The Philosophical Roots and Ideology of Fascism and National Socialism
Ideological Foundations of Fascism and National Socialism
Fascism and the Italian Labor Charter (Mussolini)
Mussolini wrote the principle of work for the national good into the Italian Labor Charter, which he promulgated in 1927. He asserted that the ends of the Italian nation are “superior to those of the separate individuals which comprise it.”
- “Work in all its forms… is a social duty.”
- Production “has a single object, namely, the well-being of individuals and the development of national power.”
National Socialism and the Nationalization of the Masses (Hitler)
Hitler said in 1928 that Germany was a people “torn into two parts.”
Its nationalist part, which “comprises the layers of national intelligence,” was timid and impotent because it dared not face its defeat in the war. The great mass of the working class, organized in the Marxian parties, “consciously rejects any promotion of national interests.” Yet, this mass “comprises above all those elements of the nation without which a national resurrection is unthinkable and impossible.”
The highest aim of the new movement was declared to be:
- “The nationalization of the masses.”
- “The recovery of our national instinct of self-preservation.”
The Philosophical Climate: Irrationalism
A policy of national expansion by war corresponded to an “adventurer’s philosophy” deprived of rational calculation. Discipline and heroism must replace rational purposes. It must be a philosophy of will and action.
Though an irrationalism of this sort rarely had positive political or social implications, it combined two tendencies that were logically opposed but emotionally compatible:
- A cult of the folk, the people, or the nation.
- A cult of the hero, the genius, or the great man.
Schopenhauer’s Philosophy of Will
Schopenhauer saw behind both nature and human life the struggle of a blind force which he called “will,” an endless striving without purpose. Schopenhauer’s pessimism was based upon a moral intuition of the vanity of human wishes, the littleness of human effort, and the hopelessness of human life.
Liberation had to be achieved through contemplation of beauty or religious asceticism. The artist and the saint master the will, not by controlling it, but by denying it.
Nietzsche and the Transvaluation of Values
The curious blending of irrationality and humanitarianism, of will and contemplation, was broken apart by Nietzsche. He argued that if life and nature are truly irrational, irrationality ought to be affirmed morally as well as intellectually. This led to the joyful acceptance of striving. Values lie in struggle, not in pity and renunciation, but in the affirmation of life and the will to power. All moral values must be “transvalued.”
Philosophy and Hegelianism: State Supremacy
Mussolini, thanks to Gentile, purported a theory of “the state” and of its supremacy, sanctity, and all-inclusiveness. Its motto became “everything for the state, nothing outside the state.”
The Fascist view held:
- “It is the state rather than the nation which creates and embodies this spiritual society.”
- “It is not the nation which generates the state; that is an antiquated naturalistic concept…. Rather it is the state which creates the nation, conferring volition and therefore real life on a people made aware of their moral unity…”
- “Indeed, it is the state which, as the expression of a universal ethical will, creates the right to national independence.”
Hegelianism vs. National Socialism
National Socialism not only neglected or disclaimed Hegel but defended the thesis that the state was at most a means to defending the racial Volk and ought to be resisted if it failed to serve this purpose. In the minds of most Germans, the word “state” meant the bureaucratic procedures of the Second Empire. The theory of the racial Volk was far more in accord with the purposes of National Socialism, its conception of leadership, and the totalitarian regime it instituted.
Racial Myth, Lebensraum, and Imperialism
The Racial Myth and Aryan Supremacy
The idea of the Volk and the leader was supported by a general theory of race and of the relationship between race and culture, specifically by the myth of the Aryan or Nordic race and its place in the history of Western Civilization.
The word “race” may have originated with the Frenchman Gobineau at about the middle of the 19th century, who used it to support the claims of aristocracy against democracy. At the turn of the century, a Germanized Englishman, Chamberlain, and his father-in-law Richard Wagner popularized the Aryan myth in Germany and made Germanism into a claim of national superiority.
Basic Postulates of Race Theory (Mein Kampf)
The basic postulates of the race theory were stated clearly, though not very systematically, in Mein Kampf:
- Social progress takes place by a struggle for survival in which the fittest are selected and the weak are exterminated. This struggle occurs within the race, thus giving rise to a natural elite.
