This article was first published in The Present Age magazine Nov. 2018 Vol.4 No.8

This month we commemorate the Armistice of 11 November 1918 and the end of the First World War, although fighting of various kinds went on in numerous countries for the next few years, and although the 1914-1918 conflict would soon be seen by more far-sighted observers as the ‘first round’ of a conflict that would sooner or later begin again. Anthroposophers are familiar with Rudolf Steiner’s statements about nationalism¹ being a major contributing factor to what was then called the “Great War” and which he usually referred to, more appropriately,  as “the catastrophe”.

Repeatedly over the last seven years or so, since about 2011, one has read or seen in the media, both mainstream and alternative, talk of the struggle between “globalism” and “nationalism”. The former is usually seen in two ways: firstly, socio-economic and geopolitical dimensions are emphasised, such as the establishment by the Anglo-American victors of the Second World War of what is commonly called in the mainstream media “the international rules-based order” of liberal democracy and capitalist economy, by which is usually meant the institutions established since the end of that war (GATT, UN, IMF, World Bank, WTO, NATO, EU et al.) and codes of conduct determined by those institutions. These institutions are often claimed by their supporters to have brought peace, prosperity and stability to the world over the last 70s years – though many in developing countries and in parts of Europe would certainly dispute that. Secondly, “globalism” is sometimes seen in terms of the technological developments that have occurred over this same period and especially since the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s: the emergence of the Internet and the World Wide Web, and the economic consequences of these technological developments across the world. Of course, it is not the case that the global economy only emerged after 1945 or even 1991. Rudolf Steiner was not the only one who was pointing out a hundred years ago that a global economy had already been in existence for decades, and arguably, one could claim that the first signs of the global economy really began to develop in the 16th and 17th centuries with the new awareness of the world as a globe and as Europeans advanced their trade and colonisation projects around the world, which were facilitated by new developments in mathematics and the natural sciences.

The Age of Michael: Archai, Archangels and Angels

To the two factors already referred to above  – wide-ranging legal institutions and economic developments, both supported by new technologies – a third factor should be added, which is not at all referred to in mainstream media discussion of “globalism” but is a key aspect of any spiritual scientific understanding of modern history, namely, the fact that since the late 19th century (specifically the year 1879, referred to by Steiner, and before him, by Johann Heidenberg, also known as Johannes Trithemius of Sponheim, 1462 – 1516) humanity has been passing through a period of history overseen by a spiritual being known to esotericism as the Archangel Michael, who, furthermore, according to Steiner, has been in the process of rising from the rank, or level of consciousness, of  an Archangel to that of an Arché since the beginning of this period.² Traditionally, Archangels functioned as inspirers of human communities, nations, peoples.

Just as an individual has his or her ‘guardian angel’, so communities have a ‘guardian archangel’. The responsibilities of these archangels is to mediate to the communities in their charge tasks for these communities to fulfil through certain individual personalities in these communities who have, as it were, global, pan-human tasks to perform on behalf of humanity’s evolution. These global tasks are determined by the Archai, the rank of spiritual consciousness immediately above that of the Archangels and two levels above that of the Angels. The perspective of the Archai is always global, not national, but the Archai (an old Christian esoteric term) are also known in Anthroposophy as “Spirits of Personality” because of this connection between tasks to be achieved for humanity at large within a certain period in history by particular individuals. We can thus say that the focus of the Archai is on the point and the periphery: the task of individual human beings for humanity. Between point and periphery is the vortex that connects the two, and this vortex is the realm or function of the Archangels who inspire and lead human communities and thus provide the socio-cultural context within which individuals can serve humanity as a whole.³ A vortex is a spiritual form that we can even observe physically in types of wind phenomena, and within the phenomena of the physical Earth, it is in the air, in the wind, that Archangels move and have their being, whereas Angels are associated with the watery element: rivers, lakes, pools. The Archai, however, are active in light. In the past, Michael was always associated with the Sun, as one of seven ‘planetary’ Archangels who had a special relationship to the Archai in that the seven were responsible for supervising smaller periods of historical time (about 350-400 years in length), while the Archai governed larger periods (2160 years). Since the 19th century, Michael has been in the process of rising to the status of Arché, a process likely to be completed by the end of his ‘time regency’ (1879-c.2300). Thus, because Michael has always been “the Archangel of the Sun” and because he is now rising to the rank of the Archai, the Spirits of Personality, who always have a global perspective and who see human individuals as servants of global tasks rather than mere personalities in themselves, our current period of history (1879-c.2300) inevitably has a global, a cosmopolitan, a Sun-like dimension to it. This is why Michael’s concern is the spiritualisation of human thinking.⁴

