contention that non-Liberal ideas aren’t ideas at all, but so many mere “irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas”. Above ground, there was the official Conservative opposition, represented in the intellectual arena by the likes of William F. Buckley and the writers of his National Review; various populist talk-radio demagogues with an enormous reach; and finally, the far less conspicuous, even cult-like, Libertarians. All of them would bitterly declaim against the direction in which the Liberal avant-garde (i.e. the so-called political “Left”) was taking the whole Liberal order, whilst nonetheless professing unconditional, uncritical, and very loud support for the ground premises of that order- even though the Left’s proposals and demands seemed to follow directly and rigorously from these very principles. This refusal to admit the intrinsic connection between premises and conclusions, in turn, left them vulnerable to insinuations that they were doing so out of political, commercial, or other vested interests, or alternately, because they were just plain dumb (“the stupid party”), an ignorant rear-garde of rustic Gomers yet to catch up with the times. These allegations, it must be allowed, were not always unjustified in the case of the party Conservatives and the AM-radio blowhards, but the Libertarians, admirably sincere and often intelligent to the point of gifted, were generally beyond reproach in these respects.

What really stood out in my mind with the Libertarians was their near-psychotic fear and loathing of something called they called “the State”, which their characterization made seem as the Earthly incarnation of some eternal cosmic principle of pure despotism, an artificial and alien presence in the midst of a human society that had no real need of it, and which could do little more than disrupt and distort the natural workings and spontaneous equilibria of human systems of exchange; something that could only be founded by pure violence and sustained only by theft and extortion, its power and authority standing in a radical zero-sum position with respect to the liberty of the person, such that the one obtains only at the loss of the other.

The fact that their bitterest opponents- the totalitarian Statists- also happened to share this last assumption (i.e. in believing that private gun ownership is an intolerable challenge to the authority of the State, etc.) was the first major red-flag here. The second was the almost comically self-defeating way all their proposals for doing away with the hated State, resting as they did on the foundational Liberal premise of the inherent and original sovereignty of the juridically isolated individual and its corollaries, infallibly and ironically succeeded only in duplicating the very thing they sought to abolish, with all its malevolent potential, only this time on a smaller and more localized scale. The third was their reification of human political relations. The modern State, by definition, can’t act for itself. At least the talk-radio set, in their endless declamations against government corruption and waste, recognized that the problem owed to the venality of the human officials acting on the State’s behalf, and not any supra-human and sui generis teleology supposed to inhere in an entity that doesn’t even exist except on paper. Since it is up to men to do the modern State’s thinking for it, it struck me that the root cause of all the problems lay in how modern men think about the nature of social relations, about the nature of political authority, and about the legitimate means and ends of governing- in short, in the mentality of modern government (to use a phrase then in vogue with certain senior academics with whom I was associated, and whose sponsorship allowed me to parlay my personal interests into a fully-fledged academic research area). And since culture-mentalities are historical phenomena that come and go over time, I even began to suspect that things hadn’t always been this way, and that the obscenely bloated monster of a State the Libertarians rightly despised, and that I despised, far from embodying the eternal Platonic essence of all human political authority, was a peculiarly modern aberration of the human norm, a freak of nature.

Having assigned myself the task of doing a genealogy (to use another term then in vogue) of this mentality, I immersed myself in the canonical texts of nascent Liberalism: Hobbes, Rousseau, Sydney, Locke, “Cato”, Burgh, Price, and finally, Hegel. In the latter’s Philosophy of Right (an especially pernicious work, particularly in its subsequent and most destructive influence, but no less interesting and thought-provoking for it), I encountered a footnote of a few thousand words (reproduced elsewhere on the present Substack) savaging the political thought of one Karl Ludwig von Haller. Unaware that what I was reading was actually a malicious libel against a straw-man spun from Hegel’s own yarn, I figured this Haller fellow for some sort of proto-Nietzsche or proto-social-Darwinist exalting violence, conquest, oppression, or outright destruction, of the weak by the strong, ultra-hierarchical organization of society along military lines with the strictest possible subordination and most punctilious micro-managing regimentation of inferiors. and so on like that. I nonetheless got an urgent sense that I had to get my hands on a copy, but the library catalogue turned up nothing; having a full plate’s worth of other reading to do as it was, I didn’t bother to inquire further, even though the title, Restoration of Political Science, stood out in my mind and continued to for years to come.

