Spengler, or David Goldman, at First Things has been one of my favorite writers for some time and I continue to be impressed with his erudition and his occassionally (perhaps often) controversial views.  He makes one think and think deeply about where the world is at.  Though, as I have previously made known, I do not always agree with him, I believe he has crystallized certain features of the global landscape in such a way as to bring understanding to where we are at and where we might be going.

This piece is a tour du force of history, literature, and philosophy as he describes the works of the famous German writer Friedrich Schiller.

I won't go into all that much detail, as only by reading the full piece can one appreciate its depth, except to comment on the conclusions drawn towards the end on how European universalism, as represented by the Catholic Church, was permanently ended during the tribulation of the Thirty Years War.

All international relations scholars understand that the "Westphalian" order of nation states that we are ostensibly still living under today.  Thus a reflection on how that order came to be and how the potential alternative to that order that was supplanted makes for illuminating consideration. 

Note this,

"Europe’s tragedy was the ruin of the never-completed, always-contested political framework of universal empire that uniquely allowed its people to be at once citizens of nations and members of the ekklesia...

Nonetheless it underscores the point that if Europe's crises had a happy ending, it is the founding of the United States."

How that conclusion is drawn is intriguing and casts American exceptionalism in a different light, or perhaps, the same light better more throughly seen.