Economics is not Destiny

Greed (2010) by James Todd

The following is a speech by Guillaume Faye from the XIII Conference of GRECE, December 10th 1978. The essay critiques the dominance of mercantile economic values in contemporary society, arguing that they reduce human existence to consumption and profit, undermining political and cultural sovereignty. It advocates for an "organic economy" that prioritizes national and collective interests over short-term market-driven gains, emphasizing the importance of long-term sustainability, cultural identity, and political autonomy. Ultimately, the essay calls for a shift away from liberal economic systems towards a more holistic approach that aligns economic activity with the cultural and political destiny of European peoples.

Translated by Alexander Raynor.

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"The only realities that matter for our future are of an economic nature," declared a minister during a debate, who is also, it seems, the best economist in France. "I completely agree with you," replied the political opponent, "but you are a poor manager, and we are stronger than you in economics."

A revealing dialogue.

Like Nietzsche, let us know how to uncover false scholars under the guise of "specialists," and dare to topple idols. For the false science – the metaphysics, too – of our time, and its first idol, is indeed economics.

"We live in societies," notes Louis Pauwels¹, "for which the economy is everything. We limit our interests to immediate history, and we limit it to economic facts." Our civilization, in fact – which is no longer a "culture" – is founded on an exclusively economic conception of the world. Liberal, socialist, or Marxist ideologies converge in their "economistic" interpretation of man and society. They all postulate that the human ideal is individual economic abundance; although they differ on the means to achieve this state, they unanimously agree that a people is merely a "society," reducing its destiny to the exclusive pursuit of its economic well-being, explaining its history and developing its politics only through economics.

And this is what we, at GRECE, contest. We reject this reduction of the human to the economic, this one-dimensionality of history. For us, peoples must first ensure their destiny: that is, their historical and political longevity, and their specificity. History is not determined; and especially not by economic relations and mechanisms. Human will makes history. Not economics.

For us, economics should be neither a constraint nor a theory, but a strategy – indispensable, yet subordinated to politics. Managing the resources of a community according to political criteria first is the place of economics.

Thus, between liberal or socialist choices and ours, no conceivable agreement exists.
Anti-reductionists, we do not believe that "happiness" deserves to be an exclusive social ideal. With modern ethologists, we believe that human communities survive physically only if they carry a spiritual and cultural destiny.

We can even demonstrate that by privileging the economy and the sole pursuit of individual well-being, we end up with tyrannical systems, the deculturation of peoples, and in the short term, poor economic management. Because economics itself works better when it does not take first place, when it does not usurp the political function.

That is why there is an intellectual shift to be made in economics, as in other fields. Another vision of economics, aligned with contemporary challenges, and no longer based on 19th-century bourgeois axioms, will perhaps be the ORGANIC ECONOMY, the subject of our current research.

The revolt – in the sense Julius Evola gives to this term – is imposed against this dictatorship of economics, born of the dominance of bourgeois ideals and the hypertrophy of a social function. For us, Western Europeans, it is a revolt against liberalism.

"Our time," wrote Nietzsche already in Dawn, "which talks so much about economics, is indeed wasteful; it wastes the spirit." And he was prophetic: today, a President of the Republic dares to declare: "The major problem of our time is consumption." The same person, addressing these "citizens" reduced to the rank of consumers, states that he wishes for the "birth of a vast middle class, unified by the standard of living." The same person has also celebrated the submission of culture to the market economy: "The massive diffusion – this word is dear to him – of audiovisual media leads the population to share the same cultural goods. Good or bad, that’s another matter (sic), but in any case, for the first time, the same ones."

A clear apology for the degradation of culture into commerce, made by the leader of the liberals. Thus, politics is reduced to mere management, a phenomenon well described by the political scientist Carl Schmitt. The obsessive dominance of economic concerns does not, however, align with the ancient psyche of European peoples. Indeed, the three millennia-old social functions of the Indo-Europeans—functions of political and religious sovereignty, of war, and, thirdly, of fertility and production—assumed a dominance of the values of the first two functions; facts highlighted by G. Dumézil and E. Benveniste. Now, not only is the function of reproduction today dominated by one of its sub-functions, the economy, but this is in turn dominated by the "mercantile" sub-function. As a result, the social organism is, pathologically, subject to the values secreted by the mercantile function.