20-odd years went by. The ferment that culminated in the arrival of Trump on the political stage and the sudden efflorescence of a new intellectual springtime associated with the “neoreactionary” (NRx) turn on the underground Right, along with a sense of alarm at how the very foundations of civic life under the Liberal order were visibly beginning to crumble in a way I did not expect to see in my lifetime or even believe possible, rekindled my long-since moribund interest in research and writing. I was just tickled pink to learn that there were others who had as much scorn for party Conservatism, the more naive schools of Libertarianism, White Nationalism, and Liberal “democracy” as I did; and I became an enthusiastic participant, quickly earning a reputation for myself with my contributions to various (long defunct) underground journals.

For all our all well-earned boasts to the highest calibre of intellectual sophistication and erudition (I dare say, one unparalleled in the whole history of the modern Right, at least in the New World), many of our analyses and prescriptions, including my own, remained rather muddled and confused, sometimes not much better than what they were intended to replace. Drawing from a homespun canon of thinkers (Bonald, Maistre, Filmer, Nietzsche, Carlyle, Jouvenel, etc.) who either never wrote systematically on the subject of politics, or did so in a fundamentally wrongheaded way, we lacked both an exhaustively thoroughgoing dissection and critique of Liberal ideology (although I don’t mind saying that I actually came pretty close on this score) and a comprehensive general scientific theory of power and authority capable of rigorously constructing a formal abstract conceptual definition of the State, and from there defining both its invariant and constant attributes and its possible variant forms, along with the laws governing its transformations over time. We were thus doomed to remain stuck at the level of mere surface description of different observed facts without being able to explain them in any unified manner.

Our relative lack of formal rigour and scientific precision with respect to the definition of States and the exact grounds of their authority in right and in fact made itself manifest in our conclusions and prescriptions. Most everybody believed that Republican government was illegitimate as such- a falsehood that simply does not stand up to sustained scrutiny. Many uncritically championed the “absolute” Monarchies of early-modern Europe- unaware that these in fact comprised the historical States of transition to modern Liberalism, albeit still clothed in Kingly raiment. Others held up despotic usurpers and dictators such as Caesar or Bonaparte as paragons of “based” government, and fervently hoped (as, avowedly, did I) that Trump would make himself such a figure- without it ever occurring to anybody to ask just how exactly any President of the American Republic could legitimately arrogate supreme power to himself for good, or at least do so in a way that would be accepted as legitimate by the citizenry of that great country. We tended to reduce the whole question of political legitimacy to either a brute right of conquest in which might makes right (a notion as imprecise as it is morally reprehensible), or some nebulous “Divine right” whose exact legitimate possessor on Earth nobody could precisely specify (as Filmer’s Liberal critics devastatingly pointed out more than three centuries ago). Many an erstwhile fierce champion of Liberal individual rights who had since become disaffected simply flipped the script and sought to do away with rights altogether- something that is logically impossible, and that wouldn’t last a day if it were (since nobody would have any way to know what was expected from them, or what they could legitimately expect of others). I could continue. None of these or other foibles like them helped the fortunes of the fledgling movement, and on the contrary contributed to its sudden, total demise while still in its childhood

Anyways, there I was one idle evening revisiting the aforementioned volume of Hegel, and I came across the name of Haller once again. This time around, though, what with the advances in computer technology, along with the rise of online archives of old books and interest in reading them (“read old books” was one of our favourite slogans in NRx), I got my hands on a digital scan of the Restoration after about a five-minute Internet search. Still expecting a proto-Nietzsche, I quickly apprehended upon skimming it that I was getting something I hadn’t quite expected, and moreover something that would prove to be huge, a veritable game-changer.

