Sarah McMahon Modern European Intellectual History Professor Rollins 12/12/12

A review of Nazism through Kant and Hobbes eyes

Nazism started with the leader himself, Adolf Hitler. He was a failed art student at the time ad he was associates with the anti-sematic man Karl Lueger. As Hitler watches the political success of Lueger he also joins the First World War as a soldier. As a soldier he was a tenacious fighter but that didnt hinder him from getting injured in the war. After he comes back from the war Hitler starts to read the works of Chamberlain, Langbehn, and people like them. Hitler also became close friends with a highly anti-sematic playwright Dietrich Eckart. As Hitler rose to power he created the NSDAP in 1920. The NSADP had two sections, the SA who wore brown shirt and the SS. The SA was not as exclusive, this branch was known as the thugs. The SS was much more exclusive, the requirements were that members much be male, right around 5 8, blond hair, and blue eyed. This section of the NSDAP was for intelligence gathering for the group. As the Nazi party formed it became weaker in times of success and peaceful times, but it started to become stronger when distress became prevalent in the nation. When Hitler gets elected he slowly takes over with the help of the Nazi party. Hitler then starts the holocaust. He and the Nazi party start to exterminate the

Jewish people who are under their rule. They burn books and libraries and start to make propaganda to get more people to follow them. They create concentration camps and gas showers. World War two breaks out as the Nazi party starts to try and take over more areas around its current field of rule.. Hobbes would not mind this way of doing things. Hobbes tells us that as human beings we are naturally greedy and nasty beings. We need to be scared into listening to our leader. He calls this terrifying leader the leviathan. This proves that this leader should be able to use scare tactics because if they do not no one will listen to them if the werent scary. Hobbes thinks that the only way to do anything with a large group of people is to be able to have power over them. They wont listen if you have no terrifying power because its in their nature. Though Hobbes would have no problem with one scary leader having power over large groups of other people but Hobbes would want the ability to vote for a new leviathan if the currant one was not scaring people into submission. The Nazi party did successfully scare followers into cooperation with them. Kant and Hobbes both agreed that people are selfish and brutish. Kant even goes so far to state that people have a childish vanity about them on top of not being able to work together as a team. But Kant would have some serious problems with the Nazism way of doing things. Kant describes his ideal way of doing things as having a leviathan that does scare others into submission but to also have a super leviathan that watches and scares the smaller leviathan. Kant would want an even higher power to scare the Nazi party into obeying them.

Kant believed in a super leviathan that would not only scare the leviathan underneath it but to add extra fear to the people underneath the original leviathan. Kant created this super leviathan idea from the League of Nations that was happening when he was alive. He thinks that being under the leviathan will be good for others because it will scare them into obeying laws and rules. If there was no leviathan or super leviathan people would kill each other to be on top and no good would come of it. Kant would be all right with an idea of a leviathan but he would not be able to stand for the Nazi way of doing things. Kant could not stand for the idea that the Nazi party stopped people from doing certain things in society. Kant would say that this Nazi leviathan would have to be replaced because it is impeding on the ideas of society. Kant wants a leader who does not hinder enlightenment but help advance it by letting the people speak there enlightened ideas. Kant would also disagree with the Nazi party because of the unnecessary violence. He thinks that our ruler must be both scholarly and benevolent, which the Nazi party is not. Kants suggestion for a change on the Nazi party would be that not only have Hitler as a ruler, but a group of Nazi rulers who work together. Having a group of Nazi rulers would not be enough for him to be happy though, Kant would also be opposed to the limiting of books and ideas to the people under Nazi rule and the random acts of violence that come with the Nazi party tactics. He thinks that to be a good leader the violence has to stop, or at least have an extremely good reason, and there can be no knowledge restriction to the rulers people.

Though Kant would make massive changes to the Nazi party but he would not think that the rule of the group would be all-bad for the world and the people who were under its rule. Kant is one to think that there is some sort of good that comes from every tragedy. Though the Nazi party did end up terrorizing the world and killing mass amounts of people there is some good that came out of it. The world banded together to stop the party and became stronger and smarter from it. The people under the rule also learned a lot from the terrifying experience. Over Kant would say that all of the bad things that happened because of the Nazi party lead to world progress.