Days and Works

This used to be Principles and Heresies: Frank Meyer’s column. One feels deep diffidence in accepting an invitation to take it over; the intellect shining forth on this page was a pure and hot flame lighting things up sharply, and with stark shadows. There can be no repeat of his performance. Let the former title, then, rest with Frank Meyer’s mortal remains. Its replacement derives from Hesiod’s great didactic poem Works and Days, with the two nouns reversed to foreclose any presumptuous suggestion, while yet invoking the poet’s earnest spirit as it discerned, two and a half millennia ago, beyond the troubled human city the “things which belong to thy peace.”

This day let us discuss peoples and rulers. It is characteristic of a “people” to produce a “ruler” or set of rulers, with power and authority, power being the natural fruit of a people’s inner unity. Today one can observe, almost everywhere in the world, rulers lacking power and people without unity. Two years ago, Peregrine Worsthorne in The Socialist Myth argued that a British Labor government, though it might have been returned by a decisive majority of voters, lacked the power to accomplish its purpose: the transformation of Britain into a collective society. This being an objective that required a more than usual degree of power, a Labor government would need the massive and sacrificial support of the workers, both in democratic politics and in economic production, giving the government strength to attain fundamental change. In other words, for socialism to become a reality, the workers themselves would have to undergo a moral transformation.

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Gerhart Niemeyer

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This used to be Principles and Heresies: Frank Meyer’s column. One feels deep diffidence in accepting an invitation to take it over; the intellect shining forth on this page was a pure and hot flame lighting things up sharply, and with stark shadows. There can be no repeat of his performance. Let the former title, then, rest with Frank Meyer’s mortal remains. Its replacement derives from Hesiod’s great didactic poem Works and Days, with the two nouns reversed to foreclose any presumptuous suggestion, while yet invoking the poet’s earnest spirit as it discerned, two and a half millennia ago, beyond the troubled human city the “things which belong to thy peace.”

This day let us discuss peoples and rulers. It is characteristic of a “people” to produce a “ruler” or set of rulers, with power and authority, power being the natural fruit of a people’s inner unity. Today one can observe, almost everywhere in the world, rulers lacking power and people without unity. Two years ago, Peregrine Worsthorne in The Socialist Myth argued that a British Labor government, though it might have been returned by a decisive majority of voters, lacked the power to accomplish its purpose: the transformation of Britain into a collective society. This being an objective that required a more than usual degree of power, a Labor government would need the massive and sacrificial support of the workers, both in democratic politics and in economic production, giving the government strength to attain fundamental change. In other words, for socialism to become a reality, the workers themselves would have to undergo a moral transformation.