The Windmills of Sancho Panza
By Tage Lindbom, translated by Oliver Fotros, introduction by Claes G. Ryn.
TLR, 2025.
Paperback, 126 pages, $20.00.
Reviewed by Bruce P. Frohnen.
Disillusionment with socialism has pushed many people to the political right, be it traditional conservatism, neoconservatism, libertarianism or, especially in Europe, a distinctly class-based view of the world and the dangers of mass democracy. The late Tage Lindbom, for decades a key architect of Swedish social democracy, presents a fascinating and highly illuminating example of this last path. First published in Sweden in 1962, The Windmills of Sancho Panza combines sociological analysis of liberalism’s descent into statism with a radical critique of modern trends toward socialism, egalitarianism, and individualism—all of which, in his view, have undermined ties of subordination that once nurtured community, humility, and purposeful living.
As Claes Ryn points out in his excellent introduction, by 1962, when this slim but penetrating volume was first published in Sweden, Lindbom saw that “old notions of equality and democratization were fading as sources of inspiration. Instead of producing local popular engagement and cultural broadening and deepening,” the social-democratic party “was erecting a mighty political-administrative apparatus governed from the top.” This development had deep roots. As the Old Regime faded, the masses did not climb to new heights of virtuous enlightenment. Rather, over decades and even centuries, Lindbom argues, they settled increasingly into a “vegetative” state. Pursuing self-realization, comfort, and amusement, they ceded self-government to the institutions and “general staff” of an all-intrusive administrative state and abandoned higher culture altogether.
Observing such developments, conservatives of a more Burkean/Tocquevillean disposition, especially Americans, might focus on the people’s loss of the virtues necessary for self-government. Lindbom, a continental European after all, was something closer to an Old Tory defender of Throne and Altar than an Old Whig defender of mixed, constitutional government. Not merely the virtues, but the institutions, assumptions, and class structures—and from them complementary character types—of the feudal era served for him as the substance of a better (if somewhat idealized) lost world.
Lindbom focuses on the central figures in Cervantes’ Don Quixote to illustrate modern degradation and political-cultural madness. The Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance tilts at windmills in a world bereft of wonder. His noble character no longer makes sense in our disenchanted world. His loyal vassal, Sancho Panza, is the ruling character of today. Panza is a short-sighted materialist who chooses to be deceived by his master’s mad visions out of a basic decency, but also out of a merely base self-interest and laziness. Don Quixote, the deluded but virtuous nobleman, promises his vassal a realm to govern. Panza appreciates the offer, but notes that he may not bother governing, instead hiring someone else to do the work while he enjoys the income.
The relationship between Don Quixote and Sancho Panza mirrors “the everlasting dialectic play between noble aristocracy and brash populace, between spirituality and vegetative materialism.” Panza is a necessary part of society, important in his place but corrupted, especially by Rousseau’s dream of the Sovereign Man and the Sovereign People somehow coexisting in a simple, virtuous democratic state. The first result of Rousseau’s dream was the French Revolution, wherein “republican virtue” begat class hatred and mass murder. The victor throughout the West was neither the aristocrat nor the old-style plebeian, but the man of selfish vulgarity. This corrupted individual revolts both upward and sideways, against the discipline of public-interestedness necessary for the democracy that produced him to function. We are left with the choice between a totalitarian popular state modeled on the Jacobin dictatorship and a Benthamite individualism of utilitarian calculation.
Stripped of his proper dependence on the power and mercy of God and his earthly superiors, according to Lindbom, the common man, like the servant Panza, has been liberated, only to become the new Man of Interest. Through his vegetative materialism and rejection of sacrifice and mercy, he has degraded and even atomized himself and the world around him. As a result, society has moved from hyper-individualistic liberalism to hyper-materialistic socialism, anarchism, and communism, all of which feed the pride and starve the soul as the state comes to manage everyone’s lives.
Lindbom focuses on man’s liberation from the restrictions of hierarchy. The resulting freedom, as Burke noted, is good or bad only in terms of that for which it is used. In the West, liberation was centered on nurturing the rootless individual and its own wants, desires, and “truth.”
Genuine truth, Lindbom points out, is a permanent order with laws and regulations for life. Modern truth, on the other hand, is shattered, even false, and provides no lasting norms. As a result, simplistic empiricism has become the only concrete basis for knowledge and has come to serve only the individual’s will to freedom.
A central destructive product of the thinning out of perspective has been secularization. Religious reforms of what Lindbom terms the “low church” variety have furthered individualistic degradation. The plebeian traits of Calvinist puritanism brought egalitarianism and concern with commerce, rationality, science, and administration. All these more-or-less utilitarian pursuits combined with the emphasis on property as an integral part of the individual, materializing morality and fostering two key sources of secular, class-less socialization: universal suffrage and the welfare state.
In Lindbom’s view, capitalism (akin to Weber’s Protestant Ethic) shares its essential character with secularism, making efficient material wealth generation the universal goal. As a result, labor itself has lost its essential joy in the restless pursuit of money and leisure. Men now live in a never-ending cycle of factory by day and amusement park by night.
In such a world we all may be equal in our smallness because the very notion of a beneficial subordination to higher powers or goods has been destroyed. No room is left for a permanent order, let alone a permanent, transcendent God. While people may retain a vague notion of something above them worthy of gesticulation, there can be no genuine obedience or subjection to anything outside one’s self.
Liberalism eventually evaporates into a vegetative mire because men no longer have great goals; they no longer seek to impress their will on spirit and matter. All that is left is mere industry, with no attachments or moral obligations. Genuine freedom being spiritual, it too disappears because man cannot secure it through material desires or goods. The individual becomes a slavish ward of the state. “Liberalism has been annihilated by the forces that it once had summoned, and today it gets to witness its own tragic fate: an ever-weakening society and an ever-strengthening state, an individual who is ever-less a citizen and ever-more a subject.”