- Hybridization is the cause of cultural, social, and political decay.
- All high civilizations or important cultures are the creation of one race.
- In the culture-creating Aryan, self-preservation is transmuted from egoism into care for the community.
Alfred Rosenberg and the Myth of the 20th Century
The race theory was elaborated by Alfred Rosenberg into a philosophy of history in Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts (1930), which was the principal statement of National Socialist ideology. All history, according to Rosenberg, must be rewritten and reinterpreted in terms of the struggle between races and their characteristic ideals, or more specifically, as a struggle between the Aryan or culture-creating race and all the lower breeds of mankind.
The great need of the 20th century was a new reformation, a renewed belief in honor as the supreme virtue of the person, the family, the nation, and the race. Rosenberg’s pseudo-history was supported by a pseudo-philosophy which made all cultural achievements depend on race. All mental and moral faculties are “race-bound.” “Soul is race seen from within.” Every race is under an iron necessity to suppress what is foreign, because it does violence to the mental structure of the racial type.
Racial Theory in Policy
The racial theory was developed by what purported to be “scientific” anthropology, especially under the direction of Hans Gunther, Professor of Social Anthropology at Jena. National Socialists used race prejudice for ulterior purposes; they practiced what Thorstein Veblen called “applied psychiatry.”
The racial theory of nationalist policy led to:
- A general policy of encouraging population increase, particularly of the supposed Aryan elements, by subsidizing marriage and large families.
- The eugenic legislation of 1933.
- The anti-Jewish legislation of 1935 and 1938. (This legislation also purported to aim at increasing or maintaining purity of race.)
Racial Theory, Anti-Semitism, and Imperialism
Racial theory and anti-Semitism helped solidify National Socialism in two ways:
- It made it possible to transmute a variety of hatreds, fears, resentments, and class antagonism into the fear of a single tangible enemy.
- The racial theory supplied an excellent ideological support for the particular form of imperialism that Hitler’s policy contemplated: expansion to the east and south at the expense of the Slavic peoples.
It was only in this region that compact Jewish communities existed, and anti-Semitism coincided with the belief in the racial superiority of Germans to Poles, Czechs, and Russians. The racial theory, often allied to Pan-Germanism, could easily be used to foster the idea of a Germanic state in Central Europe surrounded by an expanding ring of non-Germanic satellite states.
Geopolitik and the Concept of Lebensraum
Like the racial theory, the concept of Lebensraum (living space) was not exclusively German. It was a Swedish political scientist, Rudolf Kjellén of the University of Uppsala, who expanded the plan for a powerful Germany into a philosophy and gave it the name under which National Socialism popularized it: Geopolitik.
Its fundamentally sound scientific idea was that a realistic study of the history and growth of states must include factors such as physical environment, anthropology, sociology, and economics, as well as their constitutional organization and legal structure.
National Socialist Geopolitik
The National Socialist version of Geopolitik was associated with the name of Haushofer. He made geopolitics into an effective organ of propaganda designed to make Germany “space-conscious.”
According to the definition formulated by the editors of Haushofer’s Zeitschrift für Geopolitlk, it was “the art of guiding practical politics” and “the geographic conscience of the state,” practical politics being in substance imperialist expansion.
The sentimental appeal was addressed to:
- A long-standing German tendency to idealize the medieval empire, which existed “long before the American continent had been discovered.”
- The myth that all the cultural achievements of Central Europe were the work of German minorities. Hence, the Germans were the “natural” leaders and rulers of this region.
The supposedly scientific argument of geopolitics was a biological analogy: States are “organisms,” and so long as they live and retain their vigor they grow; when they cease to grow they die. The economic argument for imperialism was probably the most effective: by conquest, foreign markets can be captured and prosperity insured.
The Evolution of Nationalism
Defining Nationalism in the 19th Century
Nationalism is a doctrine invented in Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Briefly, the doctrine holds that:
- Humanity is naturally divided into nations.
- Nations are known by certain ascertainable characteristics.
- The only legitimate type of government is national self-government.
