“Where there is no Common Power, there is no Law….”- Leviathan, Chapter XIII[1]
A Hobbesian World
The seventeenth century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes associated world politics with the “state of nature.” In this anarchic state, war is a continuing condition, even in the absence of actual fighting. Moreover, legal order amid anarchy is problematic by definition. Warns Hobbes in a timeless observation, “Where there is no Common Power, there is no Law….”
Since the original publication of Leviathan in 1651, little has changed concerning the state of war in world politics. To be sure, we now have nuclear weapons and other instruments of mass destruction, but the underlying dynamic of anarchy-based lawlessness remains both evident and incontestable. Is there anything that could be done globally to alter and improve this stark impediment to world peace? If world law and world anarchy are plainly a contradiction in terms, what should be the next steps to safeguard an imperiled species?
States will have to learn to realign their own presumed national interests with a much wider global interest. From its modern beginnings in the seventeenth century – more precisely, since the Peace of Westphalia in 1648[2] – international law has presumed variously hard and fixed distinctions between “national interest” and “world interest.” Rather than recognize the organic wholeness and interdependence of states, this infinitely false presumption has prodded nation-states to feverishly embrace “everyone for himself” orientations to foreign policy.
The cumulative result of such crude zero-sum thinking has been obvious. It has been unceasingly injurious and routinely lethal. In more expressly jurisprudential terms, this result has repeatedly been made manifest in war, terrorism and genocide.[3]
French thinker Pierre Teilhard De Chardin points in a remediating right direction: “The egocentric ideal of a future reserved for those who have managed to attain egoistically the extremity of everyone for himself,” summarizes the Jesuit scientist and philosopher, “is false and against nature. No element can move and grow except with and by all the others with itself.”
With particular reference to the United States, the still-accumulating costs of former President Donald J. Trump’s “America First” has been a debilitated nation. This grievous debility can be assessed not only in the usual political and geostrategic terms, but also from co-equally critical standpoints of national and international law.[4] Though generally disregarded, these complementary jurisprudential perspectives are authentically important to the overall security and well-being of “post-Trump” America.[5]
There are several relevant themes and details. From its modern beginnings, world law has been based upon the “egocentric” dynamic of Realpolitik[6] or power politics.[7] Although such thinking has normally been taken as “realistic,” that view has already proven shortsighted.[8] An incumbent American president – any incumbent American president – would be well-advised to acknowledge the inherent limitations of our planet’s traditional global threat system,[9] and to identify more conspicuously durable configurations of international relations and international law.[10]
During this daunting process, history will deserve an evident pride of place. What might first have seemed promising to “realists” about national security in the “State of Nature” (the condition of global anarchy dating back to the Peace of Westphalia in 1648) is apt to prove futile for longer-term world survival prospects. For the United States in particular, this futility could be experienced not as some casual debit in the country’s complex national security calculus, but instead as an explosive and potentially irreversible combination of existential costs.
Anarchy is an old story in international relations and international law (1648 and the Peace of Westphalia), but chaos is not necessarily worse than anarchy. In certain circumstances, chaos could represent a potentially positive development for world order reform. In this eccentric but still conceivably plausible view, chaos implies unique opportunity, a chance to finally change things from the 17th century dynamic of “Westphalian” interactions.
There is more. When compared or contrasted with Westphalian anarchy, chaos is prospectively that condition which prepares the world for all things, whether sacred or profane. It represents that yawning gulf of “emptiness” where nothing is as yet, but where remaining civilizational opportunity can still originate. The 18th century German poet Friedrich Hölderlin observed: “There is a desert sacred and chaotic, which stands at the roots of the things, and which prepares all things.” Insightfully, back in the ancient pagan world, Greek philosophers thought of this inchoate “desert” as logos, a primal concept which indicates context that is anything but random or without intrinsic merit.
Harmonizing National Interests with Global Interest
In principle, at least, it is high time for states to understand that their own national interests ought never be placed at odds with world system interests. The United States, in the fashion of every other state, is merely one intersecting part of a much larger and many-sided world legal order.[11] As was already foreseen by Thomas Hobbes in the seventeenth-century, this comprehensive system of law reveals steadily diminishing chances for success within any recalcitrant patterns of global anarchy. Ipso facto, “Westphalian” decentralization is markedly corrosive and irremediably broken. [12]
“What is the good of passing from one untenable position to another,” asks philosopher/writer Samuel Beckett provocatively in Endgame, “…of seeking justification always on the same plane?” Thought the celebrated Irish playwright was assuredly not thinking specifically about world politics or international law, his generalizable query remains perfectly well-suited to the broadly global “State of Nature.” As a bitterly competitive power-politics has never been propitious for human security at any tangible level, why ought any national leader still insist upon maintaining it as the core doctrine of national interest and survival?
