AGAINST MASS MAN

The Gleaners by Jean-François Millet, 1857. Musée d'Orsay, Paris.

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The modern world speaks incessantly of “freedom,” yet produces men and women who feel increasingly unfree: economically insecure, culturally disoriented, atomized in their neighborhoods, exhausted by the churn of novelty, and resentful of the political theater around them. In this climate, two rival solutions dominate the imagination: on one side, a capitalism that asks us to trust the impersonal logic of markets even when markets corrode the very social bonds that make human life worth living; on the other, a communism, or broader collectivism, that promises justice by concentrating power, dissolving intermediary institutions, and subordinating the person to the plan.

Both, in different ways, share the same mistake. They begin from an impoverished anthropology. They imagine the human being primarily as an economic unit—producer, consumer, beneficiary, statistic—rather than as a moral and spiritual creature whose flourishing depends on duties, loyalties, inherited forms, and a culture capable of shaping virtue. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, describing the hollowing-out he perceived in affluent modern societies, put his finger on the deeper hunger: “After the suffering of decades of violence and oppression, the human soul longs for things higher, warmer, and purer than those offered by today’s mass living habits, introduced as by a calling card by the revolting invasion of commercial advertising, by TV stupor, and by intolerable music.”¹

The point is not to romanticize poverty or repression. It is to recognize that bread alone is not enough and that a political economy that forgets the soul will eventually degrade even the material order it boasts of securing. Wilhelm Röpke, a major critic of both collectivism and a merely technical “economism,” warns precisely against the conceit that markets exhaust society: “the sphere of the market… neither exhausts nor determines society as a whole. The market is only one section of society… possible only because it is part of a larger whole which concerns not economics but philosophy, history, and theology.”²

There is a third way—not a mushy “centrism,” but a principled alternative: a common-good political economy rooted in the nation understood as a moral community, with the family as its first cell; a renewed commitment to property widely held and work dignified; a reassuring of local and religious institutions; and a cultural program aimed at recovering beauty, discipline, and the conditions of virtue.

This vision rejects the modern cult of the State that absorbs everything, and it rejects any “nation” defined as an idea or economic zone. A society cannot be built from individuals floating in space, and it cannot be governed as if human beings were interchangeable units. The most perceptive critics of modernity repeatedly return to the same insight: political health requires intermediate forms—family, parish, guild, neighborhood, local associations—that stand between the solitary person and the centralized state.

Edmund Burke gives the classic statement. Against leftist revolutionary schemes that dissolve inherited attachments in the name of abstract “rights,” he insists that our loves and loyalties are first learned in the near and particular: “To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections.”³ The nation is not a replacement for those loyalties. Rather, it is their extension and guardian.

Burke deepens the point by describing society as a partnership across time, not a contract among the presently living alone: it is “a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.”⁴ A nation worthy of love is, therefore, not simply a market territory or an administrative zone. It is a moral inheritance, from its law and language, right down to its worship, manners, architecture, memory, and shared sense of the admirable.

Joseph de Maistre mocks the liberal revolutionary habit of drafting constitutions for an imaginary and universal “Man” that is detached from real peoples: “The Constitution of 1795, like its predecessors, was made for man. But there is no such thing as man in the world.” He continues, “I have seen Frenchmen, Italians, Russians, etc… But as for man, I declare that I have never in my life met him; if he exists, he is unknown to me.”⁵ This is paradigmatic of the anti-utopian insistence that politics must address human beings as they actually live: in families, nations, and traditions.

A similar observation appears—interestingly—from a scholarly foreword on early conservative thought: the post-revolutionary “reawakening… of an appreciation of these intermediate ties among human beings, with the family and church leading the way.”⁶ The “pulverizing legislation” of revolutionary modernity attacked “patriarchal family, local community, guild, monastery, and other groups and associations intermediate to man and state.”⁷ If this is true politically, it is even more true economically. A nationalist political economy is not primarily a slogan about borders or flags; it is a program for rebuilding the institutions and habits that make national solidarity possible, principally stable family life, dignified work, distributed property, and a moral culture capable of restraining appetites rather than monetizing them.

A people can be materially entertained and still become politically impotent. A people can be legally free and still lack the real independence that comes from property, family stability, and functional community.