We can see a similar historical gesture in the previous Age of Michael (c.600-c.200 BC) when great empires emerged in Europe and Asia, and diverse cultures thus encountered each other. But we would be making a great mistake if we assumed that this previous Michael Age was one of peace, prosperity and stability just because it was ‘Michaelic’ and thus cosmopolitan. On the contrary, as well as being an age when all kinds of cultural exchange and mutual learning did indeed go on, an age of great intellectual, spiritual and cultural development (the age of Buddha, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Laozi and Confucius, to name but a few great figures) it was also an age of tremendous conflicts. There were, on the one hand, the wars between the Greeks and the Persians, and on the other hand, the Hellenistic influences that resulted from the Asian campaigns of Alexander the Great to lands as far east as what is today Pakistan, which led directly via the Indo-Greek Gandhara culture to the wonders of Buddhist art and iconography in later centuries. The Macedonian conquest of Greece had effectively closed the curtain on the age of the Greek city states which had reached back far earlier than the Age of Michael. But Alexander’s empire, while cosmopolitan and governed by men married to women of a different race, a practice Alexander had fostered, turned out to be fragile and soon collapsed after his death. A new struggle broke out in the later part of the Age of Michael, in the Mediterranean, between the new, rising powers of Rome and Carthage, a struggle which was not finally determined until 146 BC, a century or so after the end of the Age of Michael. In that year, Rome not only won the final war against its Carthaginian rival, it also definitively defeated the last resistance of the Greek city states, the Achaean League, at the Battle of Corinth. Rome was now the sole superpower in the Mediterranean world, and its outer domination was to last for almost 600 years, but during that period, the Greek spirit and Greek culture steadily permeated Roman civilisation, and eventually, while the western Roman Empire fell to barbarian peoples in the 5th century AD, the eastern (Byzantine) ‘Roman’ Empire, which was thoroughly Greek in spirit, continued for a thousand years.

Kojève

Today, many anthroposophers looking at the current Michaelic age will notice that we are now in its second century; and indeed, after 1979, cosmopolitan influences did indeed seem to be steadily increasing, especially after the end of the bipolar Cold War era. When these influences are true, they proceed individually, from person to person, or from individual realisation and awakening. But they can also proceed in terms of power, as was the case with the conquests of Alexander the Great. From the 1990s until c.2007 the USA was the sole superpower in terms both of ‘hard (military) power’ and ‘soft (cultural) power’ -  its values and its culture. Everything from the music of Madonna, from T-shirts and jeans, skateboards and New York graffiti, Big Apple and Big Mac, the ideas of McKinsey and Ken Wilber, to the new Internet giants of Google, Facebook, and Amazon, almost the entire world of the Web in fact, was driven by economic and financial power and dominated by this unipolar culture that claimed to stand for “globalism”, “the international rules-based order” of liberal democracy and capitalist economy: so-called free trade and free markets.

