12 The Socialist Roots of Nazism

The doctrines of National Socialism are the culmination of a long evolution of thought. The men who produced the doctrines were powerful writers who managed to impress their ideas on the whole of European thought. It is a system of ruthless consistency and if one accepts the premises, there is no escape from its logic. It is simply collectivism freed from all traces of the individualist tradition which might hamper its realization.

The support that brought these ideas together came through the socialist camp. It was the absence of a strong bourgeoisie that these ideas were helped to power. The doctrines which guided the ruling elements of Germany were not opposed to the socialism in Marxism, but the liberal elements contained in it; its internationalism and democracy. But between the anti-capitalist feelings of both the right and left, and the fusion of radical and conservative socialism, liberalism was driven from Germany.

The connection between socialism and nationalism in Germany was close from the beginning. Theoretical Marxism drove the labor movement, but after 1914, it was the Marxist socialists who led the idealist youth and the laborer in to the national socialist fold.

Werner Sombart had been a solid Marxist up until 1909, and he hated the English commercialist views. In his view, Germany had been a warlike people and had lost some of that fervor by following in the capitalist footsteps of England. He saw the individual’s universal striving after happiness as antithetical to what should be. The German idea of the state is the state is “neither founded nor formed by individuals, nor an aggregate of individuals, nor is its purpose to serve any interest of individuals. It is a people’s community which the individual is meant to serve, and has no rights. Claims of individuals are always an outcome of the commercial spirit. The ideas of 1789- liberty, equality, fraternity, are characteristically commercial ideas and have no other purpose than to secure advantages to individuals.

He saw the German ideals of a heroic life in deadly danger from English commercialism. The war had helped the German people remember they were warriors, a people among whom all activities were subordinate to military ends. The life of the people and of the state is higher than the life of the individual, and the individual must sacrifice himself for the higher life of the state.

Johann Plenge devoted his book to the conflict between the ideals of 1789 and 1914. Organization to him is the essence of socialism. He thought Marx and Marxism had betrayed this basic idea of socialism by too much adherence to the ideal of freedom. He thought the first actual realization of the socialist ideal was the wartime economy of Germany, which demanded the socialist spirit. By 1918 the union between socialism and ruthless power politics had become complete in his mind. He wrote: It is high time to recognize the fact that socialism must be power policy because it is to be organization. He felt that individuals exercising the right of self-determination was economic anarchy.  

He felt the German race was alone in having discovered the significance of organization, while other nations still lived under individualism.

Paul Lensch developed these ideas and distributed them widely within Germany. He describes the difference between the socialist idea of freedom and the English conception. What had to be done was to get rid of these inherited political ideas and assist the growth of the new conception of the State and society. Socialism must present conscious and determined opposition to individualism.

Liberalism was the enemy of socialism, and the Third Reich intended to give Germans a socialism adapted to their nature, undefiled by Western liberal ideas.

13 The Totalitarians in Our Midst

In this chapter Hayek details some of the conversations that were taking place in England during the time of writing, which was the early to mid 1940’s. He notes the similarity of ideas in the England of his day to the ideas floating around in Germany 25-30 years prior.