A more careful reading, in turn, not only met, but exceeded my revised expectations. I was elated, agitated and even a little beside myself, as I began to realize the significance of what was laid out on the computer screen before me. I already was, and in fact had long been considered by others both within and outside the world of academia as a man of some depth of insight and erudition when it comes to the topic of the modern State and the mentality that surrounds it. I discovered that basically all of what I had regarded as my very best insights, and which I had arrived at on my own through over twenty years of study and reflection, had already been produced by Haller over a hundred and fifty years before I was even born. But there was more. In addition, Haller filled in all the many missing pieces of my own puzzle for me, straightened out certain inexactitudes and swept away a certain residuum of Liberal detritus that still infected my thought unawares, and gave it a systematic and scientific form, all in a way I immediately acknowledged I would never have been able to do under my power if I lived another hundred years. It was as though all this time I had been standing in a dimly-lit environs, with many corners obscured by shadows, that all of a sudden was illuminated with floodlights. I stood humbled, knocked down several pegs, but by no means humiliated; on the contrary, I was filled with a kind of sense of vicarious pride, as though I were personally assisting in an enormous scientific discovery under the direction of a grand doyen any man of letters would proudly and gladly serve. My heart started racing and my blood, boiling with the sort of fervour the sudden discovery of great truth involves in it.

With respect to the wider world of political struggle outside myself, I then recalled Hegel’s highly suggestive and important definition of the Great Men of history:

“ …[While ] it is impossible to deceive a people about its substantial basis, about the essence and specific character of its spirit…the people is deceived by itself about the way in which this character is known to it and in which it consequently passes judgment on events, its own actions, etc. […] Public opinion therefore deserves to be respected as well as despised– despised for its concrete consciousness, and respected for its essential basis, which appears in that concrete consciousness only in a more or less obscure manner. Since it contains no criterion of discrimination and lacks the ability to raise its own substantial aspect to determinate knowledge, the first formal condition of achieving anything great or rational, in actuality or in theory, is to be independent of public opinion. Great achievement may in turn be assured that public opinion will subsequently accept it, recognize it, and adopt it as it one of its prejudices. Every kind of falsehood and truth is present in public opinion, but it is the business of the great man to discover the truth within it. He who expresses the will of his age, tells it what its will is, and accomplishes this will, is the great man of the age.”

I immediately recognized Haller as comprising precisely such a figure for the political Right, and for the first- indeed, the only time- in modern history. His thought conserves and affirms all of the essential core themes of Conservative, Reactionary, Nietzschean, Populist, and Libertarian opinion over the course of their entire history. Limited government; the sanctity of property and contracts, “patriarchy”, and the right to bear arms; reverence for God and for Divine and natural law; exaltation of that singular personal charisma and greatness of achievement which sets the truly great above the faceless mediocrity of the herd, with its fetish for “equality”; respect for customs and traditions (above all in the area of law), and for national particularities against homogenizing globalism; dire warnings about the ruinous effects of irreligion, the corruption of morals, and feminizing decadence; these and all the rest of the familiar and time-honoured concerns find themselves vindicated, not by merely being asserted, but by being grounded, and for the very first and only time, on explicit, clear, distinct, and rigorous premises assembled into the unity of a genuinely scientific system- that is to say, one that is logically closed and wholly self-sufficient, depending on no unstated assumptions or extraneous premises, above all those of Liberal ideology. Not only that: Haller, by careful design, rigged this system so as to render it altogether water-tight and impervious to any infiltration by Liberal ideology- for his first methodological step prior to introducing his scientific system is to exhaustively identify and reject every single premise essential to Liberal ideology (a singular achievement in itself in the sociology of ideas).

In other words, Haller’s science, since it is not parasitic of or dependent upon any other system of thought, achieves what no other thinker on the Right has ever achieved: namely winning, for the Right, a fully-fledged space of intellectual sovereignty that, just like territorial sovereignty, contains its own, self-sufficient and final source of authority, one that can fend off invasion, colonization, and annexation and uphold its independence, and that unifies the inhabitants of that space under a set of laws that issue from the personal authority of the Sovereign, whose person furthermore unifies the inhabitants by serving as their figurehead. In this respect, Haller is in a singular position to play, for the Right, the part various culture-heroes and ancestral lawgivers played in the histories of primitive and ancient peoples, or, much closer to home, the part the likes of Locke, Marx, or Foucault have played on the political Left over the centuries.

