[This essay is a section in the Student Study Guide prepared
for Dwight Murphey’s Honors “Comparative Social and Political Philosophies”
class in the Fall semester 1996.]
National Socialism and Fascism
There is a form of socialist thought that does not center on weakness and its alleviation (even though its ideology may take those things into account and have a certain egalitarian component). National socialism ("Nazism") in Germany and fascism in Italy combined a profoundly collectivist outlook with a desire for heroic striving. For them socialism was a vehicle for virile energy, transcending the ordinariness of everyday existence.
It is a mistake to consider these ideologies irrelevant because they were defeated in war half a century ago. There is no reason to suppose that the collectivist outlook will always be centered upon an egalitarian perspective. Collectivism is a vessel that can be filled with a wide variety of contents. There is much in modern life that can lead people to a willingness -- or, more accurately, to an eagerness -- to use the state as an instrument to achieve a powerful integration. As the Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset pointed out in the 1920s, the state can serve as a "direct action" tool to cut through the niceties of civilized form. Within a given setting, it can become the vehicle for efficiency and order, and for the expression of the pride and anger of a large number of people. In this form, the state is thought to embody the spirit of the people and to give a no-nonsense, dynamic expression to their will.
National socialism in Germany involved several features. The ideal of what we might call "a national spiritual corporation of the German people" arose in the 19th century as a product of several developments: first, the Romantic revolt against the Enlightenment, extolling the Middle Ages and creating a longing for an heroic age that was perceived as contrasting sharply with modern commercial life. Second, Hegelianism split into its left-wing and right-wing variants, with the former holding to class theory and the latter to national and racial theory. In the second half of the 19th century, Volkish thought arose in Germany and through innumerable writings and novels developed the mystique of a Germanic people who were thought to have been molded over many centuries by geography, climate and a common blood. Although not all Volkish thought was anti-Semitic, it was an in-group philosophy that limited its vision and concern to a single people, so that it was at least a receptive host for the anti-Semitism that became increasingly intense in the early 20th century. Still another element was the pervasive spirit of nationalism that swept across Europe generally during the century following the French Revolution. At the same time, the modern nation-state was growing in economic power, population and military might.
The German Youth Movement (the "Wandervogel") that began in 1896 expressed a wide variety of anti-bourgeois viewpoints, so that it isn't accurate to pinpoint its ideology too narrowly, but in general it expressed the values just mentioned. When World War I broke out in 1914, German youth marched off to war ecstatically, sharing a common experience with an exhilarated camaraderie and elan. This turned to intense anger and frustration when Germany was defeated and blamed for the war (which the overwhelming number of Germans had considered a righteous defense of their country). This anger was one of the essential ingredients of Nazism, which began as a youth movement at the end of the war. The anger is evident in the Nazi propaganda film The Triumph of the Will, photographed at the Nazi Party Rally in Nuremberg in September 1934. There is an unforgettable scene in which the flag-bearers lowered their flags to the ground in honor of fallen comrades as the names of the battlefields of World War I were read off. Then they snapped the flags back up as Hitler shouted defiantly from the speakers' stand. In large measure, the Nazi movement and World War II were a continuation of World War I.
The "national spiritual corporation" had a strongly collectivist aspect, and -- despite its "right-wing" label -- included much out of socialist thought in general. There is a scene in the same film in which 55,000 members of the Workers Corps stood in formation before Hitler, each in uniform with a spade over his shoulder, and called out chants to Hitler about planting forests and constructing highways. Then Hitler told them that thereafter it would be impossible for a German to go into any other line of work without first being "one of you." Despite national socialism's reliance on the "leadership principle" (the "Fuhrerprinzip") and its complete denigration of democracy, it placed strong ideological emphasis on egalitarianism. It was the equality of common membership in a joint enterprise.
Needless to say, national socialism had a great deal of attraction for those who were caught up in it, although for some the attractiveness evaporated as they were ground down by its relentless opposition to individuality. It was not intended, of course, to have attraction for those who "didn't count." Hitler praised terror in Mein Kampf and used it extensively against his perceived enemies. For centuries compassion had been growing in Europe as a reflection of the ideals of the Enlightenment and the lessened hardship of human life, but this had not been a uniform phenomenon; the emotional and intellectual threads that came together in Nazism had held themselves outside the mainstream of that compassion, so that to that extent Nazism consisted of an atavistic throwback to the merciless days when armies, say, would bake their prisoners of war in ovens. (The same must be said for Stalin and Mao.)
