National Socialism vs.

Liberal Philosophy
Looking Back at Herbert Marcuse’s “The Struggle Against
Liberalism in the Totalitarian View of the State” (1934)

Bruce Miller
June 2010
 National Socialism vs. Liberal Philosophy
This paper discusses Herbert Marcuse’s essay “Der Kampf gegen den Liberalismus in der
totalitären Staatsauffassung”, which first appeared in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung
2/1934. It is collected in Herbert Marcuse, Schriften Bd. 3: Ausätze aus der Zeitschrift
für Sozialforschung 1934-1941.

Herbert Marcuse, 1955

It appears in an English translation by Jeremy Shapiro as “The Struggle Against

Liberalism in the Totalitarian View of the State“ in Herbert Marcuse, Negations: Essays
in Critical Theory (1968). The English text of Negations is available online in an
authorized SCRIBD edition from MayFly Books and is available as a text or PDF
download. The quotations from „Kampf gegen den Liberalismus“ used here are taken
from Shapiro’s translation.1

The “Kampf gegen den Liberalismus” essay from 1934 is focused in particular on
Germany and the new situation created by the installation of the Third Reich in 1933.
This is an academic essay; it wasn’t written to communicate basic ideas to the minimally
literate. In other words, it assumes the reader has a basic knowledge of the liberal
philosophy of the previous two centuries, of the political history of Germany in the
previous century, and of the very specific history of the Weimar Republic and the early
months of the Third Reich.

1
Marcuse returned to some of the same themes in his later work, such as the essay, “The New
German Mentality” (June 1942), which was published posthumously in Douglas Kellner, ed.,
Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse : Technology, War and Fascism, Volume 1. (1998). It also
appears in Herbert Marcuse, Nachgelassene Schriften Bd. 5: Feindanalysen. Über die Deutschen
(2007) as “Die neue deutsche Mentalität”, translated into German by Michael Haupt.

2
Classical liberal philosophy

The liberal tradition of philosophy and political thought grew up together with the
capitalist system that was replacing feudalism in Europe. Harry Girvetz described that
background in his article on “liberalism” in Encyclopædia Britannica 2006:

Medieval society did not provide a soil in which the first seeds of
liberalism might easily germinate. The Middle Ages produced a society of
status in which the rights and responsibilities of the individual were
determined by his place in a stratified, hierarchically ordered system. Such
a closed, authoritarian order, however grandiose in outline and noble in
aspiration, was bound to place great stress upon acquiescence and
conformity. As new needs and interests, generated by the slow
commercialization and urbanization of Europe, gained strength, the
medieval system was modified to accommodate the ambitions of national
rulers and the requirements of an expanding industry and commerce. The
ensuing policies and arrangements came to be known as mercantilism, a
policy of state intervention that, in theory at least, might be extended to
regulation of the most minute details of economic life (cf. Eli Heckscher,
Mercantilism, 1935). However, as such intervention came more and more
to serve established interests and to inhibit enterprise, it was challenged by
the members of the newly emerging middle class. The challenge took the
form of revolt, first against the Universal Church, and later against
mercantilist states, presided over by absolute monarchs. The former
manifested itself in the Protestant Reformation and the quest of Calvinists
and Calvinist sects for freedom of conscience; the latter in the great
revolutions that rocked England and France in the 17th and 18th centuries,
notably the Glorious Revolution of 1688, the French Revolution a century
later, and the successful revolt of England's American colonies. Classical
liberalism as an articulated creed is a product of those great collisions.

Some of the major figures in the liberal philosophical tradition would include Thomas
Hobbes (1588-1679), John Locke (1632-1704), Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778),
Adam Smith (1723-1790), Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826),
Jeremy Bentham (1748-1842), James Madison (1751-1836), Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
Hegel (1770-1831), and John Stuart Mill (1806-1873).

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 James Madison

Core concepts of classical liberalism included the value and sanctity of private property,
limits to the power of the state, nationalism, parliamentary democracy, the rule of law,
civil liberties (freedom of speech, assembly, petition, religion), and the autonomy,
integrity and privacy of the individual.

