THE ÆSTHETICS OF COMMAND

Volkshalle Model, 1939

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Regimes do not rule only by statute. They rule by habit, and habit is formed first by environment. Long before the citizen can name the principles of his political order, he is being trained by its streets and buildings, by what is monumental, what is cramped, what is permitted to endure, and what is allowed to look temporary and fleeting. This education is constant and mostly unconscious. It teaches, often without ever announcing itself, what deserves honor, what deserves shame, and what deserves no attention at all.

This is why architecture is never just architecture. It is the most public of the arts. It forms the theater in which all other arts and actions appear. Langbehn captures the basic intuition succinctly: “Architecture is the axis of the fine arts,” and when a people loses it, the whole cultural order splinters into specialization, imitation, and a frantic rummaging through styles with no style of its own.¹ The line is worth lingering over: an axis is not an ornament. It is what holds the parts together and gives them a direction.

Modernity’s characteristic mistake is to deny this, and then to suffer the consequences while pretending they are accidental. It insists that the beautiful is subjective or relative, that public form is a matter of mere preference, and, most damning, that civic space is value-neutral infrastructure. And then it is surprised—genuinely surprised—when the built world produces citizens who are æsthetically illiterate: men and women trained to accept incoherence, to treat scale as aggression, to distrust hierarchy as such, to prefer novelty to nobility, and to confuse shock with awe.

The classical tradition begins from the opposite premise. Form is intelligible. Proportion is not a private whim. Beauty, rather than a mood, is an order that the mind can learn and the soul can be habituated to recognize. Vitruvius makes this almost programmatic: architecture, for him, rests on a small set of governing principles—order, arrangement, eurythmy, symmetry, propriety, and economy. What matters is how he immediately explains them. Order is the discipline of measure. The parts must receive their due proportions, and the whole must cohere by reference to a standard. He imagines the work beginning from selected modules taken from its own members and then scaled upward so the total structure corresponds to that internal rule. Arrangement is the right placing of things—an intelligible disposition that produces an “elegance of effect” suited to the building’s character—and he treats it as inseparable from the ways a work is conceived and presented (plan, elevation, perspective), which themselves depend on a combination of painstaking reflection and inventive problem-solving. Eurythmy names the felt rightness of proportion—height suited to breadth, breadth to length—while symmetry is the deeper agreement that relates parts to whole by a chosen standard, and he illustrates it by the analogies of the human body as well as by the practical modular calculations used across different crafts. Propriety then gives the tradition its moral spine: a work achieves it when it is authoritatively built on approved principles, and this can arise from prescription (the right kind of temple for the right kind of god), from usage (an approach that matches the dignity of an interior; a refusal to mix orders in ways that spoil the effect), and from nature (healthy sites for sanctuaries, and orientations of rooms to light that fit their purpose). Finally, economy is not mere cost-cutting but rational stewardship: matching materials and siting to what is actually available, avoiding needless expense, and solving constraints with practical substitutes rather than demanding luxuries indifferent to place.² Read straight through, this is an excellent civic psychology. A people trained to live among measure, standard, fittingness, and propriety will find those categories thinkable in law; a people trained to live among arbitrariness and visual insolence will, in time, experience propriety itself as an imposition until public order is redescribed as oppression simply because it is order.

The æsthetics of command is not, at root, a question about one architect or one style. It is a question about whether a civilization still believes that authority can be made visible as something other than raw force, and whether the citizen can be educated—quietly, daily, almost without noticing—into reverence for measure, rank, duty, and limit.

The glass box is the signature architecture of the global managerial elite: the class that prefers spaces that could be anywhere precisely because it belongs nowhere in particular.

Classicism is often caricatured as nostalgia or austerely administrative by the modernists: columns to support people who faint at the sight of new things. That is a presentist sneer, and it is also an evasion. The classical orders are less a “look” and more an all too important kind of grammar. Their force is precisely that they bind transcendentals like beauty to necessities like law so that the building can be both human and authoritative, both encouraging expression and obedience.

