 In going beyond sensible consciousness to mythical consciousness, Cassirer emphasizes a non-rational symbolic form as the basis of all the rest. This emphasis had its most striking philosophical payoff in one of Cassirer’s last works, The Myth of the State, which appeared in the year after his death in 1945. Cassirer had written this work encouraged by his colleagues at Yale, as a way in which he could apply his philosophy of symbolic forms to the great calamity of the time – the rise of National Socialism in Germany and the resulting Second World War. Cassirer’s diagnosis of this situation is that it depended on the use of modern technologies of mass communication to awaken, manipulate, and exploit the essentially non-rational mythical functions of thought that are always still present in every human being. Cassirer singles out two German thinkers, Hegel and Spengler, as contributing especially to the Nazi glorification of the totalitarian state – the former less culpably as the most important political philosopher in the nineteenth century background to what Cassirer calls the “modern political myth,” the latter much more culpably as this myth was just coming into being in the twentieth.