Jünger

The idea of a world state. by Gerardo Muñoz

As a theme for his 1949 Aquinas Lecture at Marquette University, an American scholar, Robert Hutchins, decided to titled his conference “St. Thomas and the World State”. It is obvious that Hutchins had fresh in his mind the fact that the long European Civil War of the twentieth century, which included two World Wars, was a direct consequence of warring nationalisms and militarized nations that in our times it is once again has lavishly returned with even higher lethal consequences. There is a major historical difference, however; and that is the fact that whereas the nationalisms of the twentieth century were distinct territorial struggles in the wake of crumbling empires, the emergence of the new nationalisms are concerted, nourished, and aligned to the global commanding American imperialism. The techno-political ideal of an influential figure on American elites such as Peter Thiel takes the form of warring nations and firms against the possibility of a global world state to secure peace, interdependence, and free movement of populations across borders and communities [1]. It is fair to say that contemporary technopolitical dominance is a combination of imperial and national forces through the perpetual administration of anomia or lawlessness. 

What is striking about Hutchins’ 1949 lecture is that although Aquinas’ philosophy of law has been traditionally understood as the most important source of natural law, in his proposal Thomas’ actuality is able to fulfill positive law against the instrumental morality of nationalist empires (the United States and the Soviet Union then) that “in the absence of positive law; they may be expected to break the peace” [2]. For anyone that knows the emergence of the European state as coterminous with the secular authority of legal positivism will find this emphasis contradictory at best. The very notion of positive law requires principles of sovereign authority and normative internal recognition of its command coordination in order to consolidate a stable political form over time. This is a contradiction that Hutchins was aware of throughout his lecture. Consider, as an example, when he claims that: “The origin and meaning of the saying that a state has the natural right to sovereignty therefore, is that one state may not forcibly impose its will upon another. It means that Catholicism should oppose the foundations of a world state by force” (36). 

Or, when glossing over the obvious tension between the right of national sovereignty and a potential international federal state in the views of popes and Catholic thinkers: “I think they know that the national state is no longer the perfect community and that positive law is required to make the world community an effective political organization. I believe that they are making two points that are of the utmost importance: first, they are saying that any world government must be a federal government; and second, they see that world must come into existence by consent and not by conquest” (34). However, any student of modern political thought knows that consent and coercion are two internal modalities of governance for legitimate rule. Hutchins’ notion of “consent”, along with positive law, remains not only unthematized, but dependent on a circular of definition of law; that is, the “common good”, which is not a political concept, but a theological and moral notion extracted from the philosophy of history of Christian salvation. 

Towards the end of the lecture, Hutchins goes beyond strict positive law as if searching for some substantive ground: “…the West should not only survive, but also revive and rescue a deeper conception of human civilization than the one recently current, which enters around a religion of progress by resourceful greed and technological mastery of non-human nature” (42). But Hutchins’ plea for the retrieval of a past memory of the West runs astray when it relocates Church and State into a dual predicament of a new world state for peace on the conditions of the same structure of political theology that are no longer operative, but that actually make up the very ground of the modern collapse into nihilism – nihilism that political form does not remain immune to, quite the contrary. In fact, it is the most salient symptom of civilizational collapse. In the same way that Ernst Jünger immediately after the war called for the subsidiary spiritual assistance of the churches in the face of technological power- “the true conquest of nihilism and attainment of peace will be possible only with the help of the churches” – Hutchins will also repeat that only the conjointment of Church and State “must now work together for world peace founded on university charity…and universal democracy” (44) [3]. And the same thesis has found a clear expression in Pope Francis’ Apostolic Letter Candor Lucis Aetenae (2021): “To restore order and salvation, faith and reason, Beatrice and Virgil…Church and Empire are called to operate in harmony” [4]. This speaks directly to what we have recently called the plasticity inherent in the historical adaptations of thomism in social life [5].