This wasn’t some set of dogmas, though, like the Nicene Creed that liberal thinkers all
endorsed. For instance, many liberals of both the philosophical and practical turn of mind
were cautious about supporting universal suffrage, even for men. Nor was their
opposition to government involvement in the economy some metaphysical demand of
pure principle. The capitalists of the 18th century opposed government policies like
mercantilism that restricted the free international trade they preferred. The fact that
liberals opposed Absolutism in the days of Frederick the Great in Berlin and Joseph II in
Vienna in favor of parliamentary government didn’t mean they wanted government to be
restricted solely to police and armies.

In government, the US Constitution was mostly a classic liberal document, its acceptance
of chattel slavery being a big exception. It established a national government elected by
the people, though directly only in the case of the House of Representatives. It
established an elaborate system of checks and balances along the lines developed in the
philosophical realm by Locke and Montesquieu (1689-1755). It insisted on the sanctity of
private contracts. It eliminated remnants of feudal law like entail and primogeniture. It
required that the President be a native-born American to minimize the chances of a
European royal dynasty taking power through the Electoral College. It established a
strong, robust central government, incorporating a liberal notion of nationalism. The
Federalist is a leading statement of classical liberal political theory.

Today, even neoconservatives encouraging wars under the excuse of “democracy

promotion” typically describe parliamentary democracy with rule of law and individual
rights protected as “liberal democracy.”

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Liberalism in Britain advanced through the mechanism of Parliament without the kind of
traumatic internal revolutions the Continent experienced starting with the French
Revolution of 1789. Liberalism in Germany and the Habsburg Empire took a big hit
during the Revolutions of 1848. The German Parliament meeting in Frankfurt’s
Pauskirche was the highpoint of liberalism in the German lands. It attempted to establish
parliamentary rule in the context of a constitutional monarchy. But the Paulkirche
movement was crushed and the parliament disbanded.

And in the 1848 Revolutions in Europe, a distinct working-class-based political

movement began to emerge. It shared with classical liberals the desire for democratic
political institutions, though they tended to prefer broader suffrage rather than the more
restricted versions that many liberal businessmen found more congenial. But the working
class movements also demanded that the abuses of the part of capitalist enterprises also
be ended and focused on social inequities that classical liberalism prescribed should be
left to the Invisible Hand of the free market. The working class movements formed the
basis for the Social Democratic parties that emerged in the second half of the 19th century.

By the late 1900s, classical liberalism had become a defender of the unrestrained freedom
of the capitalist, big and small, even at the expense of the rest of society, of the workers
and the farmers. Social Darwinism may have been a more cynical and extreme brand of
this line of thought. But it fit in well with the classical liberal insistence on the freedom of
enterprise and limited government.

Gervitz writes:

In general, liberals believed that government must not do for the

individual what he is able to do for himself. Legislation like Britain's Ten
Hours Act (1847), which limited the labour of women and children to 58
hours a week, was denounced by the English jurist A.V. Dicey as late as
1905 as socialistic. Criticizing the Adulteration of Food or Drink Act and
the Sale of Food and Drugs Act of 1899, he contended that such laws
safeguard individuals from mistakes “which often may be avoided by a
man's own care and sagacity” and therefore “rest upon the idea . . . that the
State is a better judge than a man himself of his own interest . . .” (Law
and Public Opinion in England, 2nd ed.; 1914; pp. 237–238; 263–264).
Such views were even more prevalent in the United States.

The classical liberal tradition was largely based on the model of an economy dominated
by individual capitalists. But with the consolidation of the corporations and trusts in the
last three decades of the 19th century, capitalism in the leading capitalist countries had
become dominated by monopolies. Corporations are not individuals, even though the US
Supreme Court considers them to be. They are collective institutions that can manipulate
markets and require a degree of planning at both the enterprise level and at the level of
the national economy not accounted for in the Invisible Hand free-market theory of
classical liberalism.