Notice what Vitruvius’s set of principles excludes. It excludes the modern habit of treating parts as sovereign, the perverse celebration of fragmentation under any guise of authenticity. It excludes the cult of the arbitrary. It excludes the idea that a building should be a public toleration of the architect’s psyche. And it excludes the democratic fantasy that hierarchy is an insult.

Even propriety, the most priggish-sounding of Vitruvius’s terms, is defined with almost juridical sobriety. Form should match function and meaning. It means one cannot pretend that a temple for one god is just as suitable for another. And it further means that one cannot swap the peculiarities of one order into another without spoiling the effect, because traditions are definitionally averse to interchangeability.

This is exactly why architectural movements like classicism have always been attractive to states that wish to look legitimate. Legitimacy, after all, is authority that appears as rightful order rather than mere dominance. A city that builds classically is trying, whether it knows it or not, to clothe power in intelligibility—Augustus after civil war, Charlemagne’s imperial renewal, Napoleon's Roman theater, even modern projects like Albert Speer’s planned Germania. In each case, classical form is recruited to make authority appear as proportionate, continuous, and therefore rightful.

But the point can be pressed further: in the classical view, æsthetic education is political education. Plato, writing in the Laws, offers a blunt articulation: the “first education should be through music,” because music is the “orderly channelling of passions man shares with beasts.”³ The issue is not taste. The issue is instead whether the passions will be brought into harmony or left to become tyrannical within the soul. In modern liberal societies, we are shocked by the thought that a city might truncate and even censor the arts for the sake of civic virtue, because we assume politics demands almost nothing of citizens. Plato’s frame is harsher: if the city is serious, it cannot pretend that art is innocent.

Architecture is music slowed into matter. A regime that surrenders public form to ugliness is not neutral. It is pushing the citizen, daily, into disorder.

Modernism did not merely propose new shapes. It proposed a new metaphysic: that history is emancipation from inherited forms, constraint is oppression, man is most authentic when unbound, and the future is morally superior simply by being later.

Langbehn’s critique targets precisely this spiritual posture. He describes an age in which science splinters into specialization, epoch-making figures vanish, and the arts “lack monumentality and thus their best effect.”⁴ The “democratizing, leveling, atomizing spirit of the century” expresses itself æsthetically in exactly the way one would expect: in style-hopping without style, in the refusal of hierarchy, in the inability to produce public forms that command assent rather than mere attention.

This is why the modern city so often looks like a denial of the city. Its streets do not culminate; its buildings do not address one another; its monuments, when they exist, are embarrassed about being monuments. The result is not freedom, but instead a cultural and spiritual homelessness, a public realm that cannot teach citizens what they are for, because it no longer knows what it is for.

What anti-modernism insists on is not a fetish for the past, but a refusal to grant moral authority to novelty as such. It refuses to call the rejection of form by any euphemism. It insists that civilization requires boundness: that the citizen must be re-tied to measure, to inherited standards, to the hard truth that not every desire is dignified simply because it exists.

This is also why modernist defenses of authenticity ring hollow among those whose eyes are turned toward civilization inheritance. The modern city is not more authentic. It is more interchangeable. The glass box is the signature architecture of the global managerial elite: the class that prefers spaces that could be anywhere precisely because it belongs nowhere in particular. Set the same towers in Boston, Dubai, Frankfurt, Paris, or London and nothing essential changes. They are designed to accommodate any ideology, sell any product, and house any transient workforce without ever confessing what a people is or what a place means. This is the built environment of a race for whom placelessness has become a matter of policy, no standard is binding, and every inheritance is treated as an obstacle to be value-engineered away.

Classicism, by contrast, is an intelligible form that claims the right to educate. It does not ask permission to be authoritative. It presents order as a public good that the citizen can see, inhabit, and imitate.