This plasticity amounts to the administration of desperate souls from the structures of the state and Churches, without ever transforming the mere survival of life on Earth. This leaves us with the notion of kingdom, which Hutchins introduces in opposition to the political community of city life (polis), but only to reabsorb it into the order of political theology. And it is at this threshold, that we can claim that the kingdom is not a political theological category, but an experiential allowance in which life, the dead and languages occur beyond and before political determinations. It is no surprise, then, that Ivan Illich called the kingdom primarily a mystical experience: “I will dare to formulate a hypothesis: the kingdom is what constitutes the authentic mystical experience, if the mystic knows what experience is really constituted by. The mystical experience of the believer is the conscious experience of the kingdom before the parousia. The mystical experience is the fruit of love, and, therefore, it is also accessible to every lover. The awareness about its meaning is the fruit of faith…” [6]. 

We tend to forget that both national units and the contemporary empires of world building and destruction have been first and foremost enemies of spoken living languages and idioms. On the one hand, the historical grammars to build the unity of people’s official language, and in our days the rise of Artificial Intelligence has clearly become the last stage through which power abandons languages to computational and rhetorical obsolescence. This opening towards awareness is not an article of faith through consent nor a moral predicament that can be adequate prima facie into a political register; it is fundamentally a linguistic experience that allows for the delicate cultivation of peaceful coexistence taking place not in a world, but between them: “To learn a language in a human and mature way way is to accept the responsibility for its silences and sounds. The gift a people gives us in their language is more a gift of the rhythm, the mode, and the subtleties of its system of silences than its system of sounds…The greater the distance between two worlds, the more this silence of interest is a sign of love” [7]. 

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Notes 

1. “Apocalypse Now? Peter Thiel On Ancient Prophecies And Modern Tech,” in conversation with Peter Robinson, October 2024, Hoover Institute: https://youtu.be/wTNI_lCvWZQ?si=M8-qrBh-G7bYZPfw

2. Robert M. Hutchins. St. Thomas and The World State (Marquette University Press, 1948), 15. 

3. Ernst Jünger. The Peace (Henry Regnery Company, 1948), 69. 

4. Pope Francis. “Apostolic Letter Candor Lucis Aeternae (2021)”: https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/apost_letters/documents/papa-francesco-lettera-ap_20210325_centenario-dante.html 

5. Gerardo Muñoz. “The social efficacy of thomism”, Infrapolitical Reflections, August 2025: https://infrapoliticalreflections.org/2025/08/31/the-social-efficacy-of-thomism-by-gerardo-munoz/

6. Ivan Illich. “Concertning Aesthetic and Religious Experience”, in The Powerless Church and other selected writings, 1955-1985 (University of Penn State Press, 2018), 86.

7. Ivan Illich. “Missionary Silence”, in The Church, Change, and Development (Urban Center Training Press, 1970), 121.

The technification of thinking: Notes on Gramsci’s Prison Writings (V). by Gerardo Muñoz

In the “Fourth Prison Notebook”, Gramsci offers a treatment of the science of “historical materialism”. A science that is not to be understood as a region of thought, but rather as a totalization and condition of possibility of the very opening of a new epoch. At some point in the notebook, Gramsci writes the following (which is also exemplary exposition of the reduction of his program): “As a matter of fact, historical materialism has no need for extraneous support: it is itself so robust that the old world turns to it to supply its own arsenal with some more effective weapons. This means that while historical materialism is not subjected to hegemonies, it has itself stared to exercise a hegemony over the old intellectual world. (156). We do not want to put too much pressure on the term “intellectual” here, but it is a notable expression. There is a dual logic of “hegemony” at play: hegemony is both the archê that can sustain an epoch phantasmatically never fully closing it; while, at the same time, it is also the opening of the epoch of the “reign of freedom”, which is the discovery of historical materialism as a science of totality. When Gramsci writes that historical materialism has potential hegemony over the totality of the intellectual world, he is strongly positing a civilizational principle as a new conception of the spiritualization of the world. From this basic condition of transitional political thinking, it is difficult to see how Gramscianism can ever be freed from Hegelianism, given that Hegelianism is what informs substantially the theory of hegemonic reduction. Hegemony: what reduces the world.