It is this potential that must explain why Haller’s work has been so rigorously, and, among works in the Conservative/Reactionary/Libertarian tradition, uniquely suppressed and condemned to obscurity. For Haller was certainly not an obscure or inconsequential figure in his lifetime or even thereafter. To name just a few things: in Germany, where there are public streets named after him, he did more than anybody else to vindicate the legitimacy of private law; and Max Weber, grand doyen of modern sociology and economic history, in his celebrated and massively influential Economy and Society credited him by name, and in the main body of the text, with having produced the key concept of “patrimonial” power. The Restoration was in fact one of the very first major works of modern sociology (one of the first, in fact, to use the term “social science”) and objectively considered was a landmark achievement and magisterial work in that discipline; and yet he simply isn’t mentioned in histories of the discipline which otherwise freely acknowledge the pivotal role Conservatives and Reactionaries such as Burke, Bonald, and Maistre played therein.

For that matter, it is highly suggestive that, with the symptomatic exception of Haller, basically every other major thinker in the Conservative/Reactionary/Libertarian canon up to and including George Grant, Robert Nozick, and others who wrote within living memory also forms part of the official academic canon of a University system that today curates and propagates Liberal ideology as it once did Christian doctrine. Their works remain mandatory reading for many students in the social sciences and humanities; and nobody ever had any trouble getting a translation of those of them not originally written in English. And the reason for this is that not one of them ever attained to true intellectual sovereignty. Burke was a Whig who recognized that any attempt to implement Liberalism in pure form would result in the complete destruction of State and Society, as it had in France; his intervention, far from challenging Liberalism, sought rather to save it from itself. Bonald and Maistre were little more than salon wits, too irresolutely dilettantish to stake out, secure, and unify an intellectual territory for themselves; Nietzsche, a sort of court jester and cautionary tale whose example confirms the Liberals in their faith that the only choice is between Liberalism and insanity or despotic barbarism; and various Libertarian-spectrum thinkers, in their hostility to the State, likewise confirm the Liberals in their faith that the only choice is between their artificial Leviathan (whose power, Haller reminds us, by definition and design cannot be limited) and no State at all (all the while confident that nobody really would, or actually could, choose the latter in real life).

You can see where I’m going with this. These thinkers, far from winning intellectual sovereignty for themselves, at most were permitted to incorporate a few mere municipalities on a territory that isn’t their own; completely dependent on the Sovereign power of the territory for their charters, subject to its laws at all times, they are in no position to seriously challenge that power, and freely accorded some standing and (revocable) privileges accordingly. Haller, though, in attaining to intellectual independence, founded an intellectual Kingdom for himself- one that intended, not merely to defend itself and stave off aggression, but to become the aggressor, waging an offensive war of conquest against the Kingdom of Liberal ideology. And he means war in the strong sense. In his own memorable words:

“ War in the realm of the intellect…is from time to time necessary to prevent the human heart from freezing over, and keep the Divine fire burning within it. It is in combat that talent shines, since it is there that the greatest exertions must be made; it is there that the soul proves itself, that the captain distinguishes himself from the common soldier; and in every era, the most ingenious writing owes its existence to open warfare between truth and error…Once revolutionary errors have been annihilated and entirely erased from minds, this controversy may become pointless, and we will keep the peace once we have no more enemies, or once they have been defeated and rehabilitated…[F]ar be from us tolerance or indifference towards truth and lies, justice and injustice, religion and impiety. The hour has struck; the day of the decisive battle has arrived”.         

Now, for obvious reasons no sovereignty allows an enemy belligerent on its territory; and that’s why Haller’s work was, and remains, completely banned and excluded from the Liberal-controlled academic canon (in exactly the same way his physical person was exiled from his native Switzerland by a Liberal political regime installed by French revolutionaries, and for exactly the same reason).