Enlightenment Philosophy and the Social Pact
The philosophy of the Enlightenment, prevalent in Europe in the eighteenth century, held that the universe was governed by a uniform Law of Nature that could be discovered by reason. This view suggested that:
- All men are born equal, possessing a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
- Men are under two sovereign masters, Pain and Pleasure, and the best social arrangements maximize pleasure and minimize pain.
The state, on this philosophical view, is a collection of individuals who live together to secure their own welfare. It is the duty of rulers to govern so as to bring about the greatest welfare for the inhabitants of their territory. This is the social pact which unites men together and defines the rights and duties of rulers and subjects.
The Original Meaning of “Natio”
What was then meant by “nation”? Natio in ordinary speech originally meant a group of men belonging together by similarity of birth, larger than a family, but smaller than a clan or a people. Thus, one spoke of the Populus Romanus and not of the natio romanorum. The term applied particularly to a community of foreigners.
Medieval universities were divided into ‘nations’: the University of Paris had four nations: l’honorable nation de France, la fidèle nation de Picardie, la vénérable nation de Normandie, and la constante nation de Germanie.
In later years, a nation became a body of people to whom a government is responsible through their legislature. Any body of people associating together and deciding on a scheme for their own government forms a nation. If, on this definition, all the people of the world decided on a common government, they would form one nation.
The French Revolution and the New Style of Politics
The French Revolution introduced a new style of politics in which the expression of will overrode treaties and compacts, dissolved allegiance, and, by mere declaration, made lawful any act whatever. By its very nature, this new style ran to extremes. It represented politics as a fight for principles, not the endless composition of claims in conflict.
Self-Determination and Rational Doubt
The revolutionaries asserted that men possessed inalienable natural rights, and society ought to be arranged to foster these rights. The ancien régime was evil precisely because it violated them. However, to speak of natural rights assumes the existence of an orderly universe, capable of rational explanation.
In the 19th century, philosophers began to show that these concepts were obscure, uncertain, and incapable of rational proof. If the mind is, in the beginning, a clean slate on which sensations gradually leave their mark, how can we assert that liberty, equality, and fraternity are the birthright of every individual? They risked dissolving into a perplexing haze of opinion and sensations.
Kant, Morality, and Individual Sovereignty
According to Kant, it was useless to seek to prove matters of morality by methods used for the understanding of nature. Morality had therefore to be separated from knowledge and experience. Only when the will of man is moved by an inward law can it really be free, and only then can there be talk of good and evil, of morality and justice.
If virtue exists, it does not reside in an object, nor does it consist in obedience to some external authority, or in the feeling of well-being which accompanies certain actions; virtue is the quality of the free will when it obeys the inward law.
Kant’s doctrine makes the individual the sovereign of the universe in a way never envisaged by the French revolutionaries. He is not a mere element in the natural order, but, with the help of self-discovered, self-imposed norms, determines himself as a free and moral being. The existence of God becomes the guarantee of the moral perfection of man; God is an assumption which man makes in asserting his moral freedom. This completes the inversion of the traditional order of thought, in which man was the creature of God.
Fichte, Schelling, and the Supremacy of the State
Fichte argued that, just as an individual consciousness makes its own world, so the world as a whole—nature in all its variety and history in its past, present, and future—must necessarily be the product of a universal consciousness.
According to Schelling, freedom is, even more emphatically than in Kant, an internal state, a determination of the will according to self-imposed commands. But individuals, as such, are phantoms; they gain reality insofar as they have a place in a whole. Consequently, the freedom of the individual, which is his self-realization, lies in identifying himself with the whole, belonging to which endows him with reality.
The Excellence of Diversity and the Concept of Struggle
The destiny of man is accomplished, and his freedom realized, by absorption within the state, because only through the state does he attain coherence and acquire reality.
For Kant, evil was necessary in the passage from barbarity to civilization, from ignorance to knowledge. This change was effected only through struggle, violence, and upheavals. Similarly, for Fichte, war between states was the mechanism that introduces ‘a living and progressive principle into History.’
Ultimately, a nation becomes a natural division of the human race, endowed by God with its own character, which its citizens must, as a duty, preserve pure and inviolable.