Who is Thomas Carlyle? And why did people stop reading him?
Once widely acknowledged as among the very greatest 19th-century men of letters—a major interlocutor for Charles Dickens, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Walt Whitman—this essayist, historian, and philosopher (1795–1881) is now little read outside of two small categories of devotees. One consists of scholars of the literature and culture of Victorian Britain, who view the “Sage of Chelsea” as crucial to an understanding of the period. These may still assign their students excerpts—probably not more than that—from some of Carlyle’s most famous works, such as Past and Present; On Heroes, Hero-Worship, & the Heroic in History; or Sartor Resartus. This is to be expected.
What is surprising, however, is that the other group still enthusiastically reading Carlyle are ideologues of the far right. To fully understand how this writer dead a 150 years ago became a cult figure among today’s Fascists, one needs to go back at least as far as the waning days of World War II.
In Hitler’s final hours in his bunker, he “was reading from his favorite book, Carlyle’s History of Frederick the Great.” In that nearly century-old book (as first revealed by historian Hugh Trevor-Roper in his 1947 bombshell The Last Days of Hitler), the Führer read how Frederick vowed to commit suicide with poison, if he could not save Prussia from what seemed at the time imminent military defeat. “At this touching tale, said Goebbels, ‘tears stood in the Fuehrer’s eyes.’” Hitler and Goebbels subsequently consulted two horoscopes, one for the German Republic, one for Hitler himself—along with Carlyle’s 1865 book—to arrive at the prediction that, despite all the bad military news lately coming into the Führerbunker, Germany would shortly “rise to greatness again.”
“Such were the incidents which enlivened the dreary hours of waiting in the underground Bunker of the Reich Chancellery,” Trevor-Roper dryly observes. “The horoscopes,” however, “which had so accurately prophesied the past, were less reliable for the future.” And neither Hitler, nor Carlyle’s reputation as a wise sage, were to survive much longer.
Once you’ve pictured Hitler and Goebbels using Carlyle’s book as a kind of Fascist Ouija board to foretell a successful thousand-year Reich … you can’t unsee it.
To most of us, that Carlyle was so beloved by the leader of the Nazi party is, at the least, a questionable mark against the Victorian thinker. But not, it would seem, to the man who is likely the single most devoted Carlyle superfan of our day: Curtis Yarvin. “I am a Carlylean. My worship of Thomas Carlyle, the Victorian Jesus, is no adolescent passion—but the conscious choice of a mature adult,” ringingly declares Yarvin in his 2009 Amazon ebook Moldbug on Carlyle. (Yarvin sometimes blogs and writes online as Mencius Moldbug.) “I will always be a Carlylean, just the way a Marxist will always be a Marxist.”
And what does this Carlylean do when he is not rereading “the Victorian Jesus”? Yarvin is “often cited as the ‘house philosopher’ of the New Right,” per Politico, in an article about “The Seven Thinkers and Groups That Have Shaped JD Vance’s Unusual Worldview.” And The Verge has reported that “no one online has shaped Vance’s thinking more” than Yarvin.
Thus, Yarvin—and, through him, arguably, Carlyle—has now emerged as a significant source of ideas for the present administration. This is alarming because, as The Guardian reports, “For years, Yarvin has consistently held to a number of explicitly anti-democratic beliefs: republican self-government has already ended; real power is exercised oligarchically in a small number of prestigious academic and media institutions he calls the Cathedral; and a sclerotic democracy should be replaced by a strict hierarchy headed by a single person whose role is that of a monarch or CEO.”
Yarvin came to broader attention this January when he was interviewed for the New York Times Magazine by David Marchese, who helpfully unearthed some of Yarvin’s more jaw-dropping past remarks. For example, of the US Civil War, Yarvin offers an unorthodox interpretation: “It is very difficult to argue that the War of Secession made anyone’s life more pleasant, including that of freed slaves.” Or take the case of the Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik, a white supremacist who killed 77, many of them children: “If you ask me to condemn Anders Breivik … but adore Nelson Mandela, perhaps you have a mother you’d like to [expletive].” (His point apparently being that Breivik is no worse a terrorist than Mandela was.) And most recently, Ava Kofman’s June 2 New Yorker profile of Yarvin revealed, among other details, that his ex-fiancée managed to get him “to stop using the N-word, at least around her,” and that, confronting the problem of homelessness in San Francisco, Yarvin has written that it will be necessary to find “a humane alternative to genocide,” an outcome that “achieves the same result as mass murder (the removal of undesirable elements from society) but without any of the moral stigma.”
