......... So, egalitarian, anti-aristocratic and anti-caste - thus 'Rousseauian' - struggles were fully justified as late as the Second World War. We forget the backward-looking character of fascism and Nazism at our own peril. Serious attempts to create a new nobility were launched, beginning with the vitéz or warrior 'estate' in the first, radical phase of Vice-Admiral von Horthy's counter-revolution in Hungary and ending in Himmler's SS mystique; the vitéz (former First World War soldiers, commissioned and non-commissioned, of impeccably Gentile ancestry) were offered land and a small stipend and were organized in quite an effective knights' order from 1920; their Supreme Captain was the Regent, von Horthy, himself. The vitéz order was revived in Hungary after 1989, albeit only as a nostalgic association of the extreme right. But 'corporatist' ideology is still alive in contemporary Hungary; from time to time there are proposals to revive an unelected upper chamber consisting of delegates of all 'respectable professions', all the bishops, etc. Most recently such a proposal was advanced by a 'socialist' prime minister, a former Communist central committee member.
But since the rather recent global triumph of capitalism, egalitarian mobilizations against caste, although still the dominant form (viz. battles against poverty, for jobs, against local and global discrimination, for gender and racial equality, for fairness for the indigenous or 'first' peoples, and so on) appear insufficient because inequality (if still a pertinent term at all) has different causes from those it had in the past. When in the vast literature of the disillusioned Left we read about the irrelevance of class, the vanishing proletariat, we can still see the unconscious amalgamation of caste and class. Since the immanent, intra-capitalist fight for equality led by socialists possessed by the 'false consciousness' of fighting against alienation and exploitation, has ended; since the historically forced synthesis of these two aspirations has been dissolved through the final evanescence of the remains of aristocratic order, deference and birth privilege; since the 'socialist' states have reverted to capitalist type, as a result of the successful conquest of agrarian aristocratism by 'communist' parties;53 it is for the first time that pure capitalism makes an appearance.
One should be careful here. The historically-forced synthesis of egalitarianism and socialism is obviously not over in the 'developing' world where egalitarian movements based on the petty merchants of the bazaar, on the peasantry and the lower clergy ('Islamic radicalism') are attacking the Westernized elites and military states with an islamicized Khmer Rouge rhetoric or, in Latin America, with an 'indigenous' millenarism. It is a telling fact that 'revolutionary openings' are on offer again on capitalism's periphery, where new strategies of the 'weakest link' and of 'combined and uneven development' are reformulated for the benefit of a new generation of 'vicarious revolutionary' dupes.