In the early 1990s this culture of the Anglo-American West claimed it had defeated Communist tyranny just as it had defeated Nazi tyranny in 1945. In his book “The End of History and the Last Man”(1992) the Japanese-American political scientist Francis Fukuyama triumphantly declared, in pseudo-Hegelian fashion, that history was now over and that Anglo-America’s liberal democracy and its capitalist model would now, essentially, go on for ever. Fukuyama’s intellectual hero in the book, the Franco-Russian Marxist philosopher Alexandre Kojève (1902-1968; see pic.below), was an important planner in the EEC bureaucracy in the 1950s and 60s.

Kojève wrote that “the disappearance of Man at the end of History…is not a cosmic catastrophe: the natural World remains what it has been from all eternity. And therefore, it is not a biological catastrophe either: man remains alive as animal in harmony with Nature or given being. What disappears is Man properly so-called – that is, Action negating the given, and Error, or in general, the Subject opposed to the Object… the definitive annihilation of Men properly so-called also means the definitive disappearance of human Discourse (Logos) in the strict sense. Animals of the species Homo sapiens would react by conditioned responses to vocal signals or sign ‘language’, and thus their so-called ‘discourses’ would be like what is supposed to be the ‘language’ of bees. …What would disappear …is not only philosophy  or the search for discursive  Wisdom, but also that Wisdom itself. For in these post-historical animals there would no longer be any [discursive] understanding of the World and of Self.”⁵ (emphasis Fukuyama)

Writing in September 2014, Riccardo Paparusso,  a professor at the Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas in Rome, an institution of the Dominican Order, comments on this in an article titled ‘Kojève’s idea of the end of history: a philosophical key to the European economic crisis’ on the George Soros-network website, opendemocracy.net:  “[This] animalization of humanity extends itself to all the world and it reaches its extreme realization by the planetary affirmation of the American way of life which, according to Kojève, proposes the satisfaction of material needs and, so, the economic aspect, as the very centre of society.” (emphasis – TB) Paparusso points out that Kojève sees the western or Christian idea of time as eschatological, focused on the future and an ultimate telos. When this telos is achieved in a secular world, he says, by the realisation of the ultimate political and philosophical goal – the self-realisation, or ‘freedom’  of the individual,  then society will fall back into the natural cycle and into animal behaviour which is based on the natural cycle, having no more any drive  to attain anything in ‘the future’. Animals are concerned above all with survival and reproduction in the present and their consequent needs for food and shelter. In human terms, this means economic life, which is primarily concerned with providing food, shelter and covering for the needs of the human body.

“How can we explain this paradox?” asks Paparusso. “Why does the potential absolute manifestation of freedom coincide with the return of humanity to its animal level and, therefore, with the absolute denial of freedom? The answer lies in the fact that when humans achieve the potential total affirmation of freedom, they cannot accomplish any authentic action because every action could be only the repetition of events by which the absolute realization of freedom was reached in the first place. Now, if man stops authentically acting, he also stops denying nature. Consequently he is absorbed into the natural space and so falls back to the prehistorical animal, and now economic, level.”