A humane political economy requires a serious account of law and moral purpose. Here St. Thomas Aquinas remains indispensable precisely because he refuses to reduce politics to power, economics, or sentiment. For Aquinas, law is not sheer command; it is rational order oriented to a shared end: “Law is nothing else than an ordinance of reason for the common good, made by him who has care of the community, and promulgated.”⁸

Notice the structure. Law presupposes (1) reason, (2) a common good, (3) legitimate authority, and (4) public intelligibility. When any of these are severed, law degenerates into mere technique or coercion. A society that legislates as if it were regulating machines will eventually receive machine-like citizens, citizens that are passive, resentful, and manipulable.

Aquinas is equally direct about the aim of legislation: “the intention of the lawgiver is fixed on the true good, which is the common good.”⁹ A nationalist politics, then, cannot treat the economy as a neutral arena of preference satisfaction. The economy must be judged by whether it supports the common good—whether it enables families to form, children to be educated, neighborhoods to cohere, and citizens to practice the virtues that freedom requires.

This also clarifies why both market absolutism and collectivist planning are ultimately inadequate. The market absolutist says that if exchanges are voluntary, the outcome is legitimate. The collectivist says that if the plan is rational, the outcome is legitimate. Aquinas replies that legitimacy must be measured by the true good of the community and by a law that forms, not merely permits.

In De Regno, Aquinas defines political rule by its end: “the idea of king implies that he be one man who is chief and that he be a shepherd, seeking the common good of the multitude and not his own.”¹⁰ Conversely, then, a tyrant is one who rules over a people for his own good rather than the good of the people. This provides a clean diagnostic for modern systems. An economy becomes tyrannical not only when a dictator appears, but when impersonal structures rule for private good i.e. when labor is treated as disposable, when communities are dismantled for profit, when the family wage becomes impossible, when culture becomes a delivery system for appetite. Tyranny can just as easily be bureaucratic or financial as it can political.

A nationalist political economy begins, therefore, with a demand: structures must serve the common good. That demand includes duties. A healthy national community is not a playground of isolated rights-claims. It is a field of reciprocal obligation in which strong institutions cultivate strong persons.

It is tempting, then, to say that capitalism and communism are opposite poles. In practice, they often function as rival mechanisms for the same outcome: depersonalization.

Röpke describes “mass society” as a condition in which the person loses “features, soul, intrinsic worth, and personality because and in so far as he is immersed in the ‘mass.’”¹¹ This happens not only in centralized political regimes but also in societies where commercial and technological forces dissolve local life into an undifferentiated consumer-culture.

He continues with a description that should unsettle both the technocratic planner and the complacent market celebrant: “men are uprooted and taken out of the close-woven social texture in which they were secure… true communities are broken up in favor of more universal but impersonal collectivities in which the individual is no longer a person in his own right.”¹²

This is the crucial point: a society can be “free” in the narrow legal sense while still producing the social reality of mass man—deracinated, lonely, and easy to govern. And once that condition becomes widespread, citizens begin to crave security over freedom, and the door opens to servility.

Here, Hilaire Belloc’s warning in The Servile State reads like a prophecy. He defines the core danger as a society divided into owners and non-owners and stabilized by state-backed arrangements that guarantee subsistence in exchange for the loss of independence. In The Servile State, he warns essentially that either the institution of property must be restored, or slavery will return.

Belloc’s argument is not that every welfare measure is evil. It is that when property becomes radically concentrated, the “solution” offered will increasingly be a trade: security for freedom—status for contract. He poses a chillingly realistic question: if offered a life-contract guaranteeing wages at the price of freedom, “how many would refuse?” and answers, “Very few would refuse it.”¹³

This is why a nationalist political economy cannot be satisfied with GDP or consumer choice. A people can be materially entertained and still become politically impotent. A people can be legally free and still lack the real independence that comes from property, family stability, and functional community.

Against both market idolaters and state idolaters, the tradition insists on the person—and on the moral ecology that makes persons possible.

The heart of an alternative political economy is not envy of the rich, or romanticization of the poor, or the contra of either of those. It is the conviction that independence requires a material basis, and that human dignity is injured when most people are locked permanently into wage dependence without any realistic path to ownership.