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When 18th century business enterprises demanded to be released from unnecessary
restrictions like mercantilist rules of others that served to preserve the feudal economy at
the expense of business freedom and economic development, they were advocating
policies that in the context advanced both political freedom and economic development.
Giant 20th century corporations demanding freedom from government regulations for
themselves often produced severe restrictions of the freedoms of much of the public and
inflicted devastating depressions on their economies. The social context had changed
radically. And there were many decades of experience with some of the devastating
social ills that capitalist enterprises had created.

Otto von Bismarck, the Iron Chancellor

In Germany and France, the capitalist/liberal parties largely accommodated themselves to

the authoritarian monarchies of Napoleon III in France and of Wilhelm I and his “Iron
Chancellor” Otto von Bismarck in Germany. Bismarck not only promoted the
development of industry and opposed the socialist movements on behalf of business. He
also unified Germany in wars with Denmark, Austria and France. Wilhelm I’s German
Empire represented the fulfillment of the Paulskirche Parliament’s “little German”
(kleindeutsch) version of German nationalism, i.e., one excluding Austria. National unity
was a major liberal goal. German liberals also supported Bismarck’s in the so-called
Kulturkampf (culture fight) with the Catholic Church on behalf of more secularized
government, also a major goal for liberals.

In Germany, the liberal goals of parliamentary democracy and civil liberties for all came
to be primarily championed by the Social Democratic Party. Liberals were more captive
politically to the monarchy, part of Bismarck’s political legacy. In classical liberal
political theory, parliamentary democracy was the ideal government for a capitalist
economy and society. But Bismarck and Napoleon III had shown that capitalist
economies could also do very well under a nominal feudal form of government like a
strong monarchy.

6
During the Weimar Republic, the main political battle was between the parties that
supported Weimar’s “liberal democracy” (Social Democrats [SPD], the Catholic Center
Party and the small German Democratic Party), on the one hand, and the authoritarian
parties of the far right, on the other. The one of the latter group that eventually won out
was, of course, Hitler’s NSDAP, the Nazi Party. The Communist Party (KPD) was
opposed to the far right, but they also opposed Weimar’s brand of parliamentarianism in
favor of a Soviet model. (The split and lasting hostility between the SPD and KPD is a
fascinating and important story, but one that is not especially relevant to the purpose of
this essay.)

This was the background in which Marcuse was looking at the philosophies identifying
with the Third Reich and their rejection of key parts of liberal philosophy.

Nazi philosophers attack liberalism

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

7
Reich [The Third Reich] (1923); the Nazis adopted the „Third Reich“ terminology from
his book.

Arthur Moeller van den Bruck: popularized the term “Third Reich”

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

8
 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.

9
Nazi existentialism

Martin Heidegger: “Let not doctrines and ‘Ideas’ be the rules of your being. Today
and in the future, only the Führer himself is German reality and its law.” (1933)

His discussion of existentialism has a particular biographical interest in Marcuse’s life. At

the University of Freiburg, he had studied under the theologian/philosopher Edmund
Husserl and the Christian philosopher Martin Heidegger, who was considered the founder
of existentialism. After the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, Heidegger became an
enthusiastic support of the NSDAP and the Third Reich. This „Kampf gegen den
Liberalismus“ essay included an early reckoning by Marcuse with this ugly turn in his
philosophical mentor’s thinking. With particular reference to Heidegger, he writes:

In philosophy, existentialism begins as the antagonist in a great debate

with Western rationalism and idealism, intending to save their conceptual
content by injecting it into the historical concretion of individual
existence. It ends by radically denying its own origin; the struggle against
reason drives it blindly into the arms of the powers that be. In their service
and with their protection, it turns traitor to the great philosophy that it
formerly celebrated as the culmination of Western thought. The abyss
between them is now unbridgeable.

By way of explanation, he quotes Kant on human rights:

Human right must be kept sacred, no matter how great the sacrifice it costs
the ruling powers. One cannot go only halfway and contrive a
pragmatically conditioned right. … All politics, rather, must bend the knee
before sacred human right….

