[This is Section 20 of Nietzsche and the Nazis.]
20. The question of Nazism’s philosophical roots
We do not do ourselves any favors by not understanding Nazism thoroughly or by being satisfied with superficial explanations. It took a world war to stop National Socialism in the twentieth century. War is brute force. Brute force rarely changes anyone’s minds about anything, and it alone does not destroy the underlying causes that motivate conflict. To use a crude analogy: If two neighbors are having an ongoing argument about a series of issues, and one neighbor hits the other and knocks him unconscious—that ends the argument but it does not solve their problems. The source of their argument is still there and it will re-surface.
The same holds for the underlying causes of National Socialism and its differences with the liberal democracies. The liberal democracies were able to knock out the Nazis in World War II, though it was a close call—but the underlying arguments are still with us.
The differences between National Socialism and liberal democracies are profound and involve entirely different philosophies of life. National Socialism was the product of a well-thought-out philosophy of life, the main elements of which were originated, crafted, and argued by philosophers and other intellectuals across many generations.
The Nazi intellectuals were not lightweights, and we run the risk of underestimating our enemy if we dismiss their ideology as attractive only to a few cranky weirdos.[43] If your enemy has a machine gun but you believe he only has a pea shooter, then you are setting yourself up for failure. And if we remind ourselves of the list of very heavyweight intellectuals who supported Nazism—Nobel Prize winners, outstanding philosophers and brilliant legal thinkers—then it is clear that these were no pea-shooters and that we need heavyweight intellectual ammunition to defend ourselves.
In the case of other major historical revolutions, we are more familiar with seeing the significance of philosophy. When we think for example of the causes of the Communist Revolutions in Russia and China, we naturally think back to the philosopher Karl Marx. When we think of the causes of the French Revolution, we think back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau. When we think of the causes of the American Revolution, we naturally think back to the philosopher John Locke. The same holds the causes of National Socialism—although since the Nazi regime went so horribly wrong, there is perhaps some reluctance to name names. Yet naming names is sometimes crucial if we are going to get to the historical heart of the matter. What philosophers can we cite in the case of the Nazis? Several names are candidates: Georg Hegel, Johann Fichte, even elements from Karl Marx.
But in connection with the Nazis, perhaps the biggest and the most controversial name regularly mentioned is that of Friedrich Nietzsche. The Nazis often cited Nietzsche as one of their philosophical precursors, and even though Nietzsche died thirty-three years before the Nazis came to power, references to Nietzsche crop up regularly in Nazi writings and activities. In philosopher Heidegger’s lectures, for example, “Nietzsche was presented as the Nazi philosopher.”[44]
In his study, Adolf Hitler had a bust of Friedrich Nietzsche. In 1935, Hitler attended and participated in the funeral of Nietzsche’s sister Elisabeth. In 1938, the Nazis built a monument to Nietzsche. In 1943, Hitler gave a set of Nietzsche’s writings as a gift to fellow dictator Benito Mussolini.[45]
Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, was also a great admirer of Friedrich Nietzsche. In his semi-autobiographical novel, Goebbels has the title character Michael die in a mining accident—afterward three books are found among his belongings: the Bible, Goethe’s Faust, and Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra.
So who was Friedrich Nietzsche?
References
[43] Recall Albert Speer on “the event that led me to [Hitler]”—a speech Hitler gave to the College of Engineering in Berlin: Speer expected it to be “a bombastic harangue” but it turned out to be a “reasoned lecture” (quoted in Orlow 1969, p. 199).
[44] Rohkrämer 2005, p. 181.
[45] During WWI, the German government printed 150,000 copies of Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra and gave them to soldiers along with a copy of the Bible.
[Bibliography.]
[Return to the Nietzsche and the Nazis page. Go to the StephenHicks.org main page.]
Posted 2 years, 1 month ago at 3:34 pm. Add a comment
[This excerpt is from Chapter 4 of Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault]
Fichte on education as socialization
Johann Fichte was a disciple of Kant. Born in 1762, he studied theology and philosophy at Jena, Wittenberg, and Leipzig. In 1788 he read Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason, and that reading changed Fichte’s life. He traveled to Königsberg in order to meet Kant, then the ruling philosopher of Germany. But the great man was initially distant, so Fichte worked as a tutor at Königsberg while writing his moral treatise, Critique of All Revelation. When it was finished, Fichte dedicated it to Kant. Kant read it, admired it, and urged that it be published. It was published anonymously in 1792, and this made Fichte famous in intellectual circles: It was so Kantian in style and content that it was taken by many to have been written by Kant himself and to be his fourth Critique. Kant disclaimed authorship but praised the young author, thus launching Fichte’s academic career.