To national socialism, "freedom" was not the illusory freedom of individualistic society, nor the freedom of the weak as they are aided against the strong; it consisted of participation in the only existence that is really meaningful, the on-going processes of race and nation, especially when the race itself is the creator of intelligence and culture. Nazi "freedom" is inseparable from the Nazi outlook in general. For those who shared its perceptions, there was nothing that struck them as ironic about the statement by Walter Schultze that:
"We proceed here from a notion of freedom that is specifically our own, since we know that freedom must have its limits in the actual existence of the Volk. Freedom is conceivable only as a bond to something that has universal validity, a law of which the whole nation is the bearer ... Ultimately freedom is nothing else but responsible service on behalf of the basic values of our being as a Volk." (1)
Hitler's internal
policies
David Schoenbaum's Hitler's Social Revolution tells at length about
Nazism's internal policies. Particularly interesting is the nature of Hitler's
socialism. Combining a number of ingredients, "the new regime was, by its
own definition, revolutionary, socialist, egalitarian, and elitist at
once." The result was "a verbal radicalism in the old socialist
tradition ... As the worker was declared the pillar of the community, the
bourgeois and the capitalist were excoriated as the enemies of the
people." The means of production were left to private ownership, but
subject to constant state control. Schoenbaum tells how "a Party editorial
in 1939 declared free enterprise to be the very basis for Germany's socialism."
The Nazi E. R. Huber "defined the right of property as a function of
duty." Nazism "claimed total control of the economy; total command
over resources; total direction of wages, prices, production; total
organization of credit, manpower, transportation, and planning." Hitler
wanted to make the cities smaller, the concentration of capital less; to
increase the rural population; to return women to the home; and to reduce
inequalities of income.
The world most remembers Nazism for its brutality and militarism. During the
Weimar Republic before Hitler came to power in early 1933, squads of young
Nazis would fight it out with squads of young Communists for the control of
meeting halls, from which "bourgeois" speakers were dispossessed. And
even before Hitler's assumption of power, the annual Nazi Party Rallies at
Nuremberg were showpieces of military precision, with hundreds of thousands
standing in military formation and marching in parades. From these things, we
can see the spirit that led on to the events of the late 1930s and of World War
II.
What are the sources of brutality and of militarism? Many views can be given about this, but I would suggest that they seem to be much more naturally a part of human life, given what we see from history, than their opposites. Just read the daily paper: there is a constant stream of stories about people around us who commit enormities against their fellow man. Compassion and peaceable commercial life supporting a broad-based well-being of large numbers of people have been rare in history, not the rule. An ideology that, with Nietzsche, excoriated those things interposed no barriers against a revisiting of many of the worst horrors of history.
Fascism in Italy
Although it allied itself with Nazi Germany, Italian fascism was substantially different from Nazism, while still sharing a number of features. Mussolini, as we have seen, had been editor of the leading socialist newspaper, Avanti, before World War I. He was a disciple of Sorel, the French syndicalist who combined worker control of industry with militant revolutionary tactics.
During the war, Mussolini became the leader of a movement that sought the support not just of the "working class," but of Italians in general in support of a rebirth of classic Italian greatness in the image of the ancient Caesars. Mussolini came to power with the 1922 march on Rome by his fascist "black shirts."
In the section on socialism, we have seen how Mussolini organized the Italian economy, placing each industry under a central planning board consisting of representatives from workers, management, the fascist party, and the Italian government, with these boards in turn accountable to a national planning board over which Mussolini had ultimate control.
Mussolini launched Italy upon military adventures in Ethiopia, the Spanish Civil War, and Albania before the start of World War II, but proved to be an ineffectual ally of Nazi Germany in the larger war when it occurred.
Benito Mussolini's My Autobiography (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1939) provides insight into both the man and his thinking.
Bibliographical Notes
Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf is, of course, necessary reading for anyone studying Nazism. Many students will have read it, however, and they should desist from doing so again as a way of "easing their reading load" in a course such as this one. I have just mentioned Mussolini's autobiography as being worthwhile. A genuine autobiography (i.e., one actually written by the person himself) provides direct insight into a person's mental landscape.
Werner Sombart was an economist who went through various phases in his intellectual life, all of them deeply alienated from a market economy and the bourgeoisie: a member of the German Historical School, a Marxist, and later a devotee of Nazism. His A New Social Philosophy is one of the more lucid expressions of socialist thought, as well as of a socialist's reasons for supporting Hitler.
George Mosse, though a Marxist himself, is an excellent scholar whose books Nazi Culture and The Crisis of German Ideology give real insight into how Nazis were seeing themselves.
David Schoenbaum's Hitler's Social Revolution is a scholarly analysis of the programmatic content of national socialism.
The film The Triumph of the Will, showing the Nazi Party Rally in September 1934, powerfully portrays virtually every aspect of Nazism.
NOTES
1. Quoted in George L. Mosse, Nazi Culture (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1966), pp. 315-6.