10
By contrast, Heidegger notoriously declared“ in 1933, “Let not doctrines and ‘Ideas’ be
the rules of your being. Today and in the future, only the Führer himself [Adolf Hitler] is
German reality and its law.”

In that statement, Heidegger was arguing against the insistence on Reason, the need for
understanding empirical reality, and the insistence on the centrality of freedom and
humane values that were core elements of the philosophies of Kant and Hegel
incorporated.

When Marcuse describes the brand of existentialism from advocates of the Third Reich,
he emphasizes two components of it. One is the sense that the nation and the Aryan race
are in constant existential danger, that their enemies are always trying to destroy them
and are in danger of suceeding. This constant state of fear had the practical political value
of allowing the Nazi dictatorship to rally the public in the us-against-them tribal feeling
of a group in danger from without. Heidegger’s existentialism up until his Sein und Zeit
[Being and Time] had attempted to get beyond the limits of classical German idealist
philosophy, which considered the human subject primarily in terms of his rational
capabilities (Decartes’ „I think, therefore I am“), by aiming at „regaining the full
concretion of the historical subject in opposition to the abstract ‘logical’ subject of
rational idealism.” But the existentialism of the Third Reich subsumed the existence of
the individual in the race, made the individual completely subservient to the needs of the
Race and the Nation as interpreted by the Führer who headed the state:

A total activation, concretization, and politicization of all dimensions of

existence is demanded. The autonomy of thought and the objectivity and
neutrality of science are repudiated as heresy or even as a political
falsification on the part of liberalism. “We are active, enterprising beings
and incur guilt if we deny this our essence: guilt by neutrality and
tolerance” [quote from Alfred Bäumler].

The jurist Ernst Forsthoff (1902-1974) defended the Nazi Führerprinzip (leadership
principle) this way:

Die Führergewalt ist umfassend und total; sie vereinigt in sich alle Mittel
der politischen Gestaltung; sie erstreckt sich auf alle Sachgebiete des
völkischen Lebens; sie erfasst alle Volksgenossen, die dem Führer zu
Treue und Gehorsam verpflichtet sind.

[The authority of the Führer is comprehensive and total; it unites in itself

all means of political formations; it extends to all specialized fields of the
life of the people; it includes all those related to the people [i.e., those
considered ethnic Germans], who are obligated to provide the Führer their
loyalty and obedience.]

The other major component of Nazi existentialism is the emphasis on taking a side as
being in itself more important than decided what side rationally makes sense. Bäumler
again:

11
 Action does not mean ‘deciding in favor of’ …, for that presupposes that
one knows in favor of what one is deciding; rather, action means ‘setting
off in a direction’, ‘taking sides’, by virtue of a mandate of destiny, by
virtue of ‘one’s own right’. … It is really secondary [inferior] to decide in
favor of something that I have come to know.

The Nazi brand of existentialism therefore rejects the heritiage of philosophical

liberalism in two critical ways. One it rejects the concepts of Reason and the possibility
of objective knowledge. The other is that it erases the essential value of the individual
and his rights, it denies the necessity for society to be independent of the State, and also
denies that distinct groups within society have conflicting interests. In the latter case,
National Socialist ideology was particularly intent on denying the existence of class
conflict within the Aryan race and the German nation. And the embodying of the
collective into the will of the Führer was about as far removed as it could be from liberal
notions of a social contract, the need for representative institutions, limited government,
and the separation of powers.

Nazi universalism

Otto Koellreutter: wanted the “establishment of a real folk community, which

elevates itself above the interests and conflicts of status groups and classes”

Marcuse addresses Nazi universalism from a somewhat different viewpoint in another

section of his essay. The fact that his discussion of Nazi universalism overlaps his
analysis of Nazi existentialism is a function of the fact of the simplistic core of Nazi
ideology and of the philosophies that elaborated it: the Master Race, the nation, the
Führer. Or, as one of the regime’s slogans had it: Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer (One
people, one empire, one Leader).