The major breakthrough, however—the event that launched Fichte permanently onto the German landscape as not only a leading philosopher but also as a cultural leader—came in 1807. A year after Napoleon’s defeat of the Prussians, Fichte stepped onto the public stage and delivered his ringing call to arms, his Addresses to the German Nation.
In the Addresses, Fichte spoke as a philosopher who had descended from abstractions to connect with practical affairs, in order to situate those practical affairs within the context of the most metaphysical.[66] He addressed the defeated Germans, calling for a renewal of their spirit and character. The Germans had lost the physical battle, Fichte argued, but now more was at stake: the real battle now was a battle of character.
Why had Germany come under the dominion of Napoleon? Fichte granted that many factors were responsible, most of them having to do with the infiltration of softening, Enlightenment beliefs—“all the evils which have now brought us to ruin are of foreign origin”[67]—and that many reforms were needed in the military, religion, and the administration of government.
But the fundamental problem was clear: the educational system had failed Germany. Only with a total revision of the method of educating children could Germany hope to become immune from the Napoleons of the future. “In a word, it is a total change of the existing system of education that I propose as the sole means of preserving the existence of the German nation.”[68] In Fichte’s educational philosophy, themes from Rousseau, Hamann, Kant, and Schleiermacher are integrated into a package that would be influential for more than one hundred years.
In the Addresses, there is no question in Fichte’s mind about what abstract system is the right one. With Kant, “the problem has been completely solved among us, and philosophy has been perfected.”[69] But Kant’s philosophy had not yet been applied systematically to the education of children.
Fichte started by looking back to see how Germany got into its current sorry state. Germany used to be great. In the Middle Ages, “the German burghers were the civilized people,” and “this period is the only one in German history in which this nation is famous and brilliant.” What was great about the burghers was their “spirit of piety, of honour, of modesty, and of the sense of community.” They were great because they were not individualistic. “Seldom does the name of an individual stand out or distinguish itself, for they were all of like mind and alike in sacrifice for the common weal.”[70]
Fichte was, however, not a conservative apologist for the good old days. In the context of feudal Germany, Fichte was a reformer who believed that it was the corrupt upper classes that had ruined Germany: “its bloom [was] destroyed by the avarice and tyranny of princes.”[71] The Germans had become further corrupted by the modern world, which led to their impotence in the face of Napoleon. What about the modern world, essentially, caused the corruption? Self-seeking: “self-seeking has destroyed itself by its own complete development,” and “[a] people can be completely corrupted, i.e., self-seeking—for self-seeking is the root of all other corruption.”[72]
And this, echoing Rousseau, was because men became rational, under the guise of Enlightenment. This undermined religion and its moral force. “The enlightenment of the understanding, with its purely material calculations, was the force which destroyed the connection established by religion between some future life and the present.” Consequently, government became liberal and morally lax: “the weakness of governments” frequently allowed “neglect of duty to go unpunished.”[73]
So now the German has sold his soul, lost his true self, his identity. “It follows, then, that the means of salvation which I promise to indicate consists in the fashioning of an entirely new self, which may have existed before perhaps in individuals as an exception, but never as a universal and national self, and in the education of the nation.” Echoing Rousseau again: “By means of the new education we want to mould the Germans into a corporate body, which shall be stimulated and animated in all its individual members by the same interest.”[74]
To start with, education must be egalitarian and universal, unlike previous education, which was feudal and elitist: “So there is nothing left for us but just to apply the new system to every German without exception, so that it is not the education of a single class, but the education of the nation.” Such education will aid in the creation of a classless society: “All distinctions of classes … will be completely removed and vanish. In this way there will grow up among us, not popular education, but real German national education.”[75]
Real education must start by getting to the source of human nature. Education must exert “an influence penetrating to the roots of vital impulse and action.” Here was a great failing of traditional education, for it had relied upon and appealed to the student’s free will. “I should reply that that very recognition of, and reliance upon, free will in the pupil is the first mistake of the old system.” Compulsion, not freedom, is best for students:
On the other hand, the new education must consist essentially in this, that it completely destroys freedom of will in the soil which it undertakes to cultivate, and produces on the contrary strict necessity in the decisions of the will, the opposite being impossible. Such a will can henceforth be relied upon with confidence and certainty.[76]
Unfortunately, it is difficult to do this under contemporary living arrangements, in which children go to school and then return to corrupting influences in their homes and their neighborhoods at the end of the day. “It is essential,” Fichte then urged, “that from the very beginning the pupil should be continuously and completely under the influence of this education, and should be separated altogether from the community, and kept from all contact with it.”[77]
Once the children are separated, educators can turn their attention to internal matters. In his essay on education, Kant had of course argued that “above all things, obedience is an essential feature in the character of a child, especially of a school boy or girl.”[78] However, Fichte pointed out, children are children and as such they do not naturally impose duties upon themselves. So the school’s authorities must firmly impose the duties upon them:
“[T]he legislation should consequently maintain a high standard of severity, and should prohibit the doing of many things. Such prohibitions, which simply must exist and on which the existence of the community depends, are to be enforced in case of necessity by fear of immediate punishment, and this penal law must be administered absolutely without indulgence or exception.”[79]
One of the duties to be inculcated is the obligation of the student who is more able to help the more needy students. Yet “he is to expect neither reward for it, for under this system of government all are quite equal in regard to work and pleasure, nor even praise, for the attitude of mind prevailing in the community is that it is just everyone’s duty to act thus.” Anticipating Marx, Fichte believed that the school should be a microcosm of what the ideal society would be like: “Under this system of government, therefore, the acquirement of greater skill and the effort spent therein will result only in fresh effort and work, and it will be the very pupil who is abler than the rest who must often watch while the others sleep, and reflect while others play.”[80]
More broadly, the new education will eliminate all self interest and inculcate the pure love of duty for its own sake that Rousseau and Kant had prized:
“[I]n place of that love of self, with which nothing for our good can be connected any longer, we must set up and establish in the hearts of all those whom we wish to reckon among our nation that other kind of love, which is concerned directly with the good, simply as such and for its own sake.”[81]
If the system is successful, its fruit will be as follows: “Its pupil goes forth at the proper time as a fixed and unchangeable machine.”[82]
But this moral education is not enough. Drawing upon Hamann and Schleiermacher, Fichte next turned to religion.
“The pupil of this education is not merely a member of human society here on this earth and for the short span of life which is permitted to him. He is also, and is undoubtedly acknowledged by education to be, a link in the eternal chain of spiritual life in a higher social order. A training which has undertaken to include the whole of his being should undoubtedly lead him to a knowledge of this higher order also.”[83]
Despite being seen as soft on religion by the Lutheran orthodoxy, Fichte argued that education must also be intensely religious. “Under proper guidance,” the student will “find at the end that nothing really exists but life, the spiritual life which lives in thought, and that everything else does not really exist, but only appears to exist.” He will find that “Only in immediate contact with God and the direct emanation of his life from him will he find life, light, and happiness, but in any separation from that immediate contact, death, darkness, and misery.” “Education to true religion is, therefore, the final task of the new education.”[84]
So far Fichte’s program of education includes the communal separation of children, severe authoritarian top-down training, strict moral duty and selflessness, and total religious immersion. Not quite the Enlightenment model of liberal education.
But Fichte’s program did not end there. For now we add the importance of ethnicity. Only the German is capable of true education. The German is the best that the world has to offer and is the hope for the future progress of mankind. The German “alone, above all other European nations, [has] the capacity of responding to such an education.”[85] But as goes Germany, so goes the rest of Europe and, ultimately, all of humankind. Either the Germans will respond to Fichte’s call and reform themselves—or they will sink into oblivion. “But, as Germany sinks, the rest of Europe is seen to sink with it.”[86]
Thus Fichte, with his passionate style and force of personality, spurred the Germans to action. The Germans listened admiringly and with approval. In 1810, three years after the delivery of his Addresses, Fichte was appointed dean of the philosophy faculty at the newly-founded University of Berlin. (Schleiermacher was appointed head of the faculty of theology.) In the following year Fichte became rector of the whole university, and so was in a position to put his educational program into practice.