So how did this champion of Anders Breivik and of the Confederacy and of humanely-genociding the unhoused find his way to Thomas Carlyle? Or, perhaps more worryingly, what in the pages of Carlyle sent Yarvin speeding toward violent white supremacists and ruthless enslavement?
Once, Carlyle was actually widely admired by those on the left. In the 1830s and ’40s, Carlyle’s perspicacious critique of capitalism’s “cash nexus” brought him many progressive admirers, including Whitman and Friedrich Engels. But just a decade later, Carlyle’s later work—beginning with 1849’s “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question” (subsequently retitled to make it more racist: don’t ask) and 1850’s Latter-Day Pamphlets—veered in a highly reactionary direction.
Still, notwithstanding his turn to overt racism and authoritarianism, Carlyle by and large managed to retain his status as a respected Victorian “sage.” He was admired for the originality of his literary style, which Henry David Thoreau characterized as “resound[ing] with emphatic, natural, lively, stirring tones, muttering, rattling, exploding, like shells and shot.” At least, until the mid-20th century.
But even before Hitler’s misty-eyed endorsement of Carlyle in the bunker, there were concerns that he was, in certain respects, proto-Fascistic. In fact, the idea was already circulating as early as the 1930s, as worldwide Fascism was rising to power. In 1933, Sir Herbert Grierson, the Knight Professor of English Literature at the University of Edinburgh, published a book, Carlyle and Hitler, in which he observed, “The feelings with which Russian and Italian and German turn appealingly to the Hero show the same blend of religious mysticism and economic demand as Carlyle felt and proclaimed.”
A couple years later, in 1935, Bertrand Russell published his essay “The Ancestry of Fascism,” in which he placed Carlyle in a lineage with Johann Fichte and Nietzsche as among the most significant intellectual foundations of 20th-century ultranationalism and Fascism. Russell argues that according to Fichte’s creed of nationalism, as articulated in his 1807 “Addresses to the German Nation,”
There is to be no external commerce, beyond what is absolutely unavoidable. There is to be universal military service: everybody is to be compelled to fight, not for material wellbeing, not for freedom, not in defence of the constitution, but under the impulsion of “the devouring flame of higher patriotism, which embraces the nation as the vesture of the eternal, for which the noble-minded man joyfully sacrifices himself, and the ignoble man, who only exists for the sake of the other, must likewise sacrifice himself.”
And, because “there is no objective criterion of ‘nobility’ except success in war,” therefore something close to a continual state of war “is the necessary outcome of this creed.”
Fichte’s ideas culminated most evidently in Nietzsche, Russell argues, but Carlyle was a close second. Carlyle’s major “heroes” included Oliver Cromwell, Frederick the Great, José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia (the dictator of Paraguay), and Edward John Eyre (the English governor of Jamaica, who brutally suppressed the Morant Bay rebellion of 1865). Of such men, Russell points out, “all that need be said is that their one common characteristic was a thirst for blood.” Russell quotes Carlyle’s famous definition of liberty from Past and Present—“The true liberty of a man, you would say, consisted in his finding out, or being forced to find out the right path, and to walk thereon”—and then observes that this chapter of Carlyle’s book “ends by stating, in eloquent prophetical language, that, when democracy shall have run its full course, the problem that will remain is ‘that of finding government by your Real-Superiors.’” Russell concludes, “Is there one word in all this to which Hitler would not subscribe?”
Carlyle’s writing, his style itself, was so amenable to Fascists, such that we even might reasonably say that it itself is proto-Fascistic.