Belloc is precise about what capitalism means in this sense. It is not merely trade or enterprise; it is a structure in which “the ownership and therefore the control of the means of production, is confined to some number of free citizens not large enough to determine the social mass of the State, while the rest have not such property and are therefore proletarian.”¹⁴

This structural definition matters because it clarifies why the meritocracy myth often fails. If the basic condition of the majority is non-ownership, then politics becomes a contest over wages and transfers rather than a project of restoring independence. Indeed, Belloc observes that workers increasingly cease to view ownership as attainable; “they think of themselves as wage-earners.”¹⁵

Chesterton supplies the positive counterpoint. He insists that property is not merely an economic quantity but a civic and spiritual reality: “Property is merely the art of the democracy. It means that every man should have something that he can shape in his own image, as he is shaped in the image of heaven.”¹⁶ A society of owners is a society with citizens capable of standing upright, capable of saying “no,” capable of sustaining local institutions, capable of exercising responsibility rather than merely demanding rights.

This is why the family and the household are not private lifestyle choices but the first school of political economy. Xenophon, long before modern ideology, treats household management, or oikonomia, as a discipline of stewardship and formation. In a striking passage, he notes the social expectation that women be educated chiefly so that “she might see as little, hear as little, and ask as few questions as possible,” while the husband was expected to look after his work.¹⁷

We need not import every ancient social assumption wholesale to learn from the underlying point: a household is a real economic unit with real duties, and a healthy society requires that households have the stability and resources to carry those duties. Modern economies often speak as if the household were merely a consumption node, but the Western tradition speaks of it as stewardship, continuity, and responsibility.

A distributive political economy follows from this. Its goal is not to abolish markets but to discipline markets toward the common good by widening ownership, restraining predatory concentrations, and ensuring that the dignity of work is not sacrificed to profit or administrative convenience.

A nationalist political economy begins where Burke begins: with the “little platoon.” It proceeds through Aquinas, for whom law is an “ordinance of reason for the common good.” It receives its economic urgency from Belloc, who insists that the alternatives resolve into a stark choice: restore property or accept servility. It gains cultural clarity from Röpke, who reminds us that markets are a “section,” not the whole, and that mass society, precisely because it is mass, can grind the person down into a unit rather than a soul. And it hears, in Solzhenitsyn’s severe voice, the warning that comfort without spiritual depth produces weakness: a civilization can be amply supplied and yet inwardly unarmed.

Economic renewal without cultural renewal is futile. If the citizen is shaped by pornography, nihilistic entertainment, and appetite, no policy will save him; he will demand to be entertained, anesthetized, and managed. He will be the cattle they already think him to be.

From these premises, what follows is not a fantasy of instant transformation, but an ordering of loves and a hierarchy of tasks. The household must be rebuilt, not as a lifestyle option, but as the irreducible cell of national continuity, through policies that make family formation eminently materially possible and through a culture that honors duty over appetite. Ownership must be distributed, because the citizen must be secure enough in property to be free in fact, not merely free on paper. The intermediaries of society must be strengthened so that the person is not left naked before Leviathan and so that public life regains texture, loyalty, and moral instruction. Politics itself must recover its proper grammar: authority understood as stewardship rather than extraction, and rule judged by whether it seeks the people’s good rather than private advantage. And beauty must be made public again: architecture, art, education, liturgy, and manners restored to their rightful place as instruments of national form, not dismissed as private taste or optional luxury.

The modern West oscillates between cynicism and frenzy: either nothing matters, or everything is an emergency. The tradition offers a steadier path, rooted in the permanent things, honest about human nature, and confident that renewal is possible because human beings are capable of virtue, indeed made for it. If “the intention of the lawgiver is fixed on the true good, which is the common good,” then the ultimate test of any political economy is not cleverness but fruit: does it make it easier for ordinary people to live truthfully, to form families, to worship, to work with dignity, and to hand down a stable inheritance to those “who are to be born”? That is the nationalist standard—not an ideology of resentment, nor of domination, nor of abstraction, but the patient work of rebuilding a moral community, first in the home, then in the neighborhood, then in the nation, until the nation again deserves to be called a common good.

