Reactionary Modernism Some Ideological Origins

Reactionary Modernism: Some Ideological Origins of the Primacy of Politics in the
Third Reich
Author(s): Jeffrey Herf
Source: Theory and Society , Nov., 1981, Vol. 10, No. 6 (Nov., 1981), pp. 805-832
Published by: Springer
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/657334
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805
REACTIONARY MODERNISM
Some Ideological Origins of the Primacy of Politics in the

Reich
JEFFREY HERF
In 1946, reflecting on the "fantastic debacle" of the Hitler regim

Tedder, Marshall of the R.A.F. and Deputy Supreme Commander of th
Expeditionary Force from 1943 to 1945, wrote that he was "unu
thankful that the lunatic devotion of the madman's judgment pervad
aspect of German activity. Never before has the truth of the old say
so conclusively borne out, 'Whom the Gods wish to destroy they fi
mad'."' Whether or not the Gods intervened to hasten Hitler's destr
a matter of faith which cannot be resolved here. But Lord Tedder's th
ness contained an appreciation of the political significance of Nazi id
that is, its primacy over sober calculation of means and ends, which
fairly common in the immediate post-war years, became distinctly un
able in much of the subsequent social scientific work on the Third R
the early 1930s, neither Hitler's traditional conservative allies nor his l
opponents took his ideas very seriously. The former believed they c
him to destroy the Weimar Republic, smash the organizations of the
class, and rearm - and then dismiss him - while the latter deluded th
into believing that, as the popular communist slogan put it, "After
comes us."2 The shock of the war and the holocaust shattered the il
that ideas are not to be taken seriously, yet the resistance of social sc
grasping the power of ideology has been so intense that at times it see
its collective wisdom is no more advanced than the naivete of Hitler
temporaries of the early 1930s.
For example, both functionalists and marxists have had a great deal
say about the political, social, and economic origins of Nazism than a
historical outcomes, especially the war and the holocaust. In part thi
Center for European Studies, Harvard University.

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806
is due to a view first articulated by Hermann Rauschning, a former associate

of Hitler's, that Hitler's was a "revolution of nihilism" guided by an utterly
cynical, opportunistic set of rationalizations passing themselves off as a world
view.3 I think it is also due to the inability of functionalist and marxist social
science to understand the paradoxical synthesis of modern technology and
political irrationalism which characterized right-wing and Nazi ideology in
Germany during the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich. This failure of
analysis can be traced back to fundamental assumptions of both functionalism
and marxism. Analysts of modernization and of revolts against modernization
have generally neglected the modern and technocratic aspects of Nazi ideology
and practice, while marxist analysts of capitalism, fascism, and class have
been unable to account for those events in the history of the Hitler regime
that had nothing to do with defense of capitalist class interests. In the present
article, I will present a reinterpretation of German ideology on the Right in
this period which points to reconciliations - rather than conflicts - between
technics and unreason. These reconciliations constituted a coherent world
view I call reactionary modernism.4 Such a reinterpretation seeks to account

for the unities of Nazi ideology and practice, to help explain the "primacy of
politics"5 in the Hitler regime, and to raise more general questions about ideol-
ogy and political rationality in advanced industrial societies.
In the last decade, a number of sociologists argued that the New Left in Europe
and North America and the associated Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School
advocated anti-industrial and anti-technological views which, according to
these critics, were reminiscent of the irrationalist currents of conservative and
fascist Kulturkritik during the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich.6 One
problem with such criticisms is that they tended to conflate critiques of his-
torically specific forms of technology with opposition to science and technol-
ogy in general.7 However, more to the point for the issue at hand is the
assumption made by such critics that the ideological discourse of the German
Right in the 1920s and 1930s was uniformly antagonistic to technological
advance.8 In view of the persistence with which interpreters have placed a cul-
tural and political revolt against modernity at the center of discussions of the
origins of Nazi ideology, such an assumption is hardly surprising. Lukacs
called Germany the "classic land of irrationalism".9 George Mosse's depiction
of "Volkish ideology" and Fritz Stern's analysis of "the politics of cultural
despair" also emphasized the ideological resistance to "Western Civilization,"
materialism, positivism, the market, marxism, and liberalism in German con-
servatism and fascism.10 Talcott Parsons saw "at least one critically important
aspect of the National Socialist movement" as "a mobilization of the extremely
deep-seated romantic tendencies of German society in the service of a violently
aggressive political movement, incorporating a 'fundamentalist' revolt against

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the whole tendency of rationalization in the Western world."1 Henry J.

