The standpoint from which to comprehend the economic history of great Cultures is not to be looked for on economic ground. Economic thought and action are a side of life that acquires a false appearance when regarded as a self-contained _kind_ of life. Least of all is the secure standpoint to be had on the basis of the present-day world-economics, which for the last 150 years has been mounting fantastically, perilously, and in the end almost desperately--an economics, moreover, that is exclusively Western-dynamic, anything but common-human.

That which we call national economy to-day is built up on premisses that are openly and specifically English. The industry of machines, which is unknown to all other Cultures, stands in the centre as though it were a matter of course and, without men being conscious of the fact, completely dominates the formulation of ideas and the deduction of so-called laws. Credit-money, in the special form imparted to it by the relations of world-trade and export-industry in a peasantless England, serves as the foundation whereupon to define words like capital, value, price, property--and the definitions are then transferred without more ado to other Culture-stages and life-cycles. The insular position of England has determined a conception of politics, and of its relation to economics, that rules in all economic theories. The creators of this economic _picture_ were David Hume[845] and Adam Smith.[846] Everything that has since been written about them or against them always presupposes the critical structure and methods of their systems. This is as true of Carey and List as it is of Fourier and Lassalle. As for Smith’s greatest adversary, Marx, it matters little how loudly one protests against English capitalism when one is thoroughly imbued with its images; the protest is itself a recognition, and its only aim is, through a new kind of accounting, to confer upon objects the advantage of being subjects.

From Adam Smith to Marx it is nothing but self-analysis of the economic thinking of a single Culture on a particular development-level. Rationalistic through and through, it starts from Material and its conditions, needs, and motives, instead of from the _Soul_--of generations, Estates, and peoples--and its creative power. It looks upon men as constituent parts of situations, and knows nothing of the big personality and history-shaping will, of individuals or of groups, the will that sees in the facts of economics not ends but means. It takes economic life to be something that can be accounted for without remainder by visible causes and effects, something of which the structure is quite mechanical and completely self-contained and even, finally, something that stands in some sort of causal relation to religion and politics--these again being considered as individual self-contained domains. As this outlook is the systematic and not the historical, the timeless and universal validity of its concepts and rules is an article of faith, and its ambition is to establish the one and only correct method of applying “the” science of management. And accordingly, wherever its truths have come into contact with the facts, it has experienced a complete fiasco--as was the case with the prophecies of bourgeois theorists concerning the World War,[847] and with those of proletarian theorists on the induction of the Soviet economy.

Up to now, therefore, there has been no national economy, in the sense of a morphology of the economic _side_ of life and more particularly of that side in the life of the high Cultures, with their formations--concordant as to stage, tempo, and duration--of economic styles. Economics has no system, but a physiognomy. To fathom the secret of its inner form, its _soul_, demands the physiognomic flair. To succeed in it it is necessary to be a “judge” of it as one is a “judge” of men or of horses, and requires even less “knowledge” than that which a horseman needs to have of zoölogy. But this faculty of “judgment” can be awakened, and the way to awaken it is through the sympathetic outlook on history which gives a shrewd idea of the race-instincts, which are at work in the economic as in other constituents of active existence, symbolically shaping the external position--the economic “stuff,” the need--in harmony with their own inner character. _All economic life is the expression of a soul-life._

This is a new, a German, outlook upon economics, an outlook from beyond all Capitalism and Socialism--both of which were products of the jejune rationality of the eighteenth century, and aimed at nothing but a material analysis and subsequent synthesis of the economic surface. All that has been taught hitherto is no more than preparatory. Economic thought, like legal,[848] stands now on the verge of its true and proper development, which (for us, as for the Hellenistic-Roman age) sets in only where art and philosophy have irrevocably passed away.

The attempt which follows is meant only as a flying survey of the possibilities here available.

Economics and politics are sides of the _one_ livingly flowing current of being, and not of the waking-consciousness, the intellect.[849] In each of them is manifested the pulse of the cosmic flowings that are occluded in the sequent generations of individual existences. They may be said, not to _have_ history, but to _be_ history. Irreversible Time, the When, rules in them. They belong, both of them, to race and not, as religion and science belong, to language with its spatial-causal tensions; they regard facts, not truths. There are economic _Destinies_ as there are political, whereas in scientific doctrines, as in religious, there is _timeless connexion of cause and effect_.