From this follows a distributive political economy: not a scheme to abolish markets, but a resolve to place markets back under judgment, disciplining them toward the common good by widening ownership, restraining predatory concentrations, and refusing to let the dignity of work be treated as expendable whenever profit or administrative convenience demands a sacrifice. In practice, such a program takes form through a public regime that breaks the spell of bigness—an anti-monopoly seriousness that prevents ownership and cultural power from congealing in a few commercial, financial, or technological hands—while reestablishing labor and wage norms ordered not merely to “productivity,” but to the actual conditions of household formation and the raising of children. It seeks broad-based capital as a necessary part of the architecture: cooperative ownership where fitting, employee ownership where possible, small business formation as a national priority, and local credit institutions that invest in places rather than merely bleeding them dry. And it gives a real preference to the local, shaping procurement, zoning, and tax policy so that community-scale enterprise can survive and flourish instead of being crowded out by a system that rewards pure utilitarian scale and calls the resulting massacre “efficiency.” A common-good political economy requires competent authority, but it also requires limits. The modern error is to see only two options: a centralized state that “solves” everything, or a procedural liberalism that refuses to name the good and therefore cannot defend the social preconditions of its own freedom.

The classical tradition offers a more realistic account. Polybius, analyzing regime forms, notes that: 

“There are six kinds of constitution—the three commonly recognized ones I have just mentioned, and three more which are congenital with them: tyranny, oligarchy, and ochlocracy or mob-rule. In the natural, spontaneous course of events, the first system to arise is monarchy, and this is followed by kingship, but it takes the deliberate correction of the defects of monarchy for it to develop into kingship. Kingship changes into its congenital vice—that is, into tyranny—and then it is the turn of aristocracy, after the dissolution of tyranny. Aristocracy necessarily degenerates into oligarchy, and when the general populace get impassioned enough to seek redress for the crimes committed by their leaders, democracy is born.”¹⁸

The point is not to memorize typologies; it is to recognize that every regime form carries characteristic temptations, and therefore stable politics often requires a mixed constitution—a balance of elements that prevents any one principle from devouring the rest.

Burke’s lament about the collapse of moral and æsthetic restraint belongs here too. A society that sneers at honor, piety, and tradition soon discovers that it cannot govern by calculation alone: “The age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators, has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever.” This is not just romantic grief. It is a warning: when a civilization reduces human motives to interest, it will eventually be ruled by whoever manipulates interest most effectively, whether the bureaucrat, the financier, or the propagandist. A nationalist political economy must therefore recover not only institutional competence but moral formation—citizens who can be governed without being bribed or hypnotized.

Economic renewal without cultural renewal is futile. If the citizen is shaped by pornography, nihilistic entertainment, and appetite, no policy will save him; he will demand to be entertained, anesthetized, and managed. He will be the cattle they already think him to be.

Röpke describes the intellectual and moral dimension of mass society with unsparing clarity:

“thought is becoming shallow, uniform, derivative, herdlike, and tritely mediocre; the growing predominance of the semi-educated; the destruction of the necessary intellectual hierarchy of achievement and function; the crumbling away of the edifice of civilization; and the presumption with which this homo insipiens gregarius sets himself up as the norm and chokes everything that is finer or deeper.”¹⁹

If politics is downstream from culture, then a nationalist project must include cultural disciplines: education that trains taste and judgment, public architecture that embodies national beauty, and a civic life that honors worship, sacrifice, and the inheritance of the dead.

The globalist, commercial culture does not merely sell products; it sells a posture toward reality. It is a culture designed to keep citizens in a permanent state of appetite and distraction, because appetite is governable and distraction is profitable.

A nationalist cultural program is not a call for puritanical grayness. It is a call for natural beauty—for homes and streets that invite reverence rather than assault attention; for art that ennobles rather than degrades; for moral standards that free desire by disciplining it. Solzhenitsyn’s critique of “commercial advertising” and “TV stupor” is, ultimately, a plea for human elevation. The globalist, commercial culture does not merely sell products; it sells a posture toward reality. It is a culture designed to keep citizens in a permanent state of appetite and distraction, because appetite is governable and distraction is profitable. When a people is trained to crave stimulation and despise discipline, it becomes easy to rule: not by persuasion, but by sedatives, incentives, and fear of exclusion. Beauty, in this context, is not decoration. It is resistance. The point can be stated simply: if the human person is made for higher things, then a world order that trains him to live for lower things will eventually produce despair—and despair is politically explosive.

A nationalist political economy does not require hatred of other nations. On the contrary, it presupposes that real peace is easier among peoples who are internally healthy, secure in their identity, capable of self-government, and not compelled to export their disorder abroad.