Nazi universalism was not the universalism of Christianity or of liberal philosophy,

which held that in some basic sense that “all men are created equal.” (And, yes, they

12
usually meant men.) The universalism of the Third Reich was that of ein Volk, ein Reich,
ein Führer. It was the nation, the Master Race and the Führer speaking for them that
were the ultimate source of value: not God, not Reason, and certainly not the rights of the
individual.

Marcuse stresses that monopoly capitalism itself has created a kind of social universalism
by consolidating economic power and authority into larger and larger economic units that
have a collective quality largely absent in the capitalism of the early 19th century
characterized by the individual entrepreneur, the social assumptions of which lie at the
root of classical liberalism. Liberalism emphasized the reality and the positive value of
the diversity of interest groups within society. James Madison gave it a classic expression
in Federalist #10 in 1787:

As long as the reason of man continues fallible, and he is at liberty to

exercise it, different opinions will be formed. As long as the connection
subsists between his reason and his self-love, his opinions and his passions
will have a reciprocal influence on each other; and the former will be
objects to which the latter will attach themselves. The diversity in the
faculties of men, from which the rights of property originate, is not
less an insuperable obstacle to a uniformity of interests. The
protection of these faculties is the first object of government. From the
protection of different and unequal faculties of acquiring property, the
possession of different degrees and kinds of property immediately results;
and from the influence of these on the sentiments and views of the
respective proprietors, ensues a division of the society into different
interests and parties.

The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man; and we see
them everywhere brought into different degrees of activity, according to
the different circumstances of civil society. A zeal for different opinions
concerning religion, concerning government, and many other points, as
well of speculation as of practice; an attachment to different leaders
ambitiously contending for pre-eminence and power; or to persons of
other descriptions whose fortunes have been interesting to the human
passions, have, in turn, divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with
mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and
oppress each other than to co-operate for their common good. So strong is
this propensity of mankind to fall into mutual animosities, that where
no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful
distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions
and excite their most violent conflicts. But the most common and
durable source of factions has been the various and unequal
distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without
property have ever formed distinct interests in society. Those who are
creditors, and those who are debtors, fall under a like discrimination. A
landed interest, a manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest, a moneyed
interest, with many lesser interests, grow up of necessity in civilized

13
 nations, and divide them into different classes, actuated by different
sentiments and views. The regulation of these various and interfering
interests forms the principal task of modern legislation, and involves the
spirit of party and faction in the necessary and ordinary operations of the
government. [my emphasis]

Liberal theory not only recognized the existence of these diverse factions based on
different opinions and interests, but, in Madison’s formulation, called the protection of
those interests “the first object of government.” Nazi universalism instead wished to deny
their existence, particularly the existence of class conflicts, in opposition to Madison’s
liberal recognition that “the most common and durable source of factions has been the
various and unequal distribution of property.” Marcuse writes of Nazi universalism:

The whole that it presents is not the unification achieved by the

domination of one class within the framework of class society, but rather a
unity that combines all classes, that is supposed to overcome the reality of
class struggle and thus of classes themselves: the “establishment of a real
folk community, which elevates itself above the interests and conflicts of
status groups and classes” [quote from pro-Nazi jurist Otto Koellreutter].
A classless society, in other words, is the goal, but a classless society on
the basis of and within the framework of – the existing class society.
[my emphasis in bold]

Nazi naturalism/organicism

The other of the “three constitutive components“ of the pro-Nazi philosophy Marcuse
identified in 1934 along with universalism and existentialism is naturalism or
organicism. The central feature of Nazi naturalism/organicism is to set up the allegedly
organic nature of the nation and the Master Race I opposition to any theory of historical
development. To defend their absurd, pseudoscientific and ahistorical notion of the innate
superiority of the “Aryan” race, the Nazis had to present history as periodically
demonstrating the emergence of the superior Aryan qualities, without allowing the
perception that the “Aryan race” was decisively shaped in any way shaped by its
historical experience, let alone by biological mixture with non-Aryans.

