National Socialism vs. liberal philosophy (6 of 6): Philosophical sources of the German reactionary philosophies

Ludwig von Mises: "The merit that Fascism has … won for itself will live on eternally in history." (1927)

This is the sixth and final 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, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 and Part 5.

Marcuse argues that the anti-liberal, far right ideology that created the philosophical framework taken over by National Socialism had four basic sources:

• celebration of the "heroic" individual in rejection of the supposed sterility of rationalism and technology

• hyper-valuation of an irrational "psychic underworld" which is held to be “as little evil as [is] the cosmic ... , but is rather the womb and refuge for all productive and generative forces, all forces that, though formless, serve every form as content, all fateful movements." (Ernst Krieck)

• irrational naturalism, rejecting reason and the possibility of objective knowledge of the world: "Reality does not admit of knowledge, only of acknowledgement.” (Heinrich Forsthoff)

• mystification of the society as a unified whole, the kind of Nazi universalism discussed above; this mystified totality can “never be grasped by hands, nor seen with outer eyes. Composure and depth of spirit are necessary in order to behold it with the inner eye.” (Othmar Spann [1878-1950])

Marcuse gives us a flavor of what kind of accusations such theorists had been making against liberalism:

If we ask the spokesmen of the new weltanschauung what they are fighting in their attack on liberalism, we hear in reply of the 'ideas of 1789', of wishy-washy humanism and pacifism, Western intellectualism, egotistical individualism, sacrifice of the nation and state to conflicts of interest between particular social groups, abstract, conformist egalitarianism, the party system, the hypertrophy of the economy, and destructive technicism and materialism. These are the most concrete utterances – for the concept 'liberal' often serves only for purposes of defamation, and political opponents are 'liberal' no matter where they stand, and are as such the simply 'evil'. [my emphasis]

As he notes, Marxism was also considered a product of liberalism, though neither Marxists nor classical liberals had any problem recognizing the distinction between them.

Marcuse also discusses at some length a couple of topics: what classical liberalism has in common with authoritarian ideologies, and the importance of the rejection of Reason in the reactionary philosophies.

On the former, he adduces some quotations from Ludwig von Mises, one of the idols of today’s American “libertarians”, part of what they call the Austrian School, to illustrate the central thing that classical liberalism has in common with fascism and National Socialism: the commitment to capitalism, to private property in the means of production. I’ve taken these quotations from a 1985 edition of Von Mises’ Liberalism in the Classical Tradition (1927), English translation by Ralph Raico. Marcuse cites these passages, though I’m giving somewhat longer versions of the quotations here:

The program of liberalism, therefore, if condensed into a single word, would have to read: property, that is, private ownership of the means of production ... All the other demands of liberalism result from this fundamental demand. (p. 19)

It cannot be denied that Fascism and similar movements aiming at the establishment of dictatorships are full of the best intentions and that their intervention has, for the moment, saved European civilization. The merit that Fascism has thereby won for itself will live on eternally in history. (p.51) [my emphasis]

... capitalism is the only feasible system of social organization based on the division of labor. (p. 85)

Immediately following that second quote, Von Mises goes on to say, “But though its policy has brought salvation for the moment, it is not of the kind which could promise continued success. Fascism was an emergency makeshift. To view it as something more would be a fatal error.” But that half-baked qualification doesn’t detract from the obvious implication of his words: his version of liberalism values the preservation of private property in the means of production far more than the value of human rights or parliamentary democracy.

In making this argument, Marcuse was coming from a Marxist perspective that was widely shared by Marxists at the time: that fascism was an ugly new form of counter-revolution against socialist movements, and one that might be appealing to capitalist in many countries. By pointing out the commitment of the Italian Fascists and German Nazis to monopoly capitalism, he was emphasizing that whatever rhetoric those regimes might use against greed or against “Jewish plutocrats”, both classical liberalism and fascism were fundamentally committed to preserving the capitalist system. His dig at Von Mises was a way of saying that even liberalism, of a corrupt brand like that of Von Mises’, was capable of finding virtue in fascism for exactly that reason: both were fundamentally committed to the preservation of monopoly capitalism. “The turn from the liberalist to the total-authoritarian state occurs within the framework of a single social order,” Marcuse writes.

Unlike Von Mises, though, Marcuse could see that there were radical differences between traditional liberalism and fascism. In the philosophical realm, a very big one was the reactionary philosophers’ rejection of Reason itself. I’ve touched on that topic already. But he also discusses it in terms of the uses that liberals and the German reactionaries made of the concept of society being subject to natural laws, laws which governments violate at the peril of disaster.

Marcuse doesn’t defend the natural law philosophy. But he does point out that the concept and function of natural law in liberal philosophy was based on Reason:

... liberalist naturalism is part of an essentially rationalist system of thought, antiliberalist naturalism part of an irrationalist one. The distinction must be maintained in order not to obliterate artificially the boundaries of both theories and not to misunderstand the change in their social function.

In elaborating on this difference, he gives us a look at an important aspect of his view of Critical Theory, though Max Horkheimer hadn’t come up with that label yet in 1934. Liberal theory assumed the existence of autonomous individuals in society who would be free to apply Reason to the existing institutions, which would enable them to take a critical perspective and act to change those institutions:

Within society, every action and every determination of goals as well as the social organization as a whole has to legitimate itself before the decisive judgment of reason and everything, in order to subsist as a fact or goal, stands in need of rational justification. The principle of sufficient reason, the authentic and basic principle of rationalism, puts forward a claim to the connection of ‘things’ or ‘facts’ as a ‘rational’ connection: the reason, or cause, posits that which it causes as eo ipso also in accordance with reason. The necessity of acknowledging a fact or goal never follows from its pure existence; rather, acknowledgment occurs only when knowledge has freely determined that the fact or goal is in accordance with reason. The rationalist theory of society is therefore essentially critical; it subjects society to the idea of a theoretical and practical, positive and negative critique. This critique has two guidelines: first, the given situation of man as a rational organism, i.e. one that has the potentiality of freely determining and shaping his own existence, directed by the process of knowledge and with regard to his worldly happiness; second, the given level of development of the productive forces and the (corresponding or conflicting) relations of production as the criterion for potentialities that can be realized at any given time in men’s structuring of society. The rationalist theory is well aware of the of human knowledge and of rational social action, but it avoids these limits too hurriedly and, above all, making capital out of the purpose of uncritically sanctioning established hierarchies. [my emphasis in bold]

As Marcuse wrote in 1968, the content of his essays from the 1930s, including the one discussed here, “has since become, perhaps not false, but a thing of the past.” But it does still provide an engaging look at a moment in time when the outcome of the struggle against Hitler’s regime was highly uncertain. And he left a record of the philosophical issues that he and the other members of the Frankfurt School were engaging as they sought to understand and oppose Nazism during the Third Reich.

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