National Socialism vs. liberal philosophy (3 of 6): Nazi philosophers attack liberalism

Arthur Moeller van den Bruck: popularized the term "Third Reich"

This is the third in a series of posts about Herbert Marcuse's 1934 essay, "The Struggle Against Liberalism in the Totalitarian View of the State." See Part 1 and Part 2.

It requires some effort for a reader today to keep in mind that most of what we know as the history of the Third Reich still lay in the future in 1934. Marcuse himself in the 1968 Foreward to Negations wrote that he had not edited the content of this essay and others from the 1930s:

No revision could bridge the chasm that separates the period in which they were written from the present one. ...

That most of this was written before Auschwitz deeply separates it f rom the present. What was correct in it has since become, perhaps not false, but a thing of the past. To be sure, the concern with philosophy expressed in these essays was already, in the thirties, a concern with the past: remembrance of something that at some point had lost its reality and had to be taken up again. Precisely at that time, beaten or betrayed, the social forces in which freedom and revolution were joined were delivered over to the existing powers. The last time that freedom, solidarity, and humanity were the goals of a revolutionary struggle was on the battlefields of the Spanish civil war.

(In a footnote, he adds, "The last time in Europe. Today [1968] the historical heritage of this struggle is to be found in those nations which defend their freedom in uncompromising struggle against the neo-colonial powers.")

Marcuse was a philosopher and the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung was an academic journal. He was focusing in particular on the philosophical arguments made in defense of National Socialism (Nazism) with some attention to related ones defending Mussolini’s Fascism in Italy. He discusses such arguments from Carl Schmitt (1888-1985), Ernst Jünger (1895-1998), Oswald Spengler (1880-1936), Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973), Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), Ernst Krieck (1882-1947), Alfred Bäumler (1887-1968), Arthur Moeller van den Bruck (1876-1925), Otto Koellreutter (1883-1972), Gunther Ipsen (1899-1984), Heinrich Forsthoff (1871-1942), and Erich Rothacker (1888-1965). All were alive in 1934 except Moeller van den Bruck, author of the book Das dritte Reich [The Third Reich] (1923); the Nazis adopted the "Third Reich" terminology from his book.

One sees even in the 1934 essay that Marcuse was struggling to take seriously at a philosophical level ideas that, as he explains, defended the Third Reich with a core group of simplistic ideas: the Aryan race; the nation; the people (Volk); the Leader (Führer); glorification of war; the idea of the people/nation/race being always under threat and in a fight for survival.

Within the Nazi Party itself, theory or philosophy as such was held in very high regard. The NSDAP emphasized those themes in their propaganda. But it wasn’t expected that Party leaders show their qualifications by authoring papers on political theory or philosophy.

However, the Nazis did apply Gleichschaltung, the process of bringing every German institution under the control of the Party and the state, to education at all levels. And they did have philosophers and other academics promoting theories which encouraged the embrace of the NSDAP worldview. So there were serious and previously well-regarded academics like Heidegger, Jünger, Spengler and Carl Schmitt whose ideas had to be taken into account to understand that level of Nazi advocacy. Somehow, Heidegger, Jünger, and Carl Schmitt all managed to be considered respectable thinkers after the Second World War, as well.

As Marcuse explains, the ideas that became the lead ideology of the Third Reich had their gestation prior to the First World War.

Right down the line, an attack was launched against the hypertrophic rationalization and technification of life, against the ‘bourgeois’ of the nineteenth century with his petty joys and petty aims, against the shopkeeper and merchant spirit and the destructive ‘anemia’ of existence. A new image of man was held up to this paltry predecessor, composed of traits from the age of the Viking, German mysticism, the Renaissance, and the Prussian military: the heroic man, bound to the forces of blood and soil – the man who travels through heaven and hell, who does not reason why, but goes into action to do and die, sacrificing himself not for any purpose but in humble obedience to the dark forces that nourish him. This image expanded to the vision of the charismatic leader whose leadership does not need to be justified on the basis of his aims, but whose mere appearance is already his ‘proof’, to be accepted as an undeserved gift of grace. With many modifications, but always in the forefront of the fight against bourgeois and intellectualistic existence, this archetype of man can be found among the ideas of the Stefan George circle, of Moller van den Bruck, [Werner] Sombart [1863-1941], [Max] Scheler [1874-1928], [Friedrich] Hielscher [1902-1990], Jünger, and others. [my emphasis]

Marcuse in this essay doesn’t deal directly with the pseudoscientific racial claims behind Nazi racist ideology and its promotion of the fictitious “Aryan” race. (The Nazis so discredited the word that the word has now been replaced in its legitimate anthropological and linguistic uses by “Indo-European”.) This is presumably part of what Marcuse meant when he wrote in the 1968 preface to Negations, “That most of this was written before Auschwitz deeply separates it from the present.” Obviously, as a Jewish Marxist who had to flee Germany along with other colleagues from the Institute for Sozialforschung (Frankfurt School), he was keenly aware of that aspect of Nazi ideology. He discusses that in the 1934 essay in the context of the closely related concepts of Blut und Boden (blood and soil) and other naturalistic aspects of these philosophers’ work. As we will see, he thought that the Nazi racial concepts couldn’t be understood a primarily biological thinking.

Marcuse focuses on three philosophical concepts that he argued were the "three constitutive components“ of the pro-Nazi philosophical trends prevailing in Germany in 1934: universalism, naturalism or organicism), and existentialism.

Tags: critical theory, frankfurt school, herbert marcuse, liberalism, national socialism