Any serious treatment of such æsthetics must confront Albert Speer as an icon and case study that forces clarity about what is being praised when one praises monumentality.

Speer’s central intuition, that architecture can manufacture awe, synchronize bodies, and make the regime feel inevitable, is not unique to him. It is a standing possibility of the art. But Speer makes it explicit, systematic, and inseparable from a twentieth-century project of total mobilization. 

“Ruin value” intensifies the point. By this, I mean the deliberate designing of public works so that, after decades or centuries of decay, they would still present themselves as noble and symbolically potent rather than collapsing into rubble or becoming mere industrial wreckage. To build for ruins is, in one register, to reject the modern cult of disposability, to insist that the public realm should not be made of materials and forms that age into trash. Vitruvius himself ties economy to a sober management of materials and site, but in Speer the desire to bequeath ruins often functions as a path to legitimacy: the future admiration of our remains speaks to our rulership in the present.

Classicism, by contrast, is an intelligible form that claims the right to educate. It does not ask permission to be authoritative. It presents order as a public good that the citizen can see, inhabit, and imitate.

Neoclassicism, then, can, and in a time like ours must, be enlisted in projects that are civilizational in scope. The question, then, is not whether one may recover classical form, but on what terms we draw the line. This architectural movement will be reattached to the classical insistence on measure, limit, and the moral education of free citizens, sure, but let us not forget its role in domination, be it the domination of a skyline or of an oppressive force from whom we seek to liberate the unawakened masses.

Modernism is not wrong because it is new. It is wrong because it dissolves the visible conditions of order. Speer is not great because he is grand—though he is. He is great because he exposes how grandeur, unmoored from restraint, becomes a political technology. If æsthetics is not merely decoration but political pedagogy, then architecture must be at the regime’s front of mind. It is the one civic art that speaks in mass, proportion, and permanence. It habituates the citizen’s eye, and through the eye, the soul. Plato is unembarrassed about this, insisting that delight in certain rhythms, postures, and songs assimilates the person to what he delights in, and therefore the lawgiver cannot be indifferent to æsthetic formation. The same point applied to the built world is almost too obvious to mention: we become the kind of people who can live comfortably inside the forms we normalize.

Return, then, to Albert Speer: a modern figure who more than most recognized the political power of classical form and attempted to wield it at continental scale. It is precisely because Speer’s work is morally radioactive by most Western accounts that it makes a useful diagnostic instrument. He demonstrates, with a clarity almost unbearable, what moderns often deny: that monumental classicism can produce obedience and understanding, and that architectural form can be used to build up legitimacy, especially in a society whose spiritual and civic muscles have already atrophied from Weimar decadence.

Speer’s genius lies in his grasp of command as an æsthetic experience. His projects are not merely big. They stage the citizen as small. The individual is invited to perceive himself as a unit inside a larger body. This is why size in this tradition is not a vulgar craving for bigness but an attempt to make the state feel like fate. Here we should introduce a distinction the anti-modernist needs if it wishes to be serious: there is a difference between monumentality that dignifies and monumentality that crushes.

Classical architecture can dignify because it places the person inside an intelligible order, one in which the whole is higher than the part, but the part is still recognized as a part. The best classicism has a human logic: it can be read; it can be learned; it implies a rational world. Vitruvius’s talk of proportion and standard is not trivial. It implies that the city should be comprehensible and reasoned, not merely asserted. In this respect, classical form is anti-modern less because it hates novelty as such and more because it hates arbitrariness—the modern belief that the built world is merely an arena for self-expression or economic throughput.