Nor was Fichte a flash in the pan. One spark appears over a century later in 1919, in Friedrich Ebert’s speech at the opening of the National Assembly at Weimar. Germany had once again been defeated by foreign powers, and the nation was demoralized, resentful, and starting over. Elected first president of the German Republic in 1919, Ebert made a point in his opening address of stressing the relevance of Fichte to Germany’s situation:
“In this way we will set to work, our great aim before us: to maintain the right of the German nation, to lay the foundation in Germany for a strong democracy, and to bring it to achievement with the true social spirit and in the socialistic way. Thus shall we realize that which Fichte has given to the German nation as its task.”[87]
References
[66] Fichte once said to Madame de Staël: “Grasp my metaphysics, Madame; you will then understand my ethics.”
[67] Fichte 1807, 84.
[68] Fichte 1807, 13.
[69] Fichte 1807, 101.
[70] Fichte 1807, 104-105.
[71] Fichte 1807, pp. 104-5.
[72] Fichte 1807, 8-9.
[73] Fichte 1807, 11.
[74] Fichte 1807, 12-13, 15.
[75] Fichte 1807, 15.
[76] Fichte 1807, 14, 20.
[77] Fichte 1807, 31.
[78] Kant 1960, 84.
[79] Fichte 1807, 33.
[80] Fichte 1807, 34-5.
[81] Fichte 1807, 23.
[82] Fichte 1807, 36.
[83] Fichte 1807, 37.
[84] Fichte 1807, 37, 38.
[85] Fichte 1807, 52.
[86] Fichte 1807, 105.
[87] In Fichte 1807, xxii.
Bibliography
[This is an excerpt from Stephen Hicks's Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (Scholargy Publishing, 2004, 2011). The full book is available in hardcover or e-book at Amazon.com. See also the Explaining Postmodernism page.]
Posted 2 years, 1 month ago at 1:17 pm. 2 comments
[This excerpt is from Chapter 2 of Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault]
Metaphysical solutions to Kant: from Hegel to Nietzsche
Georg W. F. Hegel’s philosophy is another fundamentally Counter-Enlightenment attack on reason and individualism. His philosophy is a partially secularized version of traditional Judeo-Christian cosmology. While Kant’s concerns centered upon epistemology, Hegel’s centered upon metaphysics. For Kant, preserving faith led him to deny reason, while for Hegel preserving the spirit of Judeo-Christian metaphysics led him to be more anti-reason and anti-individualist than Kant ever was.
Hegel agreed with Kant that realism and objectivism were dead ends. Kant had transcended them by making the subject prior, but from Hegel’s perspective he had been too wishy-washy in doing so. Kant made the subject responsible only for the phenomenal world of experience, leaving noumenal reality forever closed off to us. This was intolerable to Hegel—after all, the whole point of philosophy is to achieve union with reality, to escape the merely sensuous and finite and to come to know and be one with the supersensuous and infinite.
However, Hegel had no intention of trying to solve the epistemological puzzles about perception, concept-formation, and induction that had set Kant’s agenda, in order to show us how we might acquire knowledge of the noumenal. Instead, taking a cue from Johann Fichte, Hegel’s strategy was to assert boldly an identity of subject and object, thus closing the gap metaphysically.
On Kantian grounds, the subject is responsible for the form of awareness; but Kant was still enough of a realist to posit a noumenal reality that was the source of the content that our minds shape and structure. For Hegel, the realist element drops out entirely: the subject generates both content and form. The subject is in no way responsive to an external reality; instead, the whole of reality is a creation of the subject.
“In my view,” Hegel wrote at the beginning of the Phenomenology of Spirit, “which can be justified only by the exposition of the system itself, everything turns on grasping and expressing the True, not only as Substance, but equally as Subject”.[23] The Subject that Hegel had in mind is not the empirical, individual subject of traditional philosophy. The creative Subject that is also Substance is the universe as a whole (or God, or Spirit, or the Absolute), of which we individual subjects are mere portions. Realists had seen the universe as a whole as an object or set of objects within which there are some subjects. Hegel reversed that: the universe as a whole is a subject, and within the subject are objects. Such a bold posit solves a lot of problems.
We can get even more necessity and universality than Kant had given us. Hume had told us that we cannot get necessary and universal truths from reality. Kant, agreeing with Hume’s conclusion, had suggested that we supply necessity and universality from ourselves. That grounded necessity and universality, but at a price: since we supply them subjectively, we cannot be sure that they apply to reality. Hegel agreed with Kant that our minds supply necessity and universality, but said that all of reality is a product of mind, the Mind that contains all of our little minds within it. Since reality comes from us, we can know all of reality in all of its glorious necessity.