Paparusso is pointing to an all too obvious problem here when he states that this is where we are heading now in the age of economic globalisation and the increasingly financialised global economy that since the period 1770-1850 (the age of Adam Smith, David Ricardo and the five Rothschild brothers⁶) has been dominated by Anglo-American economic thinking and practices. The title of Paparusso’s article implies that Kojève held the key that would enable our escape from a return to a purely economic, ‘animal’ existence – but in fact, he does not. Kojève stood for no such escape. Paparusso finds the solution to the problem of our purely economic i.e. animal ‘future’ -  which is actually no future, because it is only an eternal present, of the kind that the most radical Greens and ‘Gaians’ might subscribe to -  not in the threefold thoughts of the future Aquinas i.e. Rudolf Steiner⁷, which are rooted in an esoteric understanding of the Christian Trinity, but in the abstract economic ideas of the Indian economist and philosopher Amartya Sen (b. 1933), as expressed, for example, in his book Development as Freedom (1999). Sen is one of those academics from a former colonial subject people who has been enthusiastically adopted by the liberal, left wing of the Anglo-American establishment because his erudition and research does not essentially challenge fundamental characteristics of the Anglo-American, financialised global economy and does not do so because it is not rooted in a spiritual perspective of the human being. A lifelong atheist, Sen came  from an Indian elite family with close connections to Rabrindranath Tagore⁸, Sen studied at Cambridge where he joined the exclusive discussion group known as the Cambridge Apostles, which was influenced by secret society practices. He studied under the left-wing British economist Joan Robinson (1903-1983) who would later write books defending Mao Zedong and the Chinese Cultural Revolution. One of the most internationally lauded figures in economics, who won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 1998, Amartya Sen is the Thomas W. Lamont University Professor at Harvard University in the USA. His current and third wife is Emma Georgina Rothschild, a member of the British branch of the Rothschild banking family and also a professor at Harvard and Cambridge (UK) universities. Moreover, from 1998-2015 she served on the board of the United Nations Foundation, launched in 1998 with a donation of $1 billion by US billionaire Ted Turner to support the work of the United Nations. So Riccardo Paparusso, professor of philosophy at the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas in Rome, looks to two non-Anglo-American left-wing academics for ideas about how to get this modern, Anglo-American-dominated world out of its crisis: Alexandre Kojève and Amartya Sen – two men who ended up, respectively, in the embraces of the EEC bureaucracy and of Anglo-American academia. This would only seem to bear out the observation of Rudolf Steiner i.e. the individuality who once was Thomas Aquinas, with regard to the deep-rooted connection between the Catholic Church and left-wing political and economic thinking.⁹

Kojève believed in a “universal and homogenous state” at the “End of History” and in 1945 declared to General Charles de Gaulle: “The period of national political realities is over. This is the epoch of Empires, which is to say of transnational political unities, but formed by affiliated nations.” Many anthroposophers, familiar with Rudolf Steiner’s many statements critical of nationalism, may perhaps agree with what Kojève says here and may think this describes where we are now, in the cosmopolitan Age of Michael. Only larger political units than the nation state, such as the EU, they feel, are able to solve the complex problems we face in this age of globalisation; only such political units are “on the right side of history”, to use that phrase much abused by Barack Obama. In other words, such people may believe that these larger entities are in the “right Michaelic direction”, despite still continuing various undesirable traits such as overcentralised, unaccountable bureaucracy which is all too susceptible to corruption and behind-the-scenes manipulation, as we see in such large entities as the EU, in the USA, in Russia and in China. But these bad habits in the EU will wither away, they argue: the EU, as an apparently non-nationalist, seemingly ‘cosmopolitan’ entity, is therefore on the right lines and should be supported and reformed from within to bring it more in accord with a desired “threefold”, “anthroposophical” and “Michaelic” model. Some Central European anthroposophers familiar with Central Europe’s past centuries of experience of the ‘decentralised’ Holy Roman Empire may perhaps be especially susceptible to this kind of thinking. The problem with it is that it is fundamentally misguided.

Ghosts of the past walking…

Rudolf Steiner called repeatedly for drastic rethinking in Europe after 1918, a revaluation of values, one could even call it. He pointed out that in view of the major spiritual changes that had begun since 1879, with the beginning of the Age of Michael, and since 1900, with the end of the 5000 year-long Kali Yuga, or Age of Darkness, too many people were still stuck in the thinking and social habits of past centuries. If they were not prepared to heed the new knowledge that spiritual science had to offer for a reformation of society that would be in tune with the changes that, since 1879 and 1900, were now happening, only further cataclysms would follow, as indeed they did, in 1939, and in the economic crashes of 1929 and 2008. In a lecture on 14 December 1919 (GA 194)¹⁰ he told his listeners in Dornach three times that major change must come about by the middle of the 20th century i.e. 33 years after 1919, by which time “the forces of human evolution [from before the 15th century] that have been guiding human beings in their progress will be exhausted” and “will reach their ultimate decadence”.