Turner, Jr. has recently summarized the analysis of the modernization theo-
rists in saying that National Socialism grew out of a "crisis of modernization"
which found ideological expression in the Nazis' "utopian anti-modernism"
the essence of which lay "in an extreme revolt against the modern industrial
world and an attempt to recapture a distant mythic past."12 Such theories
assume that fascism interrupted a fundamental evolutionary development of
modern society from tradition to modernity, myth to rationality, religion to
disenchantment, and ideological to technocratic legitimation, and that this
interruption was due to the peculiarities of Germany's modern social and
economic history.13 The salience of Blut und Boden in German nationalist
symbolism has been contrasted to the links between Futurism and Fascism in
Italy, where Marinetti's fascination with speed, the beauty of machines and of
war, and of a will pulsating through modern technology found receptive ears
among those drawn to fascism.14 The Germans either detested technology or,
as Charles Maier has put it, reconciled themselves to it through Taylorism,
technocracy, and sober utopias of a productivist corporatism beyond scarcity-
induced class conflicts.s5
Of course there were peculiarities to Germany's development. Compared to

England and France, industrialization was late, quick, and thorough. Economic
units were large and the intervention of the state was direct and extensive.
Most importantly, capitalism came to Germany without a successful bourgeois
revolution and the bourgeoisie, political liberalism, and the Enlightenment
remained weak.'6 Lukacs described this well known combination of state,
industry, and aristocracy as the "Prussian path" and saw in it a blend of
archaic and modern trends that would be fateful for German politics and
intellectual life.l7 More recently, Ralf Dahrendorf located the "explosive
potential of recent German social development" in "the encounter and com-
bination" of rapid industrialization and the "inherited structures of the 'dynas-
tic state' of Prussia," which left little space for the "liberal principle."'8 The
"Prussian path"was a form of capitalist industrialization that fostered a pecu-
liarly intense cultural and ideological protest, the politicization of which con-
stituted a decisive chapter in the history of German nationalism. The language
of romanticism, soul, Volk, Gemeinschaft, Kultur, life, blood, inwardness
(Innerlichkeit) stood for specifically German virtues confronted with the
danger of Zivilisation - capitalism, liberalism, science, soulless rationality,
international communism and, of course, the Jews.19
How then did German nationalism, an heir to this irrationalist protest, recon-
cile itself to a manifestation of instrumental reason such as modern technology?
And how did this anti-modernist revolt against the modern industrial world

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reconcile itself to that world once the Nazis seized power? One answer, put
forth by Veblen and later by Barrington Moore, Jr., was that the "feudalistic
spirit" or "reactionary imagery" of "Catonism" succumbed to the logic of
industrialism and was tamed into a form of politically inconsequential nostal-
gia.20 In the mid-1960s, both Ralf Dahrendorf and David Schonbaum devoted
considerable attention to what they saw as a conflict between anti-modernist
ideology and modernist practice. Dahrendorf s argument was as follows: The
break with tradition and thus a "strong push toward modernity" was the sub-
stantive characteristic of the social revolution of National Socialism. Of course,
Hitler did not set out to complete "the revolution of modernity". Rather, "the
entire cloudy National Socialist ideology" seemed to demand the "recovery
of the values of the past; the Nazis liked to appear Catonic where they were
in fact radical innovators. For whatever their ideology, they were compelled
to revolutionize society in order to stay in power.... The contradiction
between the ideology and practice of National Socialism is as astonishing as it
is understandable. It means, however, that the veil of ideology should not
deceive us."21 In order to establish total political power, the Nazis had to
destroy traditional loyalities to family and "partial elites" of a local nature,
and to replace "organic social structure by mechanical formations". Indeed,
"the contradiction between the National Socialist ideology of the organic and
the mechanical practice of co-ordination remains so striking that one is almost
tempted to believe that the ideology was not simply an instrument to mislead
people deliberately." The obstacles to democracy, the traditional conservative
elites, were also the obstacles to totalitarianism. The Nazis destroyed these
obstacles in creating the ambiguously modern person, the Volksgenosse.22
Schonbaum described National Socialism as a "double revolution," that is, an
ideological war against bourgeois and industrial society waged with bourgeois
and industrial means.23 He argued that the conflict between the anti-industrial
outlook of the Nazi ideologues and the modernizing practices of the Nazi
regime was resolved through an "inevitable rapprochement" between the fas-
cist mass movement, on the one hand, and the state and industrial elites which
that movement had supposedly meant to destroy, on the other. The Nazis
made their peace with modern technology not because it was admired but
because it was necessary to carry out their anti-modernist politics.24
Leaving aside for a moment the issue of whether, in fact, right-wing and Nazi
ideology was as unambiguously anti-modernist as much of the literature has
suggested was the case, let us look at the consequences of this view for
explaining subsequent political developments. If, as Dahrendorf urges, we
should not allow ourselves to be deceived by the veil of ideology, how can we
explain why the total power that Hitler strove for was used for some purposes
and not others? Why must we assume that because the Nazis were not iden-

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tical in their outlook with traditional German conservatism that they were a
"traditionless" clique? Or if, along with Schonbaum, we claim that the Nazis
reconciled their anti-modernist traditions to industrial society for purely
pragmatic and expedient reasons, we also arrive at a version of an end-of