 The conclusion of this new critique was that the future belonged not to the republican people, or to separate national states, but to a transnational imperialism, involving the confrontation of two absolutist programmes. In one of these, the Western European, political absolutism arose over modern mass society as its necessary complement. Bauer had earlier criticized this configuration as an outmoded form of state, to be supplanted by the republic; he now described it as the result of an incomplete political development, which would issue in a contention for world domination. Within the Western European form, Bauer distinguished two variants: Bismarck’s state socialism, imitating eighteenth-century Prussian militarism, attempted to subject economic production to political control, suppressing innovation and personal independence; while Disraeli’s romantic imperialism sought to level and subordinate English society before a paternalistic monarchy. In opposition to the west, the second major absolutist form was that of Russia, a substantial power with limited internal distinctions. Its cohesiveness derived from the fusion of political and ecclesiastical power, and the absence of the modern idea of subjectivity. Bauer noted that Hegel had mistakenly discounted this zone from world history. Like the anarchist Michael Bakunin, Bauer claimed that Russia owed its original state formation to Germany; but Russia had otherwise been impervious to western philosophical influence, adopting only what served its immediate, concrete ends. Animated by hatred and shame of its past insignificance, Russia too was ambivalent. It did not directly provide the solution to the contemporary political crisis, but elicited a decisive struggle with the west. The vigour of an alien adversary would force Europe to transform itself, and offered the only remaining prospects of a cultural renewal. Preceding any such renewal would be the extension of imperialism across the continent and the globe, and the clash of rivals for dominance within the new empire. Bauer concluded that world war was inevitable.