Among those forces from the previous epoch, the 4th Post-Atlantean epoch, the Greco-Latin epoch, were abstract intellectual thinking which in 1919 and still in 1952, continued to dominate academic education in Europe and America, not least in the social sciences, influenced as they were by Marxism and by reactions to Marxism. But the change in thinking that Steiner called for in 1919 had not taken place by the 1950s, and so what happened instead as the negative consequences of that failure, was what he had described in Zurich the year before, on 9 Oct. 1918 (GA 182), in the lecture known as The Work of the Angels In Man’s Astral Body. Here he specifically referred to the year 2000 and spoke of how the angels, seeking to work in accordance with the intentions for humanity of the Spirits of Form, the Exusiai, would have to work compulsively in human etheric bodies asleep at night if human beings were not able to work consciously and in freedom with the angels through the developments of the human astral body. This compulsion would result in negative effects in human culture in the areas of sexuality and birth, in medicine, and in technology. These negative effects had already happened in the three areas mentioned by the year 2000. In the same lecture he said: “If, in some epoch, the men who ought to be vigilant fail in this respect and do not discern what really ought to happen, then nothing real does happen. Instead, the ghost of the preceding epoch walks-as the ghosts of the past are walking in many religious communities today, and as the ghost of ancient Rome still haunts the sphere of jurisprudence.” [emphasis – TB] Today, the ghost of the 4th epoch is walking amongst us in education, in the cultural sphere: the spirit of abstraction, the spirit of intellectual thinking.

As a result of our failure to change our thinking sufficiently over the past 100 years, the ghost of the Age of Gabriel is also walking amongst us – the age that preceded our current Age of Michael. The Age of Gabriel (1510-1879) was one in which all those impulses that have to do with incarnation into physical reality took precedence. This was therefore the age in which natural science emerged and flourished in the West and it did so on the philosophical basis of materialism that had been laid during the Middle Ages, above all, in European culture, by the Roman Catholic Church. Through its anathemas at the 8th Ecumenical Council in Constantinople in 869, the Church denied to the mass of the population their own experience of the spiritual world and subjected them to the increasingly abstract intellectual dogmas of the Church during the following centuries in the Middle Ages. In the Age of Gabriel human beings thus more and more came to identify with the physical part of their existence – with their physical bodies, with the lands and nature in which they lived, with their own language. To identify with what is earthly and the physical means to identify with what is separate, as the physical plane of reality is intrinsically separate and distinct in comparison with the flow and interpenetration that is reality in the spiritual world. It was thus in the Age of Gabriel that nationalism, quite naturally, made its appearance. The more ancient value of patriotism, a positive love of country, increasingly gave way between 1500 and 1900 to nationalism – a boastful assertion of the superiority and rights of one’s own country vis-a-vis other countries and peoples. This would become a key contributory factor in the events that led to the world wars of the 20th century.

However, this does not mean that it is wise for those who understand this process, those who can see how the nationalism that had to emerge in the Age of Gabriel must give way to the cosmopolitanism, the supranationalism, of the Age of Michael, should now demand that those who do not understand what has been happening must change their ways and habits of thought; nor should they seek to force them to do so by overt or covert means, as the elites of the Anglo-American countries and the elites driving forward economic globalisation and the EU project have been doing for decades and with ever greater intensity. Most of those who do this demanding and forcing are behaving with the same automatic unconscious conformity to the spirit of the age as those in the Age of Gabriel who embraced and promoted nationalism. They will not see for instance how the forces preparing for the incarnation of Ahriman are doing so both through the advocacy of nationalism, as Steiner said in 1919¹¹ would be the case, and also through the aid of what Steiner called a “false socialism”¹², a false sense of brotherhood, driven luciferically from on high. The League of Nations, the USSR, the United Nations, the European Union – all of these bodies, though perhaps seemingly different on the surface, are examples of “false socialism”. They are not institutions of true brotherhood which have arisen out of the changes in the hearts and minds of millions of individuals. They are attempts to impose upon those many millions, to force upon them, overtly and covertly -  not least by economic pressures and fears of war -  a socio-economic and political order from above, a social order dictated and driven by an elite, a cadre.