A decade or so after Grierson’s book and Russell’s essays was 1945, the year of Hitler’s séance in the bunker. That same year saw the publication in the Journal of Modern History of a yet more stridently alarmist essay, “Thomas Carlyle, Prophet of Fascism,” by J. Salwyn Schapiro, a young professor of history at the City College of New York. Carlyle’s writings “acquire a new and startling significance when viewed in light of the great events of our day,” Schapiro writes. “Admired, even revered, by his contemporaries as a preacher of righteousness, Carlyle now emerges as a prophet with a sinister message for our generation. His views on social and political problems, divested of their moral appeal by the march of time, are revealed to be those of a fascist in their essential implications.” Schapiro concludes his essay with a consideration of the appeal of Carlyle to the Nazis. “Had he not expressed fascist principles in language that flamed across the century? It is no wonder that the Nazis recognized in Carlyle a kindred spirit whose ideas had anticipated their own.”
We can certainly see many political ideas in Carlyle’s writing that may seem proto-Fascistic, then. But is there anything in Carlyle’s writing, beyond its more explicit political content, that could be read in this way? Is there a proto-Fascist, or Fascist-friendly, style in Carlyle?
To think about that question, we might go back to Thoreau’s admiring description of Carlyle’s prose as “muttering, rattling, exploding, like shells and shot.” And to Russell’s characterization of Fichte’s ultranationalism, for which a continual state of war “is the necessary outcome.” Carlyle’s writing, his style itself, was so amenable to Fascists, such that we even might reasonably say that it itself is proto-Fascistic.
The reason for this, I would suggest, lies in the way he infuses the very sound and rhythm of his sentences with a martial, military rhythm and atmosphere. This stylistic mode, in turn, enacts and performs Carlyle’s recurring and continual obsession with what he defines as “drilling.”
In the young Carlyle’s epoch-defining The French Revolution—published in the first year of Queen Victoria’s reign, in 1837, and with a reasonable claim to being the single most influential work of all early Victorian culture—he sketches a conflict between the forces of social order, on the one hand, and of the terrifying, violent disorder of the Revolution, on the other: “The fruitful seedfield, lie unreaped, the vineyards trampled down; there is red cruelty, madness of universal choler and gall. Havoc and anarchy everywhere.” “Crowding and Confusion; jostle, hurry, vehemence and terror!”
For Carlyle, a nation must be synonymous with, or subsumed by, its army, and its civic and cultural life indistinguishable from its military. And such total militarization requires a constant process of what he repeatedly calls “drilling”: of military training generalized and turned into bildung itself, in order to regulate and manage the forces of potential “havoc and anarchy.” As Yarvin himself sums up this line of Carlyle’s thinking in Moldbug on Carlyle: “Evil is chaos; good is order.”
Carlyle declares, early in Hitler’s problematic fave History of Frederick the Great, “I have remarked that, of all things, a Nation needs first to be drilled [my emphasis]; and no Nation that has not first been governed by so-called ‘Tyrants’ [note the scare quotes!], and held tight to the curb till it became perfect in its paces and thoroughly amenable to rule and law … ever came to much in this world.” And a few pages later, in a rapturous evocation of one of the first battles in which the young Frederick participated: “For the actual battle-drums are now beating, the big cannon-wains are creaking under way; and military men take farewell, and march, tramp, tramp. … Majesty in grenadier-guard uniform at their hear: horse, foot, and artillery.” “This has been going on these Three-hundred years. But Friedrich Wilhelm completes the process and finishes it up to the last pitch of perfection. Friedrich Wilhelm carries it through every fibre and cranny of Prussian Business; and so far as possible, of Prussian Life; so that Prussia is all a drilled phalanx ready to the word of command; and what we see in the Army is but the last consummate essence of what exists in the Nation everywhere.”
And a bit later: “With a wise instinct, Friedrich Wilhelm had discerned that all things in Prussia must point towards his Army; that his Army was the heart and pith; the State being the tree, every branch and leaf bound, after its sort, to be nutritive and productive for the Army’s behoof. … The more of potential battle, the more of life is in us; a maximum of potential battle, therefore; and let it be the optimum in quality!”