According to the concepts of sociologist F. Tönnies, this upside-down world loses its "organic" and living character and becomes a "mechanical society." We must reinvent an "organic community." Thus, economic liberalism and its political corollary take on their historical significance: this ideology was the theoretical alibi of an economic and social class to "free" itself from any tutelage of the sovereign and political function, and to impose its values—its material interests—in place of the "general interest" of the entire community.

Only the sovereign function and its own values can ensure the general interest. The only revolution that occurred was that of liberalism, which usurped sovereignty on behalf of the economic function, first claiming "equality" with other values as a pretext to marginalize them later.

According to a process similar to Marxism, liberalism constructed an economic reductionism. Men are significant to it only as abstract participants in a market: clients, consumers, units of labor; cultural, ethnic, and political specificities are obstacles, "temporary anomalies" in relation to the Utopia to be realized: the global market, without borders, without races, without singularities; this utopia is more dangerous than the "communist" egalitarianism, because it is more extremist still, and more pragmatic. American liberalism and its dream of the end of history in the same planetary "way of life" commercializes the planet, constituting the primary threat.

Thus, we clearly designate our enemy. We commonly refer to the "mercantile society" as the society realized by the liberal ideology—we can note that Marxism and socialism, on the other hand, never succeeded in realizing their egalitarian project, the "communist society," and thus appear less revolutionary than liberalism, less "real."

This "mercantile society" thus appears to us as the current and concrete object of criticism and destruction.

Our society is "mercantile," but not specifically mercantile in nature. The Republic of Venice or the Hanseatic Cities lived off a mercantile economic system but did not constitute "mercantile societies." Therefore, the term "mercantile" does not refer to socio-economic structures but to a collective mentality, a state of values that characterizes not only the economy but all institutions.

The values of the merchant, indispensable at his level alone, determine the behavior of all social and state spheres, and even the purely productive function of the economy."

Everything is judged – and the State foremost – from a mercantile point of view. This does not mean that mercantile domination means 'domination by money'; we do not issue a moral condemnation of money and of an entrepreneur’s profit. One must admit mercantile or profiteering behavior, provided it accepts being subordinated to other values. Therefore, our position should not be seen as a 'hatred of the economy' or a new reductionism opposing profit and the mercantile function as such. We are not Christian moralists. A mercantile society thus means a society where values are purely mercantile. These can be classified into three major figures: the deterministic mentality, the spirit of calculation, and the dictatorship of individual economic well-being.

The deterministic mentality, useful only for mercantile activity, aims to eliminate risks and minimize uncertainties. But when adopted by an entire society, and especially by political and economic decision-makers, the deterministic mentality becomes an intellectual excuse for not acting and taking risks. Only the merchant can justifiably subordinate his actions to determinisms in order to maximize his profits: market laws, circumstances, price curves, etc.

But political power, no more than the national economy, should, like a merchant, submit and “let itself be guided” by an excessive rationality that dispenses with any “game of risk.” The mercantile society is "managed" in the short term, under the hegemony of pseudo-scientific "economic forecasts" (the "inevitable" industrialization of the Third World, the globalization of international competition, income and GDP growth rates, etc.), but paradoxically does not take into account even the most elementary political developments in the medium term: for example, the oligopoly of oil holders.

Nothing is less "independent" than mercantile nations. Liberal managers “go with the flow” of what they believe is mechanically determined (because rationally formulated), economizing on imagination and will.

In the age of forecasting, statistical prediction, and computing, we settle for the short term and predict less than the sovereigns of past centuries. It is as if social, demographic, and geopolitical developments did not exist and would not have major effects. All things being equal – according to the stupid formula of liberal economists – only short-term economic constraints or pseudo-forecasts are taken into account by decision-makers.

Thus, the mercantile society is blind. Subject to external developments and wills, because it believes in historical determinism, it renders European peoples objects of history.