In these conspicuously urgent matters, truth is necessary and exculpatory. Pertinent facts about such matters can never be overridden by visceral chanting at mind-canceling political rallies or by any substitutions of empty political witticism for verifiable analysis. Retained as context for world legal order, the State of Nature can never preserve national or human security for reasonably sustained intervals. Looking further ahead, this unsteady condition could quickly be exacerbated by multiple systemic failures, by losses that could become mutually reinforcing or fully “synergistic.”[13] Plausibly, these failures could sometime involve assorted weapons of mass destruction.
Most conspicuously portentous, in this regard, would be the use of nuclear weapons.[14] In this connection, it is important to understand that states are under no externally-imposed obligations to remain non-nuclear. Such an obligation may be incurred, of course, by volitional state action, but not by any antecedent and general normative prohibition.[15]
There is still more to consider. By definition, any prospective failure of nuclear Realpolitik in the State of Nations could represent not “only” catastrophic forms of aggression,[16] but negative forms that are also unprecedented (sui generis). This sobering conclusion would hold true if the relevant failures were eventually judged within the full scope of their national and international declensions.
Beyond Westphalia: Alternative Systems of World Legal Order
What next? All states that depend upon some form of nuclear deterrence – especially the United States – must prepare to think more self-consciously and imaginatively about alternative systems of world politics and world law; that is, about creating prospectively viable legal configurations that are reliably war-averse and determinedly cooperation-centered. Although any discernible hint of interest in such patterns of expanding global integration (of what the Jesuit philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin calls “planetization”[17]) could sound unacceptably utopian to “realists,” an opposite interpretation would actually prove more sensible.[18]
At this point in national and world history, it is more realistic to acknowledge that an “every man for himself” ethos in world politics is endlessly degrading and also sorely incapable of offering any plausible legal reassurances.[19] Indeed, even to challenge such an acknowledgment would be unsupportable prima facie.
Again and again – and at some point, irretrievably – “Westphalian” world systemic failures could become relentlessly dire and potentially irreversible. In the final analysis, it will not help the United States or any other country to assert “national interest” as a brazenly self-confirming national objective. Clinging stubbornly to variously vitriolic notions of “us versus them,” maintaining belligerent postures between states or (as “hybridized” actors) between states and surrogate or sub-state organizations[20] would prove excruciatingly misconceived.[21]
Going forward, the only sort of legal realism that could make any sense for America and other leading states in Westphalian world politics is a courageous posture that points thoughtfully toward some aptly “higher” awareness of global “oneness.”
In its fully optimized expression, any such indispensable awareness – a literally opposite awareness of former US President Donald Trump’s “America First” – would resemble what the ancients had called “cosmopolis” or “world city” focused. For the moment, the insightful prophets of a more collaboratively legal world civilization must remain “out of sight,” few and far between.[22] But this consequential absence is not due to any intrinsic lack of need or witting intellectual forfeiture. Rather, it reflects a progressively imperiled species’ retrograde unwillingness ever to take itself seriously – that is, to recognize that the only sort of law-based loyalties that can finally rescue nation-states from war, terrorism and genocide must embrace a redirected commitment (both individual and national) to humankind as a whole.
The only reasonable mantra to guide the United States on security matters must be “World First, America First.” Nothing else could prove more sensible.
There is more. This is not really a bewildering idea. It is hardly a medical or biological secret that the core factors and behaviors common to all human beings outnumber those that genuinely differentiate one person from another. Unless the leaders of all major states on Planet Earth can finally understand that the survival of any one state must always be contingent upon the survival of all, true national security will continue to elude absolutely every nation. This references even the purportedly “most powerful” states, including those that so fitfully declare themselves “first.”
