Civilization as Divine Superman: A Superorganic Philosophy of History

Regarded as the leading philosopher of British Fascism, Raven Thomson was greatly influenced by Oswald Spengler’s cyclic theory of history, However, in Civilization As Divine Superman, Thomson rejects Spengler’s pessimism on the future of the West, and suggests that culture-man has the option of willing an ongoing path of greatness, rather than succumbing to decay and death. Thomson believed this could be achieved by developing a social organism, where each fulfils a function as part of a totality. When former Labour party eminence Sir Oswald Mosley founded the British Union of Fascists in 1932 to address such problems, Thomson saw in Mosley’s version of Fascism a means of attaining such an organic society. As a street corner orator and a philosopher, Raven Thomson was that rare breed that Oswald Mosley described as the “though-deed man”. Interned in England during World War II, he was one of the first to resume association with Mosley after the war, and was a leading member of Mosley’s Union Movement, advocating the new post-war doctrine of “European Socialism”. With this re-publication of Civilization As Divine Superman at a time when we have more reasons to accept Spengler’s fatality of a globalised society, Raven Thomson offers us our last hope to avoid catastrophe.