De Maistre’s mockery of “Man” is relevant again because the most aggressive imperial projects now arrive wearing humanitarian masks. The universal abstractions of our age—“the international community,” “global norms,” “the rules-based order”—are not descriptions; they are claims to authority. They function as a solvent poured on particular loyalties, loyalties to religion, to nation, to locality, to inherited obligations. Under this Hebraic pressure, a people is instructed to treat itself as provisional, negotiable, and morally suspect, while the managers of the system present their own power. The result is a politics in which sovereignty becomes a sin, borders become a scandal, tradition becomes repressive, and any attempt to defend the integrity of a national community is denounced as extremism, precisely because a self-governing people is the one thing a borderless managerial class cannot easily tolerate.

This is also a warning against the modern habit of laundering ambition through moral vocabulary. This world Jewry speaks with a pretense of humanity while practicing the politics of control: it declares itself neutral, rational, benevolent, and rules-based, even as it concentrates decision-making in institutions no citizen can meaningfully reach—boards, courts, agencies, transnational consortia, and the soft-power priesthood of experts. It flatters the public with slogans about openness and progress while quietly converting communities into administrable populations and citizens into compliant stakeholders who will never see a dime. If one wants a definition of contemporary domination, it is not jackboots; it is this, a regime of incentives and penalties, of reputational policing and regulatory strangulation, designed to make resistance too costly and loyalty too quaint to sustain.

A nationalist political economy, then, is best understood not as a mood or a slogan, but as a discipline of order: the deliberate subordination of wealth, technique, and appetite to the ends that justify a common life in the first place. It insists that the nation is not a warehouse of interchangeable labor, nor a bazaar of detached consumers, nor a spreadsheet managed by distant experts, but a communion of persons bound by obligation—an inheritance carried, cultivated, and handed on. It therefore measures success by realities that resist abstraction: whether marriage is attainable without despair, whether children are welcomed without financial panic, whether work grants dignity rather than humiliation, whether ownership is sufficiently widespread that citizens can stand upright, and whether the places people inhabit train reverence rather than cynicism. Such a project cannot be achieved by a single law or election; it is a long campaign of reconstruction that begins with first principles and ends in institutions, habits, and a culture capable of moral self-government.

If there is a practical confidence at the heart of this vision, it is the confidence that the political and economic order is not fated. Structures can be changed; incentives can be reformed; power can be redirected; and a people can recover the capacity for seriousness. A nation that chooses to prefer families over usurious financial abstraction, productive ownership over servile dependence, local vitality over centralized extraction, and public beauty over private degradation is not retreating into the past; it is reclaiming the preconditions of liberty. The modern world’s deepest lie is that nothing higher can be asked of man than comfort and choice. The nationalist alternative answers with a higher realism: that man is capable of loyalty, sacrifice, reverence, and craftsmanship, and that when these are expected again, a people becomes harder to purchase, harder to deceive, and harder to rule from afar. That is not merely an economic program. It is a moral recovery, and it is the only foundation on which a stable, peaceful, and genuinely humane public life can be rebuilt. 

¹ Solzhenitsyn, A World Split Apart

² Röpke, A Humane Economy, p.91-2

³ Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, p.39-40

⁴ Ibid., p.80

⁵ de Maistre, Considerations on France, p. 97

⁶ Nisbet foreword on Bonald, On Divorce, p.ix

⁷ Ibid.

⁸ Aquinas, Summa Theologiæ, I–II, Q.90, Art.4

⁹ Ibid., I–II, Q.92, Art.1

¹⁰ Aquinas, De Regno, II. 13.

¹¹ Röpke, A Humane Economy, p.53

¹² Ibid. p.55

¹³ Belloc, The Servile State, p.140-1

¹⁴ Ibid. p.15

¹⁵ Ibid. p.138

¹⁶ Chesterton, What’s Wrong with the World, I.VI.

¹⁷ Xenophon, Œconomicus, p.97. Concerning the way in which the Athenian girls passed their time before marriage, see Becker's Charicles, vol. ii. p. 422, 475. Breitenbach, Also Xen. Rep. Lac. c. 1, sect. 3.

¹⁸ Polybius, Histories, VI. IV.

¹⁹ Röpke, A Humane Economy, p. 54