Sparta (9c9711e0)

Sparta is presented as the book’s clearest symbol of an absolute positive-liberty state: a society in which freedom is pursued through concentrated public power rather than through resistance to government. The text defines it through absolute state power and absolute government, then sets that model against contemporary American right-wing hostility to central authority, taxation, and public interference. Sparta therefore functions less as a reconstructed historical society than as a political emblem in the book’s argument about capitalism, liberty, hierarchy, and collective power.

Definition and Political Form

Sparta appears under the emphatic heading “Sparta” and is immediately identified as “The Ultimate Positive Liberty State.” That designation places it within the book’s opposition between positive liberty and negative liberty. Positive liberty is represented as the capacity of a collective political order to act decisively, impose common purposes, and prevent private power from dominating society. Sparta’s defining features are correspondingly stated in maximal terms: “Absolute State Power” and “Absolute Government.”

The formulation makes Sparta the opposite of a weak or fragmented polity. Its authority is not presented as a limited instrument that merely protects private arrangements; it is the organizing force of social life. In the book’s political imagination, the state must be sufficiently powerful to restrain elites, enforce a common order, and prevent individuals or private interests from treating public authority as an obstacle to their wealth. Sparta consequently serves as a counter-image to the anti-government ideal associated with contemporary American conservatism and libertarianism.

Sparta and the American Right

The book argues that no one would remember Sparta as a powerful state if its population had consisted of people holding the views attributed to the American right wing. That comparison rests on a list of oppositions: American right wingers are described as hating government, the state, and central authority; believing that citizens should be armed against the state; and placing complete faith in private power and in the financial power of elites opposed to the state. Sparta, by contrast, is imagined as intolerant of precisely those commitments.

The contrast is deliberately uncompromising. The text calls American right wingers “anarchists,” while noting that they use “libertarians” as a euphemism, and claims that a healthy state would not tolerate them. It goes further by imagining that Sparta would have used its army to destroy such people as enemies of the state. This is not a neutral comparison between constitutional systems. It is a polemical reversal of the usual conservative admiration for individual arms and resistance to centralized authority: the qualities praised by the American right are recast as signs of political disorder, while Sparta’s coercive unity becomes evidence of state health.

Connection to the Book’s Wider Political Argument

Sparta’s meaning is reinforced by the book’s account of the Ownership Class, described as the rich elite, the one percent, that rules the world while inducing the ninety-nine percent to serve its interests. The book interprets this submission through the “master–slave dialectic,” in which one self-conscious being risks death to seize power while the other submits in order to preserve life. Within that framework, a strong state can appear as a possible instrument against private mastery, whereas an ideology of unrestricted private power can leave ordinary people subject to economic domination while proclaiming them free.

This argument also explains Sparta’s proximity to the book’s treatment of capitalism and slavery. The text claims that the American right wing preserves the Confederacy’s attitude toward government and holds that people should remain free to do whatever they like to others, including enslaving them. It presents the American Civil War as a conflict over the nature of capitalism and over whether slavery should count as an acceptable capitalist practice. Against that background, Sparta symbolizes the opposite institutional choice: the state is not required to stand aside while private owners maximize profit, and public authority is treated as capable of overriding private economic power.

The same logic appears in the book’s assertion that Abraham Lincoln used the positive-liberty state to destroy the Confederacy as a physical entity, while a new Lincoln would be needed to destroy the Confederacy as a mental entity. Modern predatory capitalism is described as making slaves of those without capital, and the employee-employer relationship is recast through the claim that “Employee” is simply capitalism’s euphemism for “slave.” Sparta thus belongs to a conceptual chain in which strong state power is imagined as the necessary means of ending economic subordination.

Symbolic and Narrative Significance

Sparta is one of several historical and political symbols through which the book turns contemporary conflict into an epic struggle between collective emancipation and elite domination. The text compares the Trump insurgency with “The Confederacy: The Sequel,” describes it as a return to far-right conservative rule based on racism, white supremacy, and plutocracy, and links it to the world of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. Sparta supplies the opposite end of that symbolic spectrum: not private wealth refusing the state, but a state powerful enough to command society and suppress organized resistance to its authority.

The symbol also clarifies the book’s hostility to the idea that freedom consists primarily in being left alone by government. In the closing political movement, the book announces the coming of a worldwide “Jacobin Age” and argues that placing a senior member of the one percent in the White House will leave the right wing with no one to blame when its promised order produces disaster. The resulting crisis is expected to generate revolutionary resolve rather than vindicate private power. Within that prophetic structure, Sparta is a model of the force the book believes collective liberation requires: organized, centralized, and prepared to act where fragmented individualism merely protects existing hierarchies.

Sparta is therefore less a setting than a governing principle. Its absolute authority is presented as both the condition of political strength and the dividing line between a state capable of confronting domination and a society in which anti-state rhetoric serves the wealthy. The book’s use of Sparta is intentionally mythic and polemical; it does not establish a detailed historical account of Spartan institutions. Its decisive function is to make the argument that liberty, as the book understands it, may require not less power but a public power strong enough to defeat private mastery.