Richard Wolin

The Seduction of Unreason

As Fritz Stern has observed, 'From the 1870s on, conservative writers in imperial Germany expressed the fear that the German soul would be destroyed by 'Americanization,' that is by mammonism, materialism, mechanization and mass society.' A proverbial latecomer to modernity, the breathtaking pace of German industrialization produced shock waves of anxiety among traditional German elites: Junker aristocrats, mandarin intellectuals, not to mention rural inhabitants forced to migrate to the cities for work. A phobic preoccupation with the evils of modern industrial society became a hallmark of German social thought from the 1880s onward. More often than not, such fears were projected upon America, that upstart transatlantic colossus and apex of political liberalism.

Among postmodernists it has become fashionable to read Nietzsche as a poet, a stylist, an aesthete—as anything but a political thinker. Yet in Nietzsche's oeuvre there are extended discussions of 'breeding,' 'hierarchy.' 'race,' and war chat have been conveniently excised from the postmodern canon. If one wants to understand the radicalizalion of Germany's right-wing intellectuals, an appreciation of Nietzsche's influence as a political thinker is indispensable. All the prejudices that existed among French prophets of counterrevolution one finds redoubted in Nietzsche.

According to Nietzsche, 'The breathless haste with which [the Americans] work—the distinctive vice of the new world—is already beginning ferociously to intect old Europe and is spreading a spiritual emptiness over the continent.' In America, observes Nietzsche, 'one thinks with a watch in one's hand'; 'prolonged reflection almost gives people a bad conscience.' To their discredit, Americans have redefined the meaning of virtue. 'Virtuousness now consists in doing something in less time than someone else.' Perhaps things would not be so bad were such untrammeled philistinism confined to the New World alone. But, increasingly, such attitudes were manifesting themselves elsewhere. Thus, 'the faith of the Americans today is more and more becoming the faith of the European as well.' If the modern age could aptly be described as an era of total nihilism, whose defining feature was the replacement of aristocratic values by the timorous, egalitarian mores of mass society; then it was America that was leading the charge. That Nietzsche had never set foot on American soil proved no obstacle to his judgmental self-confidence.

Such Nietzschean sentiments would inspire the worldview of Germany's 'conservative revolutionary' thinkers, most of whom came of age during the interwar years. For this influential group of proto-fascist intellectuals—Ernst Junger, Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, Carl Schmitt, and Oswald Spengler—several of whom would make their peace with the Nazi Party during the 1930s, 'Americanization' symbolized a fate of thoroughgoing racial debasement and cultural degeneracy.

Though Spengler was perhaps the best known among this group, Moeller van den Bruck first popularized the idea of the Third Reich in a 1923 book that bore this title. For van den Bruck America was a one-dimensional society. 'In America everything is a block, pragmatism, and the national Taylor System.' In his view the history of liberalism had obviously ended in failure. America's only hope was to shed the trammels of constitutional government in order to exploit to the hilt her industrial prowess and pioneer spirit.

In Spengler's writings the German preoccupation with technology was raised to the level of a major philosophical obsession. Decline of the West (1918, 1922) was significantly influenced by Gobineau's thesis concerning the inevitability of European decay and corresponded perfectly to Germany's postwar mood of despair and disorientation. Few books had a greater cultural impact on German society during the 1920s.

In 1931 Spengler published the equally influential Man and Technology, where he viewed the entire expanse of human history from the standpoint of man's struggle with the forces of 'mechanization'—a confrontation that humanity was fated to lose. Inevitably, argued Spengler, the Faustian spirit of modern man was destined to recoil upon and consume its creator. 'Civilization itself has become a machine that does, or tries to do, everything in mechanical fashion. We think only in horse-power now; we cannot look at a waterfall without mentally turning it into electric power; we cannot survey a countryside full of pasturing cattle without thinking of its exploitation as a source of meat-supply.'