As to myself: I knew right away that I would end up having to take it upon myself to do something to bring Haller to the attention of a dissident community already beginning to flounder under weight of factional in-fighting and personality contests, aggressive censorship and persecution, and the onset of a pandemic of a sort of general clinical depression of the intellect that saw most of the great underground journals and blogs, with their famously lengthy and challenging essays, disappear one by one in favour of aimlessly rambling podcasts and vacuous one-liner takes and memes posted on social media. No English translation was available; and the time and effort it took just to translate the table of contents of one volume for a blog of the day made it painfully clear to me just what a travail it would be to translate the entire tome. I knew exactly one person who had read Haller or even heard of him, one Nigel T. Carlsbad, who I knew from the author’s forum of a journal we both wrote for at the time. I planned to a multi-article serial exposition of the Restoration for that same journal, but wisely decided that this undertaking, which would have been quite the daunting task itself, would be a waste of time in that it would simply fall off the Internet in short order (the ‘zine, it turned out, was abruptly scrapped by its creator and all its contents deleted just a few months later). As the intellectual springtime of the dissident Right passed into a dark and dreary winter that has yet to end, and I witnessed almost all Western countries including my own tragically lose their liberties overnight and degenerate into so many open-air quarantine camps ruled by illegitimate oligarchic Regimes acting as occupation governments on behalf of Klaus Schwab’s open conspiracy of rootless cosmopolitans at Davos, I became profoundly disgusted and demoralized, let my screen go dark, and walked away from study and writing for what I thought would be for good. However, the natural teleology of things, which didn’t let me get away with trying to do this in the past, had other plans, and dragged me back just as soon as I learned, quite by chance, that the aforementioned Carlsbad had actually succeeded in arousing a modest but significant amount of interest in Haller on social media. Under orders from the nature of things, I had no choice but to act; within a week, I found a publisher and sponsor, and immediately put my nose to the grindstone for the next four months, working eight to twelve hour days, seven days a week.

For anybody who read this far, here are some notes on the translation itself. Translating the Restoration was one of the most personally fulfilling, but also one of the most arduous, things I have ever had to do in my life. Haller had published the Restoration in both German and French. He regarded the French edition, which he wrote several years after the German, as definitive; for this reason, and also because I am much, much more fluent in French than in German, I went with the second, French edition. I have not read the German edition, but apparently it was received as something of a literary masterpiece when it appeared, winning accolades for its prose style alone. The same can be hardly be said for the French version, though. Haller admitted that he rushed through it, in part while ill, and it sure does show in places. It gives the general impression of something that was “dictated but not read”, as people used to say. Making it readable in English without doing violence to his text proved to be a right sore trial; I had to do several translation passes on some sections just to get a legible result. I was often confronted with run-on sentences of several hundred words, their component-parts separated by an idiosyncratic and seemingly-random use of punctuation; these would have been downright unreadable had I not taken it upon myself to tidy up the punctuation a bit and judiciously parse some of these endless sentences into two or so more manageable ones.

Another challenge, one that applies to any French-English translation, concerns translation choices. The vocabulary of French and English overlaps so much that they are practically the same language in this respect; many, many French words show up in English as either cognates or loan-words so similar that the spelling is identical, or almost identical. The easiest thing for a translator to do, then, is be literal, selecting the corresponding English-language cognate/loan-word. But the danger is that the exact same word can have a slightly different signification in each language- one slight enough to slip by unnoticed, but big enough, especially in an original work of philosophy or social theory with lots of specific technical terms, to garble a text into outright nonsense (see Alan Sheridan’s botched translation of Michel Foucault’s The Archaeology of Knowledge for a particularly egregious example). I shudder to think, for example, of the confusion I might have introduced had I taken the easy way out and rendered the special technical term, communauté  (specifically, a corporate body created by a given membership in order to administer the collective goods and affairs of that membership) as Eng. community (in its current, diffuse sense, the sum total of individuals who happen to share some special interest, with or without any particular juridical relationship with each other). Otherwise, with respect to translation choices, I chose with the aim of maximizing immediacy, clarity, ease, and accessibility for the reader, and teasing out the many flashes of dazzling literary brilliance that lay dormant beneath his oft-awkward French prose. I like to think I succeeded on both counts; and anyone dissatisfied with my treatment is always free to rely on the originals, or essay his own.

