| “ | In this conflict it is not merely a question of the national secular State in opposition to the universal ecclesiastical State; wherever we meet universalism there anti-nationalism and anti-individualism are its necessary correlatives. Nor does it need to be conscious universalism, it is sufficient that an idea aims at something absolute, something limitless. Thus, for example, all consistently reasoned Socialism leads to the absolute State. To call Socialists point-blank “a party dangerous to the State,“ as is usually done, is only to give rise to one of those confusions of which our age is so fond. Certainly Socialism signifies a danger to the individual national States, as it does, on the whole, to the principle of individualism, but it is no danger to the idea of the State. It honestly admits its internationalism; its character is revealed, however, not in disintegration, but in a wonderfully developed organisation, copied, as it were, from a machine. In both points it betrays its affinity to Rome. In fact, it represents the same Catholic idea as the Church, although it grasps it by the other end. For that reason, too, there is no room in its system for individual freedom and diversity, for personal originality.
Ce qui lie tous les socialistes, c'est la haine de la liberté, ... as Flaubert says. * He who tears down the outward barriers, puts up inner ones. Socialism is imperialism in disguise; it will hardly be realisable without hierarchy and Primacy; in the Catholic Church it finds a pattern of socialistic, anti-individualistic organisation. |
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| — Houston Stewart Chamberlain, "The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century", 1899 | ||