We can also get a universe that does not dehumanize us. Hegel argued that the realist and objectivist models had, by separating subject and object, inevitably led to mechanical and reductionist accounts of the self. By taking the everyday objects of empirical reality as the model and explaining everything in terms of them, they necessarily had to reduce the subject to a mechanical device. But if instead we start with the subject and not the object, then our model of reality changes significantly. The subject, we know from the inside, is conscious and organic, and if the subject is a microcosm of the whole, then applying its features to the whole generates a conscious and organic model of the world. Such a model of the world is much more hospitable to traditional values than the materialist and reductionist leanings of the Enlightenment.
Hegel could also claim to be more of an advocate of reason than Kant was. Reason, Kant, taught us, is fundamentally a creative function. And, Kant also taught us, it can know only its own phenomenal creations. But having asserted that reason creates all of reality, Hegel could offer us the very optimistic, Enlightenment-sounding conclusion that reason can know all of reality.
References
[23] Hegel 1807, 17.
Bibliography [pdf] [html]
[This is an excerpt from Stephen Hicks's Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (Scholargy Publishing, 2004, 2011). The full book is available in hardcover or e-book at Amazon.com. See also the Explaining Postmodernism page.]
Posted 2 years, 1 month ago at 4:17 pm. 1 comment
[This is Appendix 3 of Nietzsche and the Nazis. Sources for the quotations are at the end of this post.]
Appendix 3: Quotations on German anti-Semitism
Martin Luther (1483-1546): “The Jews deserve to hang on gallows, seven times higher than ordinary thieves.” And: “We ought to take revenge on the Jews and kill them.”[189]
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804): The Jews are by nature “sharp dealers” who are “bound together by superstition.” Their “immoral and vile” behavior in commerce shows that they “do not aspire to civic virtue,” for “the spirit of usury holds sway amongst them.” They are “a nation of swindlers” who benefit only “from deceiving their host’s culture.”[190]
Kant: “The euthanasia of Judaism is the pure moral religion.”[191]
Johann Herder (1744-1803) quoting Kant from his lectures on practical philosophy: “Every coward is a liar; Jews, for example, not only in business, but also in common life.”[192]
Johann Fichte (1762-1814): “A mighty state stretches across almost all the nations of Europe, hostile in intent and in constant strife with all others … this is Jewry.” Also: “As for giving them [the Jews] civil rights, I for one see no remedy but that their heads should be all cut off in one night and replaced with others in which there would not be one single Jewish idea.”[193]
Ernst Moritz Arndt (1769-1860, professor at University of Bonn). Arndt was a poet, a historian, a deeply-religious Lutheran, and post-Kantian philosophical idealist whose hero was Arminius, who defeated the Romans in 9 C.E., thus saving the pure German soul from “contamination” by Latin races. According to Arndt, the Jews were “a rotten and degenerate race” that had “evil and worthless drives and desires.”[194]
G. W. F. Hegel (1770-1831): Germany cannot assimilate the Jews because the Jews live an “animal existence that can only be secured at someone else’s expense.” Also: “Spirit alone recognizes spirit. They [the Jews] saw in Jesus only the man … for He was only one like themselves, and they felt themselves to be nothing. The Jewish multitude was bound to wreck His attempt to give them the consciousness of something divine, for faith in something divine, something great, cannot make its home in a dunghill.”[195]
Johann Fries (1773-1843), professor at University of Heidelberg: Fries was a Kantian logician, a disciple of Fichte, and influential among student nationalist societies. He called the Jews “rotten,” “worthless cheats,” “bloodsuckers,” a “diseased people,” argued they should be required to wear special signs indicating to others their race, and called for their “extermination.”[196]
Karl Marx (1818-1883): “Let us consider the actual, worldly Jew—not the Sabbath Jew, as Bauer does, but the everyday Jew. Let us not look for the secret of the Jew in his religion, but let us look for the secret of his religion in the real Jew. What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest. What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money. Very well then! Emancipation from huckstering and money, consequently from practical, real Jewry, would be the self-emancipation of our time. … We recognize in Jewry, therefore, a general present-time-oriented anti-social element, an element which through historical development—to which in this harmful respect the Jews have zealously contributed—has been brought to its present high level, at which it must necessarily dissolve itself. In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Jewry.”[197]
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900): “I have not met a German yet who was well disposed toward the Jews; and however unconditionally all the cautious and politically-minded repudiated real anti-Semitism, even this caution and policy are not directed against the species of this feeling itself but only against its dangerous immoderation.”[198]
Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) in 1925: “I am convinced that I am acting as the agent of our Creator. By fighting off the Jews, I am doing the Lord’s work.” And in 1931: “The Jewish problem is a highly complex matter … our ideology is opposed to the interests of the Chosen Race in that we abominate their dance around the Golden Calf. For racial and financial reasons the Jews are basically opposed to communism.”[199]
Hitler: “Anti-Semitism is a useful revolutionary expedient.”[200]
Sidney Hook (1902-1989), a socialist philosopher: “anti-Semitism was rife in almost all varieties of socialism.”[201]
References
[189] Luther, quoted in Murphy 1999, p. 9.