The second trait of the mercantile mentality: the spirit of calculation. Adapted to the merchant, this spirit does not suit collective behavior. The hegemony of the quantifiable over the qualifiable, that is, over values, the predominance of the mechanical over the organic, the spirit of calculation applies the single grid of Economic Value to everything. We do not think that "money" has become the general norm: rather, everything that cannot be measured no longer "counts."

It is claimed that everything can be calculated, even the non-economic: retirement points, working hours, leisure time, wages, just as – but much earlier – unborn children. There is even a "cost of human life," considered for certain investments. But everything that escapes cost calculation, that is to say precisely what matters most, is neglected. The incommensurable economic aspects of socio-cultural facts (such as the social costs of uprooting resulting from immigration) become indecipherable and insignificant to the "techno-merchants."

Even in economics, excessive calculation is harmful: how many useful long-term investments, deemed unprofitable in the short term by a predictive calculation, are abandoned?"

The individual, secure, 'calculates' his existence but no longer considers his heritage, his lineage. The states, obsessed with short-term management, only take into account the 'calculable' and measurable aspects of their actions. These demagogic 'managers' only act where they can 'account for results,' especially in the immediate term, sometimes even by falsifying a few figures.

Is a region dying from cultural anemia? It doesn't matter if its growth rate is significant due to mass tourism. And, between political opponents, the political argument is reduced to battles over percentages.

This superficiality of 'technocratic management' (the mercantile substitute for the sovereign function) can even lead to 'political marketing,' reducing politics to commercial 'management.' Today, France or Germany are more or less assimilated by their governments into public limited companies. The House of France, with its citizen-employees. It follows naturally, then, that foreign policy and even defense policy are dominated by concerns about immediate commercial prospects. Even the economy is not benefited by this, since this short-term mercantilism proves to be unpredictable and does not replace a true economic policy. When heads of state on visits become sales representatives, like real sales representatives, they fall under the dependency of their clients.

The mercantile society can finally be described as a 'dictatorship of individual well-being,' in the words of Arnold Gehlen; dictatorship, because the individual, forced to enter the providential system of the state, sees his personality disintegrate in the consumerist environment. Paradoxically, the liberal welfare state stifles productive initiative (excessive social charges) and indirectly discourages individual initiative. Social security recipients, employees, paid unemployed: they no longer control their own destiny. An immense contempt for its people by the welfare state, the 'cold monster' of Nietzsche. A soft tyranny.

How can we be surprised, then, that a Sovereign, transformed into a dispenser of amenities, is despised? The political scientist Julien Freund rightly speaks of the political decay of the state.

Liberalism operates a double reductionism: on the one hand, the state and society are supposed to only respond to the economic needs of the people; and these needs themselves are reduced to individual 'standard of living.' The mercantile liberalism, partly out of self-interest, forbids itself from judging whether these needs are desirable or not: only the technical means to address them matter.

Hence the political preeminence of the standard of living, and by necessity, equality: the bourgeois (and American) dream of peoples leveled and equalized by the same standard of living.

Since, for a liberal, peoples and men are all alike, the only remaining inequality is that of purchasing power: to achieve equality, it is enough to spread the mercantile way of life across the world. Thus, the universalist humanism and 'business' are miraculously reconciled (Adam Smith’s invisible hand), justice and self-interest, as Jimmy Carter naively confessed: 'Bible and Business.'

Cultural, ethnic, linguistic particularities, and 'personalities' are obstacles for the mercantile society. This explains why the moralizing ideology of political liberalism pushes for universalism, the mixing of peoples and cultures, or various forms of centralism.

The mercantile society and the American model threaten all the cultures of the earth. In Europe or Japan, culture has been reduced to a 'way of life' (way of life) which is the exact opposite of a lifestyle.

Man is thus objectified, meaning reduced to the economic things he buys, produces, or receives, according to the same process (but more intensively) as in communist systems. His personality dissolves into economic goods, which alone structure his individuality. One changes character when one changes mode. We are no longer defined by our origins (reduced to 'folklore') nor by our works, but by our consumption, our 'standing.' In the mercantile system, the dominant civic models are the consumer, the insured, the assisted; and not the producer, the investor, the entrepreneur. Let’s not even mention the non-economic types: the jurist, the doctor, the soldier have become secondary social types."