(I deal more specifically with the pseudoscience behind the notion of the alleged Aryan
race in Indo-Europeans, language and the myth of the "Aryan" race Old Hickory’s
Weblog 11/24/2009.)

The glorification of Blut und Boden in Nazi philosophy held out the prospect that the
German people could realize their destiny by adjusting their way of life to some sort of
natural order that most closely fit their racial characteristics. Marcuse says of this notion:

The naturalistic myth begins by apostrophizing the natural as ‘eternal’ and

‘divinely willed’. This holds especially for the totality of the folk, whose
naturalness is one of the myth’s primary claims. The particular destinies of
individuals, their strivings and needs, their misery and their happiness – all

14
 this is void and perishable, for only the folk is permanent. The folk is
nature itself as the substructure of history, as eternal substance, the
eternally constant in the continual flux of economic and social relations. In
contrast with the folk, the latter are accidental, ephemeral, and
‘insignificant’.

The model of this supposed natural order, of course, is to be revealed to the Master Race
through the leadership of the Führer. Marcuse describes the problem with this
naturalist/organicist concept of history:

These formulations announce a characteristic tendency of heroicfolkish

realism: its depravation of history to a merely temporal occurrence in
which all structures are subjected to time and are therefore ‘inferior’. This
dehistoricization marks all aspects of organicist theory: the devaluation of
time in favor of space, the elevation of the static over the dynamic and the
conservative over the revolutionary, the rejection of all dialectic, the
glorification of tradition for its own sake. …

The community of destiny almost always operates at the expense of the

large majority of the people: it thus cancels itself out as a community. In
previous human history, this cleavage of national or communal unity
into social antagonisms is not merely secondary, nor is it the fault or
responsibility of individuals. Rather, it comprises history’s real
content, which cannot be changed through adaptation to any sort of
natural order. In history there are no longer any natural patterns that
could serve as models and ideas for historical movement. Through the
process in which men in society contend with nature and with their own
historical reality (whose state at any given time is indicated by the various
conditions and relations of life), ‘nature’ has long been historicized, i.e. to
an increasing degree denuded of its naturalness and subjected to rational
human planning and technology. Natural orders and data occur structured
as economic and social relations (so that, for example, the peasant’s land
is less a clod in the homeland than a holding in the mortgage section of the
land register). [my emphasis in bold]

Part of this natural order to which the Germans should strive, as described by Nazi
philosophers and propagandists, involves sacrifice and duty on the part of most people.
He quotes Ernst Krieck, who was already becoming a leading pedagogical authority for
the Third Reich:

We no longer live in the age of education, of culture, of humanitarianism,

and of the pure spirit, but rather under the necessity of struggle, of shaping
political reality, of soldiery, of folkish discipline, of folkish honor and of
the future of the folk. What is required of the men of this era,
consequently, is not the idealist but the heroic attitude as both task and
necessity of life.

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Liberal philosophy certainly emphasized the values of patriotism and of sacrifice for the
community and for the highest ideals. But the celebration of militarism and sacrifice for
the sake of “heroic” sacrifice were far from the spirit of classical liberalism, as Marcuse
explains:

As we have seen, the model of man projected by today’s heroic realism is

of one whose existence is fulfilled in unquestioning sacrifices and
unconditional acts of devotion, whose ethic is poverty and all of whose
worldly goods have been melted down into service and discipline. This
image stands in sharp opposition to all the ideals acquired by Western
man in the last centuries. How justify such an existence? Since man’s
material well-being is not its goal, it cannot be justified on the basis of his
natural needs and instincts. But neither can its goal be his spiritual welfare,
or salvation, since there is no room for justification by faith. And in the
universal struggle against reason, justification by knowledge can no longer
count as a justification. [my emphasis]

That justification is provided by the “existential” fear described above that the nation and
the Master Race are imminently in danger of being destroyed by external enemies.

Philosophical sources of the German reactionary philosophies

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

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 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.

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

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]

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 …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:

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 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.

Bruce Miller
June 11, 2010

This paper was published in six parts at the author’s Old Hickory’s Weblog in June 2010.

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