Acknowledging Planet Earth as an Organic Unity
The most immediate security task in any law-based state of nations must remain cooperatively self-centered, including the traditional remedies of collective self-defense and collective security. Simultaneously, however, leaders of all countries, especially the United States, must learn to understand that our planet represents an organic whole, a fragile but variously intersecting legal “one” that increasingly exhibits only diminishing options for successful war avoidance.[23]
To seize disappearing opportunities for longer-term survival, national leaders should learn to build upon the critical foundational insights of Francis Bacon, Galileo and Isaac Newton,[24] and on the more contemporary observation of Lewis Mumford: “Civilization,” says the distinguished social philosopher, “is the never ending process of creating one world and one humanity.”[25] These names will signify nothing to adherents of belligerent nationalism in the United States or elsewhere, but there may still remain some capable advisors who can appreciate the tangible benefits of intellect or “mind.”
There is no point to speaking of civilization without also speaking of law. In principle, no particular national leadership has any special obligations in this regard. Nonetheless, the United States remains a key element of the “legal community of nations,” and an American president, regardless of party, should do everything possible to detach the Westphalian State of Nations from the State of Nature. Moreover, any such willful detachment should be expressed as part of a much wider vision for durable and justice-centered world politics.
For the moment, at least, there is no obvious need to further detail any analytic or intellectual particulars. There are bound to be many, but for now, only a more evident and dedicated awareness of this basic civilizational obligation should be expected.[26] Once the basic vision is properly understood, proper details can reasonably follow.
In The Plague, Albert Camus instructs: “At the beginning of the pestilence and when it ends, there’s always a propensity for rhetoric. It is in the thick of a calamity that one gets hardened to the truth – in other words – to silence.” As long as the states in world politics continue to operate in narrowly zero-sum terms of engagement, they will be unable to stop the next wave of terror attacks, genocides and catastrophic wars. Presently, we will need to add “plague” in its original biological iteration to this fearful list. Both scholars and policy-makers will have to look more closely and more specifically at possible intersections/synergies between world political hazards and disease pandemics.
“Everyone for Himself:” A Prescription for Worldwide Catastrophe
Until now, the traditional legal expectations of Realpolitik, though corrosive,may still have appeared sensible. Today there are no practical reasons for expressing retrospective regrets. Nevertheless, from the always-overriding standpoint of improving humankind’s longer-term security prospects, the American president and other national leaders should substantially expand their visionary imagination to include more seriously promising forms of world legal order understanding. By ignoring the complex interrelatedness of all peoples and all states, crudely competitive visions of Realpolitik or Power Politics represent the opposite of what is required.
Now more than ever, affirming the extremity of “everyone for himself” in world politics represents a prescription not for realism and global law-enforcement, but for recurrent conflict and existential despair. If this refractory prescription should remain in place, the costs could sometime become nuclear. At that hard-to-imagine but increasingly plausible point, it will already be too late to discover that “competitive national interest” had actually been a lethal political slogan.
Thomas Hobbes, whose comment from Leviathan introduces this paper, was analytically correct. In whatever fashion scholars and decision-makers might choose to tinker round the edges of a still-malleable State of Nature, that State would necessarily remain in an intolerable condition of lawlessness or “war.” To progress and to survive, international law must finally be rendered compatible with more expressly cosmopolitan and centralized visions of global human society.
About such visions, we may learn from the ancient Greek Stoic philosopher, Epictetus, “You are a citizen of the universe.” A broader idea of “oneness” followed the death of Alexander in 322 BCE, and with it came a coinciding doctrine of “universality” or interconnectedness. By the Middle Ages, this political and social doctrine had fused with the notion of a Respublica Christiana, a worldwide Christian commonwealth, and Thomas, John of Salisbury and Dante were looking upon Europe as a single and unified Christian community. Below the level of God and his heavenly host, all the realm of humanity was to be considered as one. This is because all the world had been created for the same single and incontestable purpose; that is, to provide background for the necessary drama of human salvation.
Only in its relationship to the universe itself was the world considered as part rather than whole. Says Dante in De Monarchia: “The whole human race is a whole with reference to certain parts, and, with reference to another whole, it is a part. For it is a whole with reference to particular kingdoms and nations, as we have shown; and it is a part with reference to the whole universe, which is evident without argument.”
Seventeenth-century political philosopher Hobbes has been reinvigorated by 20th century psychiatrist Sigmund Freud. Notes the latter in his classic essay, Civilization and its Discontents: “The replacement of the power of the individual by the power of the community constitutes the decisive step of civilization.” Though Freud was thinking here of individual human beings within nations, and not of diverse nation-states in world law, the same argument applies. We cannot afford to disregard it.