The mercantile society spreads a type of daily values that are ultimately harmful to work itself: selling and consuming capital seems more important than building it. And nothing is more equalizing than the function of consumption. Producers and entrepreneurs differentiate themselves by their actions; they put unequal capacities into play. But consuming is the non-act that everyone, regardless of their abilities or origins, can access. A consumption-based economy takes an inhumane path in the sense that man is, ethologically, an action and construction being. Thus, paradoxically, the high productivity of European industries persists despite the mercantile liberal society, not because of it. For how long? It should be clarified that our critique of the mercantile society is not a rejection, quite the opposite, of industrialization or technology. The notion of an organic community, which we oppose to the mercantile society, has nothing to do with the 'convivial society' of the neo-Rousseauists (Illich, etc.).

For us, technology is a European cultural achievement, but it must be considered as a collective tool for power and domination over the environment, no longer as a drug for well-being. Therefore, we do not share the leftist critiques with biblical resonance, regarding the 'curse of money' and the 'will to power' of contemporary society. The mercantile society asserts no will, neither at the level of a global destiny nor even of an economic strategy.

The consequences of this economic civilization are serious for the fate of our species, and by extension, for our political and economic future. Konrad Lorenz² sees in the 'unity of selection factors,' all of an economic nature, a threat to human enrichment. 'A counter-selection is at work,' reveals Lorenz in Nouvelle École, 'which reduces the diversities of humanity and forces it to think exclusively in terms of short-term economic profitability. The economistic ideologies, which are technomorphic, make man a manipulable machine. Men, economic units, are becoming increasingly equal, like precisely machines.'

For Lorenz, the subordination of non-economic values is a catastrophe, not only cultural but biological. Consumerism constitutes a physiological threat to peoples. Lorenz, as a physician, speaks of collective pathology. We are dying from arteriosclerosis. The civilization of economic well-being is slowly pushing us, for Lorenz, towards a lukewarm death. He writes: 'Hypersensitive to displeasure, our capacities for enjoyment are dulled.'

Neophilia, the insatiable desire for new consumption, has, for anthropologists, harmful and poorly understood biological effects. But what is the survival of the species compared to the rise in the price of butter croissants? In short, if no one is considering these problems, we are.

Lukewarm death, but also demographic decline. The dictatorship of the economy has made us Europeans short-lived peoples according to the analysis of Raymond Ruyer. Preoccupied with our immediate economic concerns, we have become objects and victims of biological history.

Our economists are only concerned with demographic decline because it compromises pension funding. 'Our economistic civilization,' writes Raymond Ruyer, 'is essentially anti-natalist and suicidal because it is, essentially, anti-vital, anti-instinctive.'

But mass consumption has also made culture 'primitive.' The merchants of consumer goods hold cultural power, which they exercise in the direction of uprooting and egalitarian massification. It is not the consumers who choose their lifestyle – a democratic myth cherished by liberals – but mercantile firms that create mass behaviors by destroying the specific traditions of peoples. Through 'marketing,' far worse than political propaganda, a new behavior is almost scientifically imposed, playing on the mimicry of deculturalized masses. A global subculture is being born, a projection of the American model. One can orientalize or americanize at will. Since the end of the First World War, from the 'new look' to the 'disco' trend, it is a coherent process of subcultural conditioning at work. The common trait: the mimicry of behaviors launched by American merchants. In this way, the economy has become one of the qualitative foundations of the new culture, vastly exceeding its function of satisfying material needs.

Even in strictly economic terms, which, from our perspective, is not paramount, the failure of the mercantile system in recent years is obvious. Let’s not even talk about unemployment and inflation, that would be too easy. Jean Fourastié notes 'the poverty of current economic sciences, whether liberal or Marxist,' and accuses them of scientific usurpation. 'We are witnessing, he says, especially since 1973, the inadequacy of economists and the immense shipwreck of their science.' He adds: 'Liberal or socialist economists have always thought that only the rational allowed one to know the real. Their mathematical models are built on ignorance or disdain for elementary realities.'

'In any science, the elementary is the most difficult. It comes to be despised because it does not lend itself to the classic exercises on which university economists award themselves diplomas.' Fourastié concludes: 'Our people, our economists, our leaders live on the ideas of the 19th century. The dead ends of rationality are starting to become visible. Man lives at the end of the illusions of intelligence.'