[190] Kant, quoted in Weiss 1996, p. 67.
[191] Kant, Streit der Fakultaten, in Werke 11:321, quoted in Paul Lawrence Rose, Revolutionary Antisemitism from Kant to Wagner (Princeton, 1990), p. 96.
[192] Herder, quoted in Mack, 2003, p. 5.
[193] Fichte, quoted in Weiss 1996, pp. 72 and 68.
[194] Arndt, quoted in Weiss 1996, p. 74.
[195] Hegel, quoted in Weiss 1996, pp. 67 and 66.
[196] Fries, quoted in Weiss 1996, p. 74.
[197] Marx, “On The Jewish Question,” http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/jewish-question/. Viewed September 17, 2007.
[198] Nietzsche, BGE 251.
[199] Hitler, in interview with Richard Breiting, 1931, published in Edouard Calic, ed., “Second Interview with Hitler,” Secret Conversations with Hitler: The Two Newly-Discovered 1931 Interviews. New York: John Day Co., 1971, p. 86.
[200] Hitler, in Hermann Rauschning, The Voice of Destruction: Hitler Speaks, as quoted in George Seldes, The Great Thoughts. New York: Ballantine, p. 186.
[201] Hook, “Home Truths About Marx,” Commentary (September 1978) reprinted in Marxism and Beyond. Totowa, New Jersey: Rowman and Littlefield, 1983, p. 117.
[Bibliography.]
[Return to the Nietzsche and the Nazis page. Go to the StephenHicks.org main page.]
Posted 2 years, 2 months ago at 10:31 am. Add a comment
At the Explaining Postmodernism page, Chapter Four of my book is now available online. This chapter chronicles the rise of Counter-Enlightenment, collectivized social and political thought on the European continent, from Rousseau and Kant in the eighteenth century, through Fichte and Hegel in the nineteenth (Marx is treated separately in Chapter 5), setting the stage for the great battle between Right and Left versions of collectivism early in the twentieth century.
Here are the chapter’s sections and page numbers:
Chapter Four: The Climate of Collectivism [pdf]
From postmodern epistemology to postmodern politics 84
The argument of the next three chapters 86
Responding to socialism’s crisis of theory and evidence 89
Back to Rousseau 91
Rousseau’s Counter-Enlightenment 92
Rousseau’s collectivism and statism 96
Rousseau and the French Revolution 100
Counter-Enlightenment Politics: Right and Left collectivism 104
Kant on collectivism and war 106
Herder on multicultural relativism 110
Fichte on education as socialization 113
Hegel on worshipping the state 120
From Hegel to the twentieth century 124
Right versus Left collectivism in the twentieth century 126
The Rise of National Socialism: Who are the real socialists? 131
[This is an excerpt from Stephen Hicks's Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (Scholargy Publishing, 2004, 2011). The full book is available in hardcover or e-book at Amazon.com. See also the Explaining Postmodernism page.]
Posted 2 years, 4 months ago at 9:53 am. 3 comments
In the case of other major historical revolutions, we are more familiar with seeing the significance of philosophy. When we think for example of the causes of the Communist Revolutions in Russia and China, we naturally think back to the philosopher Karl Marx. When we think of the causes of the French Revolution, we think back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau. When we think of the causes of the American Revolution, we naturally think back to the philosopher John Locke. The same holds the causes of National Socialism—although since the Nazi regime went so horribly wrong, there is perhaps some reluctance to name names. Yet naming names is sometimes crucial if we are going to get to the historical heart of the matter. What philosophers can we cite in the case of the Nazis? Several names are candidates: Georg Hegel, Johann Fichte, even elements from Karl Marx. 
