The following extract is from Oswald Spenglers Decline of the West.

This is an abridged edition with a new Introduction by H. Stuart Hughes. Oxford University Press, New York, 1991. It makes good reading for those so lost in our current garden of circumstances (facts). XVIII STATE AND HISTORY
THE VESTING OF AUTHORITY

In the historical world there are no ideals, but only facts no truths, but only facts. There is no reason, no honesty, no equity, no final aim, but only facts and anyone who does not realize this should write books on politics let him not try to make politics. In the real world there are no states build according to ideals, but only state that have grown, and these are nothing but living peoples in form. No doubt it is the form impressed that living doth itself unfold, but the impress has been that of the blood and beat of a being, wholly instinctive and involuntary; and as to the unfolding, if it is guided by the master of politics, it takes the direction inherent in the blood; if by the idealist, that dictated by his own convictions in other words, the way of nullity. The destiny question, for States that exist in reality and not merely in intellectual schemes, is not that of their ideal task or structure, but that of their inner authority, which cannot in the long run be maintained by material means, but only by a belief of friend and foe in their effectiveness. The decisive problems lie, not in the working out of constitutions, but in the organization of a sound working government; not in the distribution of political rights according to just

principles (which at bottom are simply the idea that a class forms of its own legitimate claims), but in the efficient pulse of the whole (efficient in the sense that the play of muscle and sinew is efficient when an extended racehorse nears the winning-post), in that rhythm which attracts even strong genius into syntony; not, lastly, in any world-alien moral, but in the steadiness, sureness and superiority of political leadership. The more self-evident all these things are, the less is said or argued about them; the more fully matured the State, the higher the standing, the historical capacity and therefore the Destiny of the Nation. State-majesty, sovereignty, is a life-symbol of the first order. It distinguishes subjects and objects. Strength of leadership, which come to expression in the clear separation of these two factors, is the unmistakable sign of the life-force in a political unity so much so that the shattering of existing authority (for example, by the supporters of an opposed constitutional ideal) almost always results not in this new partys making itself the subject of domestic policy, but in the whole nations becoming the object of alien policy and not seldom forever. .. There is no best, or true, or right State that could possibly be actualized according to plan. Ever State that emerges in history exists as it is but once and for a moment; the next moment it has, unperceived, become different, whatever the rigidity of its legal-constitutional crust. Therefore, words like republic, absolutism, democracy, mean something different in every instance, and what turns them into catchwords is their use as definite concepts by philosophers and ideologues. A history of States is physiognomic and not

systematic. Its business is not to show how humanity advances to the conquest of its eternal rights, to freedom and equality, to the evolving of a super-wise and super-just State, but to describe the political units that really exist in the factworld, how they grow and flourish and fade and how they are really nothing but actual life in form.