A recent Nobel laureate in economics, Herbert Simon, has just demonstrated that in his economic behaviors or others, man, despite the computer, cannot optimize his choices and behave rationally. Thus, the 'Game Theory and Economic Behavior' by von Neumann and Morgenstern, one of the foundations of liberalism, proves false. Reasoned and optimal choice does not exist. Herbert Simon demonstrated that economic choices are primarily random, risky, and voluntarist.

These illusions of intelligence have led to serious failures for liberals; let’s take a few at random: The liberal mercantile system wastes innovation and misuses technical creation. This, as Wagemann had seen, is because short-term profit-based accounting (and not in terms of overall 'surplus') hampers any investment and any innovation that cannot be sold or does not yield profit in the short term.

Another failure, with incalculable consequences: the appeal for massive foreign immigration. Immediate, strictly financial profits resulting from exploitable and malleable labor have only counted in the face of the long-term 'social costs' of immigration, which were never considered by the state and employers. The immediate greed of labor importers did not even consider the 'lost profits' in terms of 'non-modernization' caused by this absurd economic choice. A manager of a large firm recently told me with a contemptuous tone that his city was 'overrun with immigrants' and that this personally bothered him. But after a few minutes of conversation, he admitted to me, in all good conscience, that ten years ago, he had 'prospected' abroad to 'import' cheap labor. Such unconsciousness is akin to a new form of slavery. It is striking to note that even Marxist ideology, despite its disdain for cultural and ethnic diversities, has not dared, like liberalism, to use the massive uprooting of rural populations from developing countries for its profit.

Irresponsible governments and an ignorant employer class, devoid of any civic or ethical sense, have endorsed a neo-slavery practice whose political, cultural, historical – and even economic – consequences are incalculable (precisely) for the host countries and especially for the peoples providing labor.

More concerned with 'business' and 'well-being,' liberals have failed to face the most elementary challenges: energy crisis, dollar standard crisis, rising European costs, and catastrophic competition from Eastern and Far Eastern countries.

Who cares? Who proposes a new industrial strategy? Who envisions the end of prosperity already underway? The response to the giant challenges at the end of the century is only possible against liberal practices. Only an economic perspective based on the choices of a semi-autarkic European economic space, planning a new medium-term energy substitution policy, and withdrawing from the international monetary system, would adapt to current realities.

The liberal or 'libertarian' dogmas of free trade, international division of labor, and monetary balance prove not only economically utopian (and we are ready to demonstrate this technically) but especially incompatible with the political choice of an autonomous destiny for Europe.

Like the new philosophers who were content to update Rousseau, we must become aware of the imposture of the advertising operation of the 'new economists.'

It is nothing more or less than a return to the well-known theses of Adam Smith. But the new French economists (Jenny, Rosa, Fourcans, Lepage) are nothing by themselves and merely popularize American theses. Let’s look at their masters.

Starting with a valid critique, it is true, of the 'Welfare State' (the bureaucratic, albeit neo-liberal welfare state), the Chicago School, monetarist and conservative, with Friedmann, Feldstein, Moore, etc., advocates a return to the micro-economic law of the market, refuses any state constraint on firms, thereby recovering the carelessness of 19th-century liberals with regard to unemployment and social issues.

And the Virginia school³, with Rothbard, David Friedman, Tullock, etc., presents itself as 'anarcho-capitalist,' advocating the dismantling of the state, and the total reduction of social and political life to competition and the sole pursuit of mercantile profit.

One could criticize these well-known and 'warmed-up' theses from an economic perspective. But suffice it to say, for us Europeans, that even realizable and 'prosperous,' such a program means our definitive death as historical peoples. The 'Friedmanites' and 'libertarians' offer us submission to the global market system dominated by laws favorable to American society but incompatible with the choice we make to remain political nations, and peoples evolving within their specific histories.

Organic economics, however, does not seek to be a theory. But a strategy, corresponding only to the choice, in 20th-century Europe, of societies where political destiny and cultural identity come before the prosperity of the economy. Subsidiarily, the economic function is better controlled there.

