ABSTRACT
Wagner and Rousseau addressed some very real problems of Western civilization. Metapolitics is simply the marriage of romanticism and concrete political action, but this marriage occurs only because of the "semi-rational" nature of politics-"semi-rational" for Viereck because of the pervasive influence of culture and the imagination. Culture manifests the ethical norms of society aesthetically through works of the imagination-esemplastically articulating values that unite a political community around a particular view of human nature. Culture, not politics, is the crux of civilization. It is the adhesive that binds the members of a community to one another through a shared perception of reality. The ineluctable presence of faction and strife does nothing to frustrate the validity of this assertion, for this conflict is also manifest within culture. In commenting on the Great Depression, Viereck admonished the reader not to neglect the repercussions of culture.