         At the same time, and in order to secure this transition to this new epochal principle, another operation comes to the forefront: to obtain hegemony over the totality of the old intellectual world requires a technified form of thinking as such vis-à-vis its intellectual class as an active player in the process. A few pages later after he treats the exception to epochal hegemonies, Gramsci writes that: “…the importance of the technique of thinking in the construction a pedagogical program; here, again, one cannot make the comparison between the technique of thinking and the old rhetorics…the technique of thinking cannot be compared to these things, which is why one can say that it is as important to teach this technique as it is to reading and writing.” (160). This thematizes the political hegemony that harbors above the alleged organic development of the new epoch; as if, the menace of the deviation from hegemony is a “bad adventure” in thought, a derailing of intensity that needs to be straighten out by the force of pedagogic reinforcement. Gramsci recognizes that thought does not have a technique, but it is in virtue of said absence that its instrumentalization must be set tightly. There is no doubt that this is catastrophic. This is the internal catastrophe of any thought when reduced to hegemony. By positing thought as pedagogical techne, Gramsci cancels any possible relation to the world. The world has already been annihilated, since it has been taken to the limit of its realization, making it only accessible from the condition of the specie’s alienation with reality. To a certain extent, pedagogy and the “common school” program stands for the performance of the laws that make up the new science of history. Hegemony becomes the accessory that guarantees the entry into a theoretical totality that pushes out any relation with the world. 

There is a “genetic problem” that can be contested even at the level of its own “scientific” assumptions. Already Hans Blumenberg in The Genesis of the Copernican World (1975) argued that the configuration of a totality of knowledge is impossible given its heterogenous conditions and “inherent pressures of its workings”. There problem of epochal hegemony, then, it is not that it elevates a supreme and all-inclusive principle; but rather that, as a concept, it cannot name a process of rationalization required to advance a civilizatory principle. Indeed, Gramsci calls “the conquest of the historical world, a new civilization” (164). This is why Gramscian appeals again and again to Catholic ecclesiastical administrative capacities for the formation of the new communist integral state. However, whereas for Weber “bureaucratic rationalization” was an organic process within history; for Gramsci, on the contrary, it is conceptual and pedagogical. In other words, it is a mimesis that transforms itself as a command of the Party, the militant, and disciplinary orientation. The Gramscian cosmos of production is a secular form of angeology for the intellectual class that must guide the working class (203). Of course, as we know, angels are not mere mediators between God and the sublunar world, they are also the keepers that glorify the dogma. And dogma here is the secular science of historical materialism. 

One last point about the date of this notebook (1932). This is most certainly a Gramsci that is no longer the one writing in the 1910s full of enthusiasm and good convictions; a Gramsci that could sense the trembling of gates of the revolution conquering the world. On the contrary, the Gramsci writing in the wake of the 1930s is one that is already noticing that “workerism” is dominion and form, or form that is already the byproduct of total mobilization. It is no coincidence that Ernst Jünger’s The Worker is published this year. At this point the worker is no longer a fixed transcendental category of the philosophy of history, but rather an energetic gestalt driven by mobilization and will to power. This means that formation – giving form – is always infinite, while the world remains objectivized into this total encompassing movement. Gramsci would mobilize intellectuals – but also thinking and imagination – to accomplish the labors of hegemonic politics.

The problem, already in 1932, should have been contested at the level of the form of life and distance between domination and world that I call post-hegemony. The false exit was taken: the multiplication of the modes of production, including the production of an “intellectual class” in an attempt to tilt the bourgeois order towards true hegemony. By 1930s it becomes clear that Gramsci cannot stand up to a problem oriented at the level of the critique of metaphysics. By adopting the science of historical materialism, Gramsci seems only capable of giving us a regional political practice masked by the metaphyisical pretensions of universality and totality. It wasn’t enough then, and it is most definitely not enough today.