At GRECE, we are reflecting on this new vision of economics, based on the works of Othmar Spann and Ernst Wagemann in Germany, Johan Akerman in Sweden, and François Perroux in France.

Wagemann compared liberal economics to a body without a brain, and Marxist economics to a brain mounted on stilts. The organic economy, a practical model we do not claim to be exportable, seeks to adapt to the organic trifunctional tradition of Europeans.

According to Bertalanffy’s⁴ work on systems, the economic function is considered as a partial organism within the general organism of the Community."

Depending on the sectors and circumstances, the economic function can be planned or operate according to the laws of the market. Adaptable and flexible, it accepts the market and profit but subordinates them to national politics. The state allows businesses, within the national framework, to operate according to market constraints but can, if circumstances require, impose national interest policies through non-economic means.

The unreal concepts of 'macro and micro-economics' give way to the reality of the 'national economy'; likewise, the notions of public and private sectors lose their meaning, since everything is both 'private' at the management level and 'public' in terms of political direction.

Durable collective goods are preferred over the production of individual goods that are obsolete and energetically costly. Economic mechanisms and manipulations are considered inefficient for regulating the economy compared to the psychological search for consensus among producers.

The accounting concept of surplus and social cost replaces the questionable concepts of 'profitability' and 'profit.' With its choice of authoritarian decentralization of economic centers and a large-scale, semi-autarkic European economic space (as seen in the USA from 1900 to 1975...), organic economics can consider an investment and technological innovation capacity superior to what the liberal system allows, which is hindered by monetary fluctuations and total international competition (a reductionist dogma of free trade, according to which external competition is always stimulating).

Ultimately, organic economics prefers the entrepreneur to the financier, the worker to the dependent, the politician to the bureaucrat, public markets and collective investments over the difficult market of individual consumers.

More than monetary manipulations, the energy of the national labor of a specific people seems to us to be the only factor capable of ensuring long-term economic dynamism.

Organic economics is not, in itself, the goal of its own success.
But it seeks to be one of the means to ensure the destiny of European peoples, among other possible destinies, as long-lived peoples.

To conclude, we should cite the conclusion that the economist Sombart gave in his treatise The Bourgeois, but we will only quote the most prophetic passage: 'In a system founded on bureaucratic organization, where the entrepreneurial spirit has disappeared, the giant, now blind, will be condemned to drag the chariot of democratic civilization. Perhaps we will then witness the twilight of the gods, and gold will be cast into the waters of the Rhine.'

François Perroux also wrote that he wished for the end of the cult of Mammon, which 'shines today with a prodigious brilliance.'

We have chosen to contribute to the end of this cult, to ensure the succession of the 'last man,' that of the civilization of the economy, of which Nietzsche’s Zarathustra said:
'Love, creation, desire, star? What is that? Thus asks the last man, and he winks. The earth will have become smaller, and on it will hop the last man, he who diminishes everything. We have invented Happiness, say the last men. And they wink.'"

1. TN: Louis Pauwels was an instrumental figure in the Nouvelle Droite’s rise to power in France in the late 1970s. He was a journalist and worked for Le Figaro, which is the oldest running daily newspaper in France and has the 2nd largest readership in France. He launched a weekly magazine, Le Figaro Magazine, which he made several prominent members of GRECE members of the editorial board of this magazine. He is also most well-known for coining the phrase “mental AIDS” (SIDA mental) in 1986 referring to student protests.

2. TN: Konrad Lorenz is a well-known zoologist and ethologist whose work was immensely influential on several ENR thinkers. His most important work is Civilized Man's Eight Deadly Sins, where he addresses the relationship between market economics and the threat of ecological catastrophe.

3. TN: I’m sure many are familiar with the Austrian School of Economics that is often associated with the Mises Institute though you may be less familiar with the Virginia School. For more information about the Virginia School, check out: Levy, D. M., & Peart, S. J. (2020). Towards an economics of natural equals: A documentary history of the early Virginia school. Cambridge University Press. A review of this text is available at The Independent Review which you can read here.

4. TN: Ludwig von Bertalanffy is a biologist who was one of the founders of general systems theory (GST), which is the transdisciplinary study of systems.