Life, therefore, has a political and an economic kind of “condition” of fitness for history. They overlie, they support, they oppose each other, but the political is unconditionally the first. Life’s will is to preserve itself and to prevail, or, rather, to make itself stronger in order that it may prevail. But in the economic state of fitness the being-streams are fit as _self_-regarding, whereas in a political they are fit as _other_-regarding. And this holds good all along the series, from the simplest unicellular plant to swarms and to peoples of the highest free mobility in space. Nourishment and winning-through--the difference of dignity between the two sides of life is recognizable in their relation to death. There is no contrast so profound as that between _hunger-death and hero-death_. Economically life is in the widest sense threatened, dishonoured, and _debased_ by hunger--with which is to be included stunting of possibilities, straitened circumstances, darkness, and pressure not less than starvation in the literal sense. Whole peoples have lost the tense force of their race through the gnawing wretchedness of their living. Here men die _of_ something and not _for_ something. Politics sacrifices men for an idea, they fall for an idea; but economy merely wastes them away. _War is the creator, hunger the destroyer, of all great things._ In war life is elevated by death, often to that point of irresistible force whose mere existence guarantees victory, but in the economic life hunger awakens the ugly, vulgar, and wholly unmetaphysical sort of fearfulness for one’s life under which the higher form-world of a Culture miserably collapses and the naked struggle for existence of the human beasts begins.

The double sense of all history that is manifested in man and woman has been discussed in an earlier chapter.[850] There is a private history which _represents_ “life in space” as a procreation-series of the generations, and a public history that _defends and secures it_ as a political “in-form”-ness--the “spindle side” and the “sword side” of being. They find expression in the ideas of Family and of State, but also in the primary form of the house[851] wherein the good spirits of the marriage-bed--the Genius and the Juno of every old Roman dwelling--were protected by that of the door, the Janus. To this private history of the family the economic now attached itself. The duration of a flourishing life is inseparable from its strength; its secret of begetting and conceiving is seen at its purest in the being of breed-strong peasant stock that is rooted, healthy and fruitful, in its soil. And as in the form of the body the organ of sex is bound up with that of the circulation,[852] so the middle of the house in _another_ sense is formed by the sacred hearths, the Vesta.

For this very reason the significance of economic history is something quite different from that of political. In the latter the foreground is taken up by the great individual destinies, which fulfil themselves indeed in the binding forms of their epoch, but are nevertheless, each in itself, strictly personal. The concern of the former, and of family history, is the course of development of the form-_language_; everything once-occurring and personal is an unimportant private-destiny, and only the basic form common to the million cases matters. But even so economics is only a foundation, for Being that is in any way meaningful. What really signifies is not _that_ an individual or a people is “in condition,” well nourished and fruitful, but _for what_ he or it is so; and the higher man climbs historically, the more conspicuously his political and religious will to inward symbolism and force of expression towers above everything in the way of form and depth that the economic life as such possesses. It is only with the coming of the Civilization, when the whole form-world begins to ebb, that mere life-preserving begins to outline itself, nakedly and insistently--this is the time when the banal assertion that “hunger and love” are the driving forces of life ceases to be ashamed of itself; when life comes to mean, not a waxing in strength for the task, but a matter of “happiness of the greatest number,” of comfort and ease, of “_panem et circenses_”; and when, in the place of grand politics, we have economic politics as an end in itself.

Since economics belongs to the race side of life, it possesses, like politics, a customary ethic and not a moral--yet again the distinction of nobility and priesthood, facts and truths. A vocation-class, like an Estate, possesses a _matter-of-course_ feeling for (not good and evil, but) good and bad. Not to have this feeling is to be void of honour, law. For those engaged _in_ the economic life, too, honour stands as central criterion, with its tact and fine flair for what is “the right thing”--something quite separate from the sin-idea underlying the religious contemplation _of_ the world. There exist, not only a very definite vocational honour amongst merchants, craftsmen, and peasants, but equally definite gradations downward for the shopkeeper, the exporter, the banker, the contractor, and even, as we all know, for thieves and beggars, in so far as two or three of them feel themselves as fellow practitioners. No one has stated or written out these customary-ethics, but they exist, and, like class-ethics everywhere and always, they are binding only within the circle of membership. Along with the noble virtues of loyalty and courage, chivalry and comradeship, which are found in every vocational society, there appear clean-cut notions of the ethical value of industry, of success, of work, and an astonishing sense of distinction and apartness. This sort of thing a man _has_--and without knowing much about it, for custom is evidenced to consciousness only when it is infringed--while, on the contrary, the prohibitions of religion which are timeless, universally valid, but never realizable ideals, must be, learned before a man can know or attempt to follow them.

Religious-ascetic fundamentals such as “selfless,” “sinless,” are without meaning in the economic life. For the true saint economics in itself is sinful,[853] and not merely taking of interest or pleasure in riches or the envy of the poor. The saying concerning the “lilies of the field” is for deeply religious (and philosophical) natures unreservedly true. The whole weight of their being lies outside economics and politics and all other facts of “this world.” We see it in Jesus’s times and St. Bernard’s and in the Russian soul of to-day; we see it too in the way of life of a Diogenes and a Kant. For its sake men choose voluntary poverty and itinerancy and hide themselves in cells and studies. Economic activity is _never_ found in a religion or a philosophy, always only in the political organism of a _church_ or the social organism of a theorizing fellowship; it is ever a compromise with “this world” and an index of the presence of a will-to-power.[854]