Thoreau’s image of Carlyle’s language exploding “like shells and shot” is very apt. Carlyle’s goal was, I would suggest, to turn prose itself into a form of “drilling”: his writing, then, a means by which to order the nation (whether that be Prussia or Britain) into “a drilled phalanx ready to the word of command.” A martial rhythm—“military men take farewell, and march, tramp, tramp”—swings through Carlyle’s writing, an audible call to any people willing to be “held tight to the curb till it became perfect in its paces” and “forced to find out the right path, and to walk thereon.”
Indeed, Carlyle presents his prose, his style, as itself a continual state of war—a “maximum of potential battle.”
To return now to Curtis Yarvin a.k.a. Mencius Moldbug: I read Moldbug on Carlyle so you do not have to, and it’s a strange and unnerving ride. “Carlyle understands the 20th century better than anyone in the 20th century,” Yarvin gushes. “If there is one writer in English whose name can be uttered with Shakespeare’s, it is Carlyle.” “Then again,” he admits coyly, “I named my daughter after Carlyle.” “I am to Carlyle, as Saruman to Morgoth. Enter the true palace of darkness! Join in my iron oath to the Master!”
To be fair, Yarvin is not completely not joking around with the Tolkien references. But you see what I mean. The devotion to Carlyle is … disquieting.
The ideas in Yarvin’s slim and chatty book, really a pamphlet, can be quickly summed up. Yarvin believes that Carlyle grasped a key truth that has eluded most modern thinkers: that democracy itself is a disaster. Democracy is “a precancerous growth always pregnant with some malignancy.” Indeed, the problem with actually existing 20th-century Fascism, Yarvin opines, is not that it is too authoritarian, but something close to the opposite of that—that Fascism is too democratic.
“To a Carlylean, the main event is the struggle between left and right. Which is the struggle between good and evil. Which is the struggle between order and chaos. Evil is chaos; good is order.” “Freedom is good, because freedom is fundamentally orderly—i.e., right-wing. Tyranny is evil, because tyranny is chaotic—i.e., left-wing.” The state’s most important goal is to achieve order, and it “may violate quite a few natural rights on his way to order.” Indeed, it must suppress “all resistance to its will.”
What, then, is the possible practical influence of the Carlyle-to-Yarvin-to-Vance (sounds like a triple play in a baseball game in Hell) intellectual pipeline? Perhaps the single most unsettling aspect of Moldbug on Carlyle is Yarvin’s surpassingly sympathetic account of Carlyle’s justifications for slavery.
Yarvin believes that Carlyle grasped a key truth that has eluded most modern thinkers: that democracy itself is a disaster.
Yarvin calls his hero “one of the few theoretical defenders of slavery in the last two centuries,” and he tries to assist us in the important task of “understand[ing] slavery through Carlyle’s eyes.” Carlyle views slavery as “a natural human relationship, like marriage.” And “of course, like marriage, slavery is not without its abuses”—and therefore, like marriage, slavery requires some (just a little!) oversight and regulation: “So, for example, Carlyle proposes reforms such as stronger supervision of slaveowners, a standard price by which slaves can buy their freedom, etc., etc.” Carlyle, Yarvin explains without criticism, furthermore “takes the view that the innate character and intelligence of some is more suited to mastery than slavery. For others, it is more suited to slavery.” “Thus, Spaniards and Englishmen in the Americas in the 17th and earlier centuries … found that Africans tended to make good slaves and Indians did not.”
If you find it troubling that our Vice President turns for intellectual inspiration to someone who believes that democracy is “a precancerous growth,” whereas slavery is a “natural human relationship, like marriage”—well, welcome to 2025! The Overton window is wide open, why not just enjoy the breeze?
In his 1945 essay, J. Salwyn Schapiro pointed out that a book of selections from Carlyle’s works, translated into German, “sold three hundred thousand copies during the period 1926–32.” Perhaps this is a case where we can even say (adapting Molly Ivins’s famous quip about Pat Buchanan’s 1992 “Culture War” speech) that some of Carlyle’s work simply sounds better in the original German. The question of the degree to which an author or artist can be held responsible for the moral crimes of those who later draw inspiration from them is often thorny: see the cases of Nietzsche, Richard Wagner, even Charles Darwin. That said, sometimes the Fascist jackboot … just slides right onto the foot. 