There can never be meaningful legal order amid anarchy in either civilizational setting, domestic or global. It is high time, therefore, to enhance the “power of the community” in world politics. No such complicated objective will ever be realized by nefarious political phrasemaking (e.g., “Make America Great Again”) or by authoritarian leadership diktat. At this point, the intersecting processes of transformation are indispensable; finally, they must be brought to “center-stage.”
There is one last observation, a final matter of “will,” whether personal, national or global. By definition, no pertinent task of will could possibly prove more vital to American or global survival than a committed dedication to planetary “oneness.”[27] Though such a goal may first appear utterly naïve or foolishly visionary, nothing could actually prove less reasonable than continuing with our world legal order’s Westphalian directives. In sum, no individual nation-state can ever be “first” except together with and by all others in law-based global community.
To render such a complex objective tangible represents above all a herculean intellectual task.[28] We require not a Hobbesian Leviathan, but a viable system of international law based upon certain commonly accepted rules and procedures. As a core example, we ought never to expect success when neither of the world’s principal superpowers will bind itself to peremptory obligations of the International Criminal Court or to the more general obligations of codified and customary anti-genocide norms. These obligations include foreseeable circumstances in which there would obtain a universal legal “responsibility to protect.”[29]
[1] By this assertion, Thomas Hobbes clarifies that there can be no law of any kind in a “State of Nature” and that any juxtaposition of the two terms is not merely flawed, but also represents a contradiction in terms.
[2] The reference is to the Peace of Westphalia (1648), which concluded the Thirty Years War, and created the still-existing state system. See: Treaty of Peace of Munster, Oct. 1648, 1 Consol. T.S. 271; and Treaty of Peace of Osnabruck, Oct. 1648, 1., Consol. T.S. 119. Together, these two treaties comprise the “Peace of Westphalia.”
[3] Thomas Hobbes notes in Leviathan that although the “state of nature” in world politics is one of inherent lawlessness, scholars and policy-makers have since accepted the notion that global anarchy and international law can coexist. Hobbes argued further that the international “state of nature” is more tolerable than the condition of individual human beings in nature. This is because with individuals, “…the weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest.” But the times have been changing. With the continuing expansion of nuclear weapons programs and strategies, there is no longer any persuasive reason to believe that the state of nations remains more tolerable. Prima facie, nuclear weapons are bringing the state of nations closer to a true Hobbesian state of nature. See, in this connection, David P. Gauthier, The Logic of Leviathan: The Moral and Political Theory of Thomas Hobbes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 207. As with Hobbes, 17th century German philosopher Samuel Pufendorf argued that the state of nations is not “as intolerable” as the state of nature between individuals. The state of nations, reasoned the famed jurist, “lacks those inconveniences which are attendant upon a pure state of nature….” In a similar vein, Baruch Spinoza suggested “that a commonwealth can guard itself against being subjugated by another, as a man in the state of nature cannot do.” See, A.G. Wernham, ed., The Political Works, Tractatus Politicus, iii, II (Clarendon Press, 1958), p. 295.
[4] Though few Americans understand, international law is always a part of US domestic law. In precise words used by the U.S. Supreme Court in The Paquete Habana, “International law is part of our law, and must be ascertained by the courts of justice of appropriate jurisdiction, as often as questions of right depending upon it are duly presented for their determination. For this purpose, where there is no treaty, and no controlling executive or legislative act or judicial decision, resort must be had to the customs and usages of civilized nations.” See The Paquete Habana, 175 U.S. 677, 678-79 (1900). See also: The Lola, 175 U.S. 677 (1900); Tel-Oren v. Libyan Arab Republic, 726 F. 2d 774, 781, 788 (D.C. Cir. 1984) (per curiam) (Edwards, J. concurring) (dismissing the action, but making several references to domestic jurisdiction over extraterritorial offenses), cert. denied, 470 U.S. 1003 (1985) (“concept of extraordinary judicial jurisdiction over acts in violation of significant international standards…embodied in the principle of `universal violations of international law.’”).
[5] See, by this author, Louis René Beres, at JURIST: https://www.jurist.org/commentary/2017/08/president-trump-nuclear-war/ Of course depending upon the 2024 presidential election, the idea of a post-Trump America may turn out to be incorrect.
[6] An earlier book by this author deals with these issues from an expressly American point of view. See: Louis René Beres, Reason and Realpolitik: US Foreign Policy and World Order (Lexington Books, 1984). A common synonym for Realpolitik is Machtpolitik.
