Imperium: The Philosophy of History and Politics

Yockey adopted Spenglerian ideas in Imperium,[8] although Yockey's extreme antisemitism differed him from Spengler.[9] Spengler's The Decline of the West was the most important single source.[10][11] Yockey's concept of the role of the state drew on Carl Schmitt's Friend–Enemy Thesis as explained in his 1927 The Concept of the Political. [12] (Yockey has been accused of plagiarizing Schmitt.[13]) Yockey heavily drew on Thomas Carlyle's great man theory, seeing the creative ability of heroic individuals as a vehicle for progress.[14]

Echoing the analogy of human life offered by Spengler's The Decline of The West, Yockey wrote of "High Cultures", describing them as organic beings, "a Life-form at the peak of the organic hierarchy of which plants, animals and men are the lower beings",[15] and arguing that they follow a pattern of birth, growth, maturity, fulfillment and death.[16] He asserted that West was the last remaining high culture of eight in world history. Yockey wrote that each high culture has a soul that seizes humans in its sphere of influence, and determines its religious expression, science, art forms, state structures, politics and morality throughout its life span.[17][18] He described races as "spirituo-biological" entities that adapt to changing needs of a culture.[19][16] He argued that civilization is not an end product of progress, but a certain phase in the life of each high culture, and that high cultures are moved by their will to power and a "spiritual drive" to fulfill "destiny" and "mission".[20] Yockey wrote that the West's fulfillment of its destiny was threatened by "cultural pathology", including interrelated sicknesses of "culture-parasitism", "culture-retardation" and "culture-distortion".[21] Yockey saw the influence of non-Western groups as corrupting to the Western culture.[22] He argued that Jews were most harmful to the Western soul by aggravating a deeper crisis, allegedly promoting materialism, rationalism, liberalism, democracy, equality, feminism, capitalism and communism.[23][24][25][26] He considered the United States lost to the Western cause in "the American Revolution of 1933", the presidential victory of Franklin D. Roosevelt, which he alleged was a Jewish seizure of political power, as opposed to "the European Revolution of 1933" represented by the rise of Hitler in Germany.[27] According to Yockey, Hitler set Europe toward a fulfillment of its destiny as a unified empire, which the United States sided with Russia to stop. Yockey decried the postwar trials by "extra-European forces" that he termed "show trials", and he denied the Holocaust, claiming that imagery of the Nazis' gas chambers was faked.[28][29] Seeing history of every high culture as guided by the "Spirit of the Age", corresponding to each life phase of high culture, Yockey considered fascism to be the expression of this spirit in the new epoch.[15]

Yockey wrote Imperium at an inn in Brittas Bay, Ireland.[27] Imperium spanned 600 pages in two volumes.[30] In Yockey's pseudonym, Ulick Varange, Ulick was supposedly a Danish-Irish name, and Varange was a reference to Norsemen.[31]

Yockey invited Oswald Mosley, who also held Spenglerian views, to publish it in his name, but Mosley refused. Publication was financed by the Mosleyites Guy Chesham, Peter Huxley-Blythe and Baroness von Pflugl.[32]

The far-right activist and antisemite Willis Carto acquired the rights to Imperium from Westropa Press, and published it more widely in 1948.[33][34] The 1962 edition, published after Yockey's suicide in jail in 1960, included an introduction by Carto,[34] along with Revilo P. Oliver's positive review.[35]

Imperium has been called one of the most influential antisemitic books since Hitler's Mein Kampf.[34][29] It influenced the American neo-Nazi James H. Madole, the racial Odinist Else Christensen, the fascist Christian Bouchet and the British neo-Nazi David Myatt.[36] According to academic Jeffrey Kaplan, some on the far right considered Imperium the "impenetrable ramblings of a madman".[37] The book's ideology was adopted by Willis Carto for the National Youth Alliance and some members of groups such as the Liberty Lobby (founded by Carto) and the American Independent Party.[38] Liberty Lobby and its spinoffs promoted Imperium as the Mein Kampf of postwar Nazism.[30] The book was also sold for several years through the catalog of David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard.[39]

After Yockey's death, Imperium was received well by European fascists, including the neo-nazi Italian hermetic philosopher Julius Evola.[31]

• Varange, Ulick (1948). Imperium: The Philosophy of History and Politics. Westropa Press.
• Goodrick-Clarke, Nicholas (2002). Black sun : Aryan cults, Esoteric Nazism, and the politics of identity. New York: New York University Press. ISBN 0-585-43467-0. OCLC 52467699.
• Gardell, Mattiass W. (2003). Gods of Blood : The Pagan Revival and White Separatism. Duke University Press Books.
• Maibaum, Matthew W. (2003). "F.P. Yockey's "Imperium", Patterns of Prejudice, 7:2, 14-18". Patterns of Prejudice. Routledge. 7 (2): 14–18. doi:10.1080/0031322X.1973.9969114.