This gives us a more mature anti-modernism: one that does not merely replace modern glass with classical stone and call it a counterrevolution. Speer’s case forces the question: What end does your order serve? And here Plato returns with a vengeance. He argues that people are harmed or benefited by what they take pleasure in. He even praises the audacity of a lawgiver who would be firm about æsthetic education, capable of mandating what is correct in music and refusing innovation that corrupts the young. Translate that into architecture and you get an unfashionable but unavoidable proposition: a regime that wishes to endure must be willing to say, “These forms elevate; those forms degrade.” Modernism refuses to say this because it fears metaphysics; liberalism refuses because it fears judgment; capitalism refuses because it fears constraint. The anti-modernist, if he is not merely a contrarian, must be willing to make discriminations.

Modernism is not wrong because it is new. It is wrong because it dissolves the visible conditions of order.

So what is the legitimate use of the Speerian insight? It is, first, the recognition that public architecture must be public in meaning. It cannot be a private prank at civic scale. The courthouse, parliament, cathedral, and war memorial are not the places for whimsical novelty. 

Second, it is the recognition that ruin and memory matter. Even where one disagrees with ruin value as a programmatic obsession, the underlying intuition is sound: a civilization should build as though it expects to be remembered. Modernism’s disposable æsthetics—its contempt for ornament, its love of temporary materials, its cult of planned obsolescence—teaches the citizen to expect transience, and therefore to live as though the permanent is not real.

Third, and most importantly, it is the recognition that classicism must be morally anchored. If the classical revival becomes merely an æsthetic of domination, it will replicate the modern illness in a different key: it will treat the city as material for will. The true anti-modern alternative is not the substitution of one style for another, but the restoration of a hierarchy of ends in which architecture serves worship, family, and civic virtue—rather than propaganda, consumption, or managerial convenience. That is why the best classical principles remain Vitruvius’s: order and symmetry disciplined by propriety and economy; grandeur disciplined by appropriateness.

In other words: the lesson of Speer is not “build like Speer.” The lesson is that architecture can command—and therefore must be handled like a weapon. The anti-modernist is right to reject the modern city and its fragmentation. The goal is the city as formative order: a built environment in which beauty trains the eye toward truth, and permanence trains the will toward responsibility.

Modernity’s deepest lie is anthropological. It says that man is a consumer before he is a citizen, more still a body before he is a soul. That lie becomes visible in modernist architecture with its contempt for proportion, the suspicion of ornament, the preference for abstraction, and the worship of novelty. In such a city, people do not merely live. They are re-made, habituated to ugliness, trained to accept this impermanence, and coached into thinking that the public realm belongs to nobody in particular.

If a civilization delights in deformity, it becomes deformed. If it delights in ordered beauty, it is at least given a chance to become ordered within. The neoclassical tradition, when it remembers its own principles, offers a way capable of expressing hierarchy, civic seriousness, and reverence, not because it is old, but because it is intelligible.

Yet one last temptation remains. That is, the temptation to treat classical form as a shortcut to greatness. Aristotle reminds us that great public works can be instruments for keeping the ruled poor and without leisure. The lesson is not that building is bad, but that building is never innocent. A politics that loves beauty must love justice more; otherwise it will use beauty as an opiate or a lash.

So the conclusion is necessarily a call to build again as if the city were worth inhabiting, and as if posterity were real. Recover order, symmetry, and propriety, not as nostalgia, but as a discipline. Reject modernism not only because it is ugly, but because it is metaphysically dishonest and perverse in its refusal to confess what man is for. And if we must speak of the æsthetics of command, let it be command first of the self and the recovery of a public taste capable of saying no to novelty, to ugliness, to the thin gruel of the disposable.

¹ Langbehn, Rembrandt as Educator (1890), trans. Thomas Dunlap, in Volume 5: Wilhelmine Germany and the First World War, 1890–1918, German History in Documents and Images (German Historical Institute)

² Vitruvius, The Ten Books on Architecture, trans. Morris Hicky Morgan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: Humphrey Milford; Oxford University Press, 1914), 13–16. 

³ Plato, The Laws of Plato, trans. Thomas L. Pangle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 406.

⁴ Langbehn, Rembrandt as Educator