What is historical action, what conditions does human action require to acquire the character, status and prestige of historical action?

Without trying to fully answer this question for now, I can now state the most obvious of these conditions: for an action to be historical, its consequences must extend beyond the physical agent’s life span. Everything that dies with a man and is forgotten forever is outside the historical realm. Obviously this criterion applies only to visible and terrestrial consequences. The man whose life is extinguished in anonymity is certainly out of history, but the anonymous prayers of anonymous saints probably have spiritual and supra-historical consequences that, as such, have a role to play in the construction of the perennial frame of all history and, thus, determine something of History. However, they are not, in themselves, historical actions.

If historical action is to extend beyond the life of the individual agent, then it is not accurate to say that he is, as such, the subject of history, since no man can act in the strict sense after he is dead.

History must have a subject durable enough to be able to act over many generations. Having realized this, albeit in a more or less nebulous way, historians and philosophers soon sought to determine, in addition to the individual agent, who would be the true subject of history and, groping haphazardly, they believed to find him now in the nations, now in races, now in social classes, now in cultures, now in civilizations (in the Spenglerian or Tokenbeean sense), finally in some collective subject that, being collective, was the opposite of the individual agent.

But that a given subject does not serve a particular predicate does not mean that it should fit its opposite, much less an opposite that only opposes it in a certain and partial aspect, as is the case with the collective subject that is only opposed to the individual from the strict point of view of quantity.

The assignment of the role of historical subject to collective entities is understood as an automatic reaction of the mind to the impossibility of attributing it exclusively to the individual agent. But it offers even greater difficulties.

In the first place, the historical subject does not have to be only “bigger” than the individual agent, nor just more durable. It must also have that unity, without which the actions do not really have a subject behind them and are not even actions, but only converging effects of the mismatched actions of multiple and even unrelated subjects. The attribution of “actions” to these collective subjects is, more often than not, pure metaphor, which over and over again ends up producing the hypnotic illusion of substantial unity, necessary to sustain the even greater illusion of a “bourgeois” or “english” or “jewish” intentionality behind the actions of bourgeois, english or individual jews.

Now, the substantial, physical unity, is the privilege of the individual and coextensive agent with the unity of his body in space and time. Society, race, class, and state cannot be endowed with it.

In order to know to what extent, how and within what limits each of the mentioned entities can actually be subject to historical action, it is necessary to investigate what type of unit constitutes and preserves it over time.

In all the historical subjects pointed out until today, the pattern of unity is not sufficient to meet the conditions of a continued intentional action such as the actions of the individual subject in the course of his life.

The characteristics of the individual unit, which determine the condition for the possibility of continued and sensible individual action, are as follows:

1. The body unit in time and space — unit given and totally independent of the subject’s decision.

2. The authorial unity and the consequent responsibility that, even if rejected by the subject, is necessarily imputed to him by the environment.

3. The subjective unit, whose conditions are the external record, independent from memory, the reflective capacity and the two previous conditions.

None of these conditions are observed in race, class, nation, state, culture or civilization.

The unity of the race has, in common with the physical unity of the individual, the fact of being given and independent of human decision, but it consists only in the repetition of a genetic pattern that, although it may differ, as a whole, from that of other races, and this, even from a psychological point of view, is never narrow enough to severely limit the appearance, within its limits, of an inexhaustible variety of characters, temperaments and individual dispositions, of which some, by statistical fatality, will be closer to those of certain individuals of other races than the average of the same race.

Furthermore, in the individual, the physical unit only becomes an efficient basis for continued action to the extent that it continues in the authorial unit, something to which the individual is continually driven either by the obligation to reflect to meet his own bodily needs, or by pressure from the environment which, imputing responsibility to him, continually returns it to the conscience of his physical unit. None of this happens with the race. The repetition of the same genetic pattern in many individuals neither necessarily impels them to common actions to meet common needs, nor does it necessarily raise the awareness of collective responsibility through pressure from the environment. Within the same race, radical tensions and oppositions can coexist which, in an individual, would be a threat to its livelihood. If, between two tribes of the same race, one destroys another, the race continues to exist, precisely because it has no organic cohesion but only generic unity.

Except, therefore, in cases where no external pressure induces a race to divide and where it can therefore maintain its homogeneity by mere inertia, the race cannot, as such, be a historical subject. Even in cases where it appears to be, it is only metaphorically, as occurs when it is valued by the unifying discourse of a culture or a nation. In this case, race is the pretext for an action whose unity is created on the cultural plane and therefore transcends it, without limit.

Only entities whose self-reproduction mechanism transcends the possibility of modifications on the initiative of individuals, groups or external factors, throughout their entire existence, can be historical subjects.

Only meet this requirement, eminently:
1) Traditions (in the sense of René Guénon).
2) Esoteric organizations and secret societies.
3) The royal and nobility dynasties.
4) Extended individualities.



self-reproduction — I use the Pierre Bourdieu concept here, but extending it to reproduction mechanisms totally unknown to Bourdieu himself, such as the tulkus rites.

dynasties — Castes are not subjects, but modes of historical action. Its stability over time is not substantial, but categorical.

individualities — V. Michel Veber, Comments on René Guénon’s “Eastern Metaphysics”.