Forced modernisation

“Kojève”, writes Robert Howse in the journal Policy Review (2004) “appears to have believed that forced ‘modernisation’ was the only, or the fastest, means of bringing Russia to the point where it might be capable of a peaceful transformation into a regime of rights.”¹³ This gesture of “forced modernisation” was the gesture of Peter the Great in the Age of Gabriel and the also gesture of Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin and Mao, amongst others, in the Age of Michael. It always results in disaster, sooner or later, because it seeks to ignore and bypass the individual human heart and conscience. It treats people as objects and seeks only to enforce the will of the elite whose agenda is the “modernisation”. When the German government tells tiny villages deep in the German countryside that they must accept 1000 “asylum seekers” from many different countries into their community, the government ought not to be surprised if it meets resistance to its high-handed attitude. In the hamlet of Sumte, in Lower Saxony, where this happened in 2015, there was actually little or no resistance but in other parts of Germany, it has been a different story, as political developments over the past three years have shown. After all, many of the ‘asylum seekers’ have been fleeing from wars  – in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya – , created by the US and the UK in pursuit of their global will to power. The German people, as citizens of a puppet state, were expected by their German masters to pick up the human pieces after disasters caused in other countries by the puppeteers. The chief local agent of the puppeteers, Angela Merkel, who, only a couple of years before, was told that her American ‘friends’ had been secretly monitoring her mobile phone (!), declared that her people would unfurl a Willkommenskultur: “Wir schaffen das”, (we’ll manage it) she said. This was an example of “forced modernisation” – the forced opening up, or ‘cosmopolitanisation’, of villages and towns across Germany. It was part of the long-term undermining of the German and not only the German nation state, but all EU states, the removal of borders, the encouragement of the free movement of people under the guise of economic rationality, the constant encouragement in media advertisements and dramas of mixed-race marriages and the doctrine of ‘multiculturalism’, the ongoing, hectoring propaganda directed at the native population in all kinds of ways, some very subtle, some much less so,  that they must accept an influx of immigrants who come from cultures very different from their own  – all in order gradually to break down the old states, the heritage of the Age of Gabriel, and to dissolve the even older, relatively mono-ethnic make-up of these states and thus to facilitate the creation of a continental ‘super-nation’ state called ‘Europe’ with a single centre of authority and focused on a single colour (blue) and a single empty circle of identical stars drawn from the Catholic Church’s Marian halo.

This is no conspiracy theory; in just a few hours on the Web you can soon find plenty of solid evidence dating back to the 1920s, to Count Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi’s plans for a “Paneuropa”, a United States of Europe which would include a new mixed race of Europeans ruled by a new mixed-race aristocracy. One can look into the writings and activities of H. G. Wells¹⁴ and the British historian Arnold J. Toynbee in the 1930s -  Toynbee (below) was a member of the Lord Milner’s Round Table group – and discover that western elites were literally keen to destroy nation states and subsume them not into a threefold social organism but either into continental states or a single world state.