So, after another one and a quarter years that saw operational delays whose details are uninteresting, Haller’s magnum opus is now presented to the English-speaking public, at the very time the great “American experiment in democracy”, the Liberal order, has finally become truly serious about committing suicide, as Haller logically proved it sooner or later would, and as the French Revolution had already empirically demonstrated. The natural social relations Burke knew were indispensable pillars of support for the artificial civil State have become fatally corroded by the very State they prop up, or more precisely, by the internal logic of the ideology that gave rise to this State. The question of whether European peoples will physically survive the catastrophic failure of the experiment at all this time around must hang in doubt (modern weapons of mass destruction, above all nuclear warheads, and impossibly complex and perilously vulnerable economic supply chains upon which everybody’s lives absolutely depend, and which in turn absolutely depend on economic and political stability along with the uninterrupted upkeep of intricate technological infrastructure, introduce new and terrifying wildcards into the game that did not exist in 18th c. Europe). And yet if they do, one must not think that a more eminently human and humane political order will simply birth itself. As Haller knew, without reversing the Liberal sea-change in world-view that changed how Europeans and North Americans perceived Man’s relation to Man, to Nature, and above all, to legitimate power and authority, the monster will re-generate itself. If the Haller revival fails to thrive, and the counter-revolution in mentality he heroically initiated but could not complete two centuries ago cannot be completed by us in the present, it seems sociologically likely that the impending collapse will, after three or so decades of intense hardship that will see thirty or so per cent of the population perish, resolve itself in a sort of pathological equilibrium or holding-pattern that will see America and her peers descend to, and remain at, the socioeconomic level of the typical Third-World banana Republic; a State that will be very much alive, but not so well, just functional enough to lurch from place to place, like a man who was a powerful athlete in his youth but since grown crippled and diabetic, having emerged from a coma only to pathetically go about his business in a mobility scooter, not quite dead, but often wishing he were, with nothing to live for but the memories of past glories, and wondering how the flower of his youth could have wilted and withered into him.

If our Nations and peoples are to be spared this fate worse than death, we will all have to be prepared to aggressively evangelize for the truth- truth that can only become visible to our sight in the light of Haller’s invincible science- to the best of each of our own individual abilities. I’ll give the last word to Haller himself on this point:

“Submit what you find in this book to critical scrutiny; and if your verdict is favourable, tell others who are loyal and courageous to spread the word; promptly and actively proclaim the good news of the truth that was lost and now is found…Have the light of the truth read in public, preach it from rooftops, from academic chairs and in the lecture-halls of schools. Make it known to young and old; clothe it in all manner of forms; wrap it in every colour; embellish it, here with subtlety, there with pomp; use images, parables, music, and song to spread it; flood every science with it, make every art a subsidiary of it; write it on the chalkboard of your hearts and the doors of your homes; all in order that that the spirit of goodness will be encountered at all times, as the spirit of evil has hitherto been; put yourself within reach of those you would like peel away from error and win for the truth; disseminate it, here liberally, there with economy; give milk to the weak, and red meat to the strong. In short, be all things to all men, in the interest of persuading a great number of them, and hastening the coming of the reign of truth. Put it in terms of whatever point of view is the most congenial to any given man, and soon he will learn to love it and know it by heart. Demonstrate how useful it is to every man without exception, and how it satisfies every interest…Wield the weaponry of the mind, the force of insight that penetrates all, and pierces the heart like a double-edged sword; arm yourselves above all with the shield of faith, trust in God, and the unshakable hope in the forces of truth and justice that contribute so mightily to persuasion and securing victory. Believe, and you will move mountains; you will surmount seemingly insurmountable obstacles, you will change the minds of a corrupted generation, you will give the world a new spirit”.