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Class warfare, inherited from Germany’s long feudal-authoritarian past, was an essential fact of the country’s life. When the lower classes looked upward, they saw what they hated as rapacious barons of privilege oblivious to justice. When the upper classes looked downward, they saw what they despised as rapacious malcontents eager to overthrow the proper social hierarchy. The bottom wanted the top cut down; the top wanted the bottom put down; the middle were capable of both feelings, depending on the direction in which they were looking.
Sayfa 256
During the nineteenth century it became a trend and then the rule for American students, especially in philosophy and theology, to spend a year or more in Germany absorbing the latest German culture. An army of American students absorbed it. They came home, and they repeated what they had learned. They repeated it throughout the country that had been founded on the ideals of an enlightened mind and man’s inalienable rights.
Sayfa 168
The German Republic was an experiment in political freedom combined with economic authoritarianism and defended by reference to the ethics of altruism.The country’s republicans did not wish to choose between freedom and altruism. They thought that they could have both. “Every German,” says Article 163, “is under a moral obligation, without prejudice to his personal liberty, to exercise his mental and physical powers in such a way as the welfare of the community requires.” In fact, however, it is either-or, and the moderates did have to choose; and they wrote their priorities all over their founding document.The transition from document to reality did not take long.
Sayfa 218
The first wave of this American Germanism, the transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson and his circle, represents an eclectic, “literary” version of German romanticism. After the Civil War, as this version waned, similar ideas moved into the colleges, assuming scholarly form; for decades, until the turn of the century, the greatest power in our philosophy departments was Hegel.
Sayfa 165
Judging by the long-term trend, the Jews were to be only the beginning. Despite his stress on anti-Semitism, Hitler’s agenda of destruction systematically escalated. It soon included the Poles, the Ukrainians, the Russians, and other nationalities. Later, it grew to include even various categories of loyal, racially “pure” Germans, e.g., those with lung or heart disease. (The Soviets, Hannah Arendt points out, have exhibited a similar development in this regard, moving from the destruction of the pre-revolutionary ruling classes, to that of the kulaks, the Russians of Polish origin, and other groups, on through the latest target, Russian Jewry.)
Sayfa 337
The collectivist tendency of transcendentalism was often hidden by an individualist veneer, which is, however, only a veneer. (For instance, Emerson’s famous doctrine of “self-reliance” demands that a man rely not on his superficial self, but on his real self, the “universal mind.” “All is of God. The individual is always mistaken”—this from Emerson, the alleged champion of individualism.) More philosophical than the transcendentalists, the Hegelians generally dispensed with any such veneer. Individualism, states Royce, is “the sin against the Holy Ghost.”
Sayfa 167 - Epub
Under capitalism, concluded one American economist of the period with evident moral relief, “the Lord maketh the selfishness of man to work for the material welfare of his kind.” As one commentator observes, the essence of this argument is the claim that capitalism is justified by its ability to convert “man’s baseness” to “noble ends.” “Baseness” here means egoism; “nobility” means altruism. And the justification of individual freedom in terms of its contribution to the welfare of society means collectivism.
Sayfa 170 - Epub
To compare the New Deal with any European version of statism, its champions said at the time, is ridiculous. This administration, they said, is not wedded to a particular ideology; Roosevelt’s concentration of power in government hands is not doctrinaire, but pragmatic. Such concentration, they added, is no threat to liberty, because the government here is using its power to cut down “economic royalists” and thus promote the welfare of the common man. In fact, said President Roosevelt in the 1932 campaign, the purpose of government restrictions is “not to hamper individualism but to protect it.”
Sayfa 388
The Founding Fathers of the United States accepted the concept of inalienable rights. The public power, they said in essence, shall make no law abridging the freedom of the individual. The Founding Fathers of the Weimar Republic rejected this approach as rigid and antisocial. The public power, their document says, shall make no law abridging the freedom of the individual—except when it judges this to be in the public interest.As a rule, the German moderates held, political freedom works to benefit the public and therefore it should not often be abridged. Besides, they felt, such freedom pertains primarily to man’s inner life or spiritual concerns, which can safely be left to the decisions of the individual.Neither of these points, they held, applies in any comparable degree to economic freedom
Sayfa 216
Kant did not preach Nazism. But, on a fundamental level and for the first time, he flung at Western man its precondition: “Du bist nichts” (“You are nothing”).“Dein Volk ist alles” (“Your people is everything”) soon followed. Most nineteenth-century philosophers accepted every essential of Kant’s philosophy and morality, except the idea of an unknowable dimension. They proceeded to name a surrogate for the noumenal self, an ego-swallowmg, duty-imposing, sacrifice-demanding power to replace it. Following the trend of the Christian development since the Renaissance, the power they named was: the neighbor (or society, or mankind).
Sayfa 117