In an address to a conference in Copenhagen in 1931 that was published in International Affairs (November 1931), the journal of the Royal Institute of International Affairs that was founded by Milner’s disciples, Toynbee said to his fellow elitist geopoliticians:  “It is just because we are really attacking the principle of local sovereignty that we keep on protesting our loyalty to it so loudly. The harder we press our attack upon the idol, the more pains we take to keep its priests and devotees in a fool’s paradise—lapped in a false sense of security which will inhibit them from taking up arms in their idol’s defence…. Our political task in our generation is to cast the abomination out, to cleanse the temple and to restore the worship of the divinity to whom the temple rightfully belongs. In plain terms, we have to re-transfer the prestige and the prerogatives of sovereignty from the fifty or sixty fragments of contemporary society to the whole of contemporary society — from the local national states by which sovereignty has been usurped, with disastrous consequences, for half a millennium, to some institution embodying our society as a whole. In the world as it is today, this institution can hardly be a universal Church. It is more likely to be something like a League of Nations. I will not prophesy. I will merely repeat that we are at present working, discreetly but with all our might, to wrest this mysterious political force called sovereignty out of the clutches of the local national states of our world. And all the time we are denying with our lips what we are doing with our hands…”(emphasis – TB) Does this not sound like the voice of a prince of the Vatican from the 15th century bemoaning the resistance of turbulent kings and princes to the Universal Church’s attempts to dictate to them?

King Philip of Macedon, the father of Alexander the Great, tried something similar on a smaller scale in Greece, and in a more primitive manner, during the previous Age of Michael, when he sought to subjugate the Greek city states to his will, seeking to create, in effect, a single Greece. The result then was, predictably, conflict and war: Sparta revolted against the Macedonian dominance of Greece, and Alexander’s cosmopolitan empire soon broke up after his death. Today, we see that the resistance against this top-down, forced ‘modernisation’ of culture, politics and ethnicity is taking the form of right-wing identity politics, which mirrors the gender, minorities, ecology and sexual identity politics that has more or less replaced the old, economy-based “solidarity-with-the-working-class” focus of the left wing. This kind of top-down ‘forced modernisation’ – whether it comes from the Catholic Curia and the Society of Jesus, from Peter the Great, from Soviet commissars or EU and UN bureaucrats or from Anglosphere bankers and global capitalists – is actually the consequence of the spiritual crime of the Council of 869 – the crime against the individual human spirit. Cosmopolitanism in the Age of Michael is not to be achieved this way, by overt and covert action from above. It can only become real through change in the individual spirit and soul  – achieved by individuals themselves.

Notes

1. See Karl Heyer, Rudolf Steiner über den Nationalismus (Perseus Verlag, 1993).
2. See R. Steiner, The Archangel Michael – His Mission and Ours, (Anthroposophic Press, 1994).
3. See C.G. Harrison, The Transcendental Universe (Lindisfarne Pres, 1993), lect.2.
4. See n. 2, pp. 52f. and p. 225f.
5. See  F. Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, pp. 311-312 and A. Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (1980), p. 160.
6. Adam Smith (1723-1790), Scottish economist and philosopher, author of The Wealth of Nations (1776); David Ricardo (1772-1823), Anglo-Jewish political economist, author of Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817), friend of James Mill, Jeremy Bentham and Thomas Malthus; Nathan, James, Salomon, Carl, Amschel were the five sons of Mayer Amschel  Rothschild (1744-1812) of Frankfurt; they ran closely coordinated banking operations in the five cities London, Paris, Vienna, Naples and Frankfurt respectively and were at the peak of their power in the 1830s-1850s.
7. See T.H. Meyer, Rudolf Steiner’s Core Mission: The Birth and Development of
    Spiritual-Scientific Karma Research (Temple Lodge, 2010).
8. Rabrindranath Tagore (1861-1941) Indian polymath, poet, musician, artist. A
friend of Sen’s family, he apparently gave Sen the name Omerto (Amartya)
which means ‘immortal’ in Bengali.
9. See R. Steiner, lect. of 18.7.1916 (GA 169).
10. See Ideas for a New Europe – Crisis and Opportunity for the West (Rudolf
Steiner Press, 1992).
11. See R. Steiner lec. 1.11.1919 (GA 191) in The Influences of Lucifer and
      Ahriman (Anthroposophic Pres, 1993)
12. See n. 1, pp. 123-130.
13. Robert Howse, ‘Kojève’s Latin Empire’, in the journal Policy Review at:
https://www.hoover.org/research/kojeves-latin-empire
14. See H.G. Wells, The New World Order (1940).