[7] For the political philosophy origins of such core assumptions, see especially classic comment of Thrasymachus in Bk. 1, Sec. 338 of Plato, The Republic: “Right is the interest of the stronger.”
[8] See by this author, Louis René Beres, at Horasis (Zurich): https://horasis.org/getting-beyond-power-politics-narratives-for-a-trust-centered-world-order/
[9] In Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes further points out that while an anarchic “State of Nature” has likely never actually existed between individual human beings, it nonetheless defines the usual structures of world politics, patterns within which all nations coexist in “the state and posture of gladiators….” This “posture,” expands Hobbes as a matter of definition, is a condition of “war.”
[10] In the final analysis, such configurations must always be anchored in Natural Law. The core idea of Natural Law is based upon the acceptance of certain principles of right and justice that prevail because of their own intrinsic merit. Eternal and immutable, they are external to all acts of human will and interpenetrate all human reason. This idea and its attendant tradition of human civility runs continuously from Mosaic Law and the ancient Greeks and Romans to the present day. For a comprehensive and far-reaching assessment of the natural law origins of international law, see Louis René Beres, “Justice and Realpolitik: International Law and the Prevention of Genocide,” The American Journal of Jurisprudence, Vol. 33, 1988, pp. 123-159. See also, more recently, Louis René Beres, https://www.jurist.org/commentary/2021/12/louis-rene-beres-natural-law-us-constitution/
[11] The term “world legal order” has its contemporary origins in a scholarly movement begun at the Yale Law School in the mid- and late 1960s, and was “adopted” by the Politics Department at Princeton University in 1967-68. The present author, an early member of the Princeton-based World Order Models Project, wrote several of the early books and articles in this once-emergent academic genre.
[12] This condition of Westphalian anarchy stands in stark contrast to the jurisprudential assumption of solidarity between states. This assumption concerns a presumptively common legal struggle against both aggression and terrorism. Such a “peremptory” expectation, known formally in law as a jus cogens assumption, was already mentioned in Justinian, Corpus Juris Civilis (533 CE); Hugo Grotius, 2 De Jure Belli ac Pacis Libri Tres, Ch. 20 (Francis W. Kesey., tr, Clarendon Press, 1925) (1690); and Emmerich de Vattel, 1 Le Droit Des Gens, Ch. 19 (1758).
[13] See: https://harvardnsj.org/2015/06/core-synergies-in-israels-strategic-planning-when-the-adversarial-whole-is-greater-than-the-sum-of-its-parts/
[14] For specialized accounts by this author of nuclear war effects, see: Louis René Beres, Apocalypse: Nuclear Catastrophe in World Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); Louis René Beres, Mimicking Sisyphus: America’s Countervailing Nuclear Strategy (Lexington, Mass., Lexington Books, 1983); Louis René Beres, Reason and Realpolitik: U.S. Foreign Policy and World Order (Lexington, Mass., Lexington Books, 1984); and Louis René Beres, Security or Armageddon: Israel’s Nuclear Strategy (Lexington, Mass., Lexington Books, 1986). Most recently, by Professor Beres, see: Surviving Amid Chaos: Israel’s Nuclear Strategy (New York, Rowman & Littlefield, 2016; 2nd ed. 2018).
[15] In certain residual circumstances, even an actual resort to nuclear weapons could be lawful. On July 8, 1996, the International Court of Justice at The Hague handed down its Advisory Opinion on “The Legality of the Threat or Use of Force of Nuclear Weapons.” The final paragraph of this Opinion, concludes, inter alia: “The threat or use of nuclear weapons would generally be contrary to the rules of international law applicable in armed conflict, and in particular the principles and rules of humanitarian law. However, in view of the current state of international law, and of the elements of fact at its disposal, the Court cannot conclude definitively whether the threat or use of nuclear weapons would be lawful or unlawful in an extreme circumstance of self-defense, in which the very survival of a State would be at stake.”
[16] For the crime of aggression under international law, see: Resolution on the Definition of Aggression, adopted by the UN General Assembly, Dec. 14, 1974. U.N.G.A. Res. 3314 (XXIX), 29 UN GAOR, Supp (No. 31), 142, UN Doc A/9631 (1975) reprinted in 13 I.L.M., 710 (1974).
[17] Se Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man (1955), originally Le Phénomene Humain (Paris).