Genuine social cooperation has become impossible and the liberal state the guardian of such order as may be maintained in the face of limitless individual conflicts of will and interest. The state is now sanitized of genuine, legitimate power yet controls more and more of our lives through bureaucratization. All must be done through institutions and mechanisms. Even liberalism’s vaunted entrepreneurs have become cogs in a meticulously administered machine of wealth generation.
The state thus becomes the legal supervisor, the arbitrator, the final guarantor for the upholding of human freedoms. The old society provided a host of middlemen, corporations and associations, in order to grant men their due rights. This does not exist in the liberal order. Consequently, federalism is supplanted by a political centralism that bears a distinctly liberal mark.
And so, liberalism gives way, bit by bit, to a new story, that of socialism, of the all-encompassing tutelary state and its determination to “liberate” the individual again, this time from meaningful labor.
Lindbom argues that socialism shares crucial aspects with liberalism. Both continue the French Revolution’s belief in man’s unlimited possibilities. Both in effect seek the individual’s deification, largely through a process of self-realization. Both want to reconcile the Man of Self-Interest with the ancient ideal of the altruistic citizen, who produced the Terror in modern France. Both declare that evil exists only outside of man, in an environment subject to political and administrative manipulation.
Socialism’s adherents claim to oppose liberalism’s politics and state power, opting instead for decision-making within the social sphere. Yet, for both, the first task is to transform society and the individual. The state must control economic and social activities to increase leisure time, supposedly for the purpose of enrichment but, in practice, only spurring vegetative appetites. Moreover, where liberalism sought checks and balances among political, economic, and other forces, socialism seeks peace, even “congruence.” In practice, this means handing control over all aspects of life to the custodial authority of state actors, ushering in a totalitarian rule that is no less degrading for being softer than socialism’s own frequent successor, communism.
Hard or soft, modern totalitarianism degrades the human spirit by “freeing” it from the abiding truths and rules needed to nurture it. Lindbom notes how the natural law understanding of a divine order has been reduced to the myth of a social contract between equal individuals. He focuses on how this contract curtails the powers of the strong, effectively turning each individual into an autocrat over himself. Rather than a society of strong orders in which subordination must play a role even as duty cabins power, we end up with a secular Kingdom of Man in which the individual is made strong by making the community weak. The result is vegetative boredom and, long before the smartphone, relentless pursuit of empty entertainment. The person, created in the image and likeness of God, is degraded into the individual consumer of things and experiences, tossed about, ironically, by an all-powerful state and the seemingly all-powerful forces of mass society, with its fads, trends, and confusions.
Lindbom is not satisfied merely criticizing modern degradations. His trenchant analysis is balanced by a vision of society as it should be—and, Lindbom asserts, as it once was. The loss of ties to the past, not merely as a memory or even an inheritance, but as a living mode of right conduct, for him has undermined our ability to sustain human flourishing.
Human affinity can only be kept alive by way of hierarchic order. There is a natural order, which is based upon hierarchy, not upon equality and freedom. This is the order that, biologically as well as spiritually, keeps the sense of exaltation and distance alive, and which therefore ties people together by thousands upon thousands of visible and indivisible threads, giving rise to feelings of dependency and duty. In this texture, men are woven together in a physical and psychological affinity, which does not require, and can even less be supplanted by, rational elaboration.
One may disagree with Lindbom’s picture of the (particularly medieval) past as a time before “liberal” checks and balances. At least since the Eleventh-Century Investiture Crisis, during which the Pope gained the right (increasingly consistent in practice over the centuries) to appoint his own bishops, checks and balances have been key to human flourishing in the West. The medieval Church wielded real power to protect clerics, peasants, and the people more generally against overreaching monarchs, in the process developing strong constitutional traditions.
Clerics did not rule. Even popes were sometimes removed from power by secular rulers. But the proper and varied associations of a meaningful life all had voice and (limited) power to help forge proper characters and good lives. Early modernity saw the concentration of power into ever-fewer orders, helping spawn that early liberalism devoted to constitutional renewal. The roots of such constitutionalism in Roman law were well known to America’s founding generation, which looked more to the past than any abstract Reason in constructing the machinery of self-government.
Lindbom is hardly unique in overlooking the associational character of medieval constitutionalism. As both a continental European and a (“high church”) Protestant, he focuses on the ways in which modern emancipation has led, seemingly inexorably, toward the horrors of revolutions like that of 1789. His reasoning is clear: emancipation has long meant freedom from the reality of our dependence on God and society’s need for distinct, hierarchical orders.
More generally, it seems clear that Lindbom regrets our loss of the tragic sense of life. We no longer understand the “eternal human truth that fear and suffering are productive factors in earthly happiness.” Our materialism has blinded us to the inevitable limits of life on Earth, rendering us blind to the needs of our fellows and the redemptive power of suffering. He notes, for example, that Christian mercy requires we recognize that the poor will always be with us. In this light the false promise of socialism and even liberalism that we can conquer want makes us worse and unhappier people.
At the end of this book, decades before Alasdair MacIntyre declared that we are waiting for a new Saint Benedict, Lindbom recommends a “hibernation of sorts” to preserve knowledge and doctrines for future restoration. After much hibernation it is devoutly to be wished that the time for restoration may have come. Certainly we all have a duty to pursue restoration by recognizing both our limits and our dignity as children of God. As Lindbom pointed out, we are social beings capable of and in need of deeper human associations than we can find within our tutelary state and the shrunken trunk of contemporary society.
Bruce P. Frohnen is Ella and Ernest Fisher Professor of Law at Ohio Northern University and a Senior Fellow at the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal.
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