[18] One may recall here the parable from Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations: “What does not benefit the entire hive is no benefit to the bee.” Unless we take meaningful steps to implement an organic and cooperative planetary civilization – one based on the irremediably central truth of human “oneness” – there will be no civilization at all.
[19] International law is ultimately deducible from natural law. According to Blackstone, each state and nation is always expected “to aid and enforce the law of nations, as part of the common law, by inflicting an adequate punishment upon offenses against that universal law….” See: 2 William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, Book 4, “Of Public Wrongs.” Lest anyone ask about the significance of Blackstone, one need only point out that Commentaries are the original and core foundation of the laws of the United States.
[20] Plausibly, these sub-state organizations could represent terrorist groups. Under authoritative international law, terrorist movements are always Hostes humani generis, or “Common enemies of mankind.” See: Research in International Law: Draft Convention on Jurisdiction with Respect to Crime, 29 AM J. INT’L L. (Supp 1935) 435, 566 (quoting King v. Marsh (1615), 3 Bulstr. 27, 81 Eng. Rep 23 (1615) (“a pirate est Hostes humani generis”)).
[21] Regarding antecedent legal obligations of sub-state surrogates, state parties (e.g., the United States) should remain wary about signing pacts because, inter alia, such agreements could impose unequal legal expectations. In this connection, several U.S. federal court decisions affirm that legal agreements between sub-state and state parties may sometime impose asymmetrical compliance expectations. In the very prominent case of Tel-Oren v. Libyan Arab Republic, a 1981 civil suit in U.S. federal court wherein the plaintiffs were Israeli survivors and representatives of persons murdered in a terrorist bus attack in Israel in 1978, Circuit Judge Harry T. Edwards opined: “…I do not believe the law of nations imposes the same responsibility or liability on non-state actors, such as the PLO, as it does on states and persons acting under color of state law.”
[22] The best studies of such modern world order “prophets” are still W. Warren Wagar, The City of Man (1963) and W. Warren Wagar, Building the City of Man (1971).
[23] Because war and genocide are not mutually exclusive, either strategically or jurisprudentially, taking proper systemic steps toward war avoidance would plausibly also reduce the likelihood of egregious “crimes against humanity.”
[24] Regarding science in such matters, Niccolo Machiavelli had joined Aristotle’s plan for a more scientific study of politics generally with various core assumptions about geopolitics or Realpolitik. His best known conclusion, in this particular suggestion, focuses on the eternally stark dilemma of practicing goodness in a world that is generally evil. “A man who wishes to make a profession of goodness in everything, must necessarily come to grief among so many who are not good.” See: The Prince, Chapter XV. Although this argument is largely unassailable, there is also a corresponding need to disavow “naive realism,” and to recognize that, in the longer term, the only outcome of “eye for an eye” conceptions in world politics will be universal blindness.
[25] We may think also of the Talmudic observation: “The earth from which the first man was made was gathered in all the four corners of the world.”
[26] International law, which is an integral part of the legal system of all states in world politics, already assumes a reciprocally common general obligation of states to supply benefits to one another and to avoid war whenever possible. This core assumption of jurisprudential solidarity is known formally as a “peremptory” or jus cogens expectation, that is, one that is not even subject to question. It can be found already in Justinian, Corpus Juris Civilis, Hugo Grotius, The Law of War and Peace (1625) and Emmerich de Vattel, The Law of Nations or Principles of Natural Law (1758).
[27] Modern origins of “will” are discoverable in the writings of Arthur Schopenhauer, especially The World as Will and Idea (1818). For his own inspiration, Schopenhauer drew freely upon Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Later, Nietzsche drew just as freely and perhaps more importantly upon Schopenhauer. Goethe was also a core intellectual source for Spanish existentialist Jose Ortega y’Gasset, author of the singularly prophetic twentieth-century work, The Revolt of the Masses (Le Rebelion de las Masas;1930). See, accordingly, Ortega’s very grand essay, “In Search of Goethe from Within” (1932), written for Die Neue Rundschau of Berlin on the centenary of Goethe’s death. It is reprinted in Ortega’s anthology, The Dehumanization of Art (1948) and is available from Princeton University Press (1968).
[28] Notes Guillaume Apollinaire, “It must not be forgotten that it is perhaps more dangerous for a nation to allow itself to be conquered intellectually than by arms.” See his The New Spirit and the Poets (1917).
[29] See United Nations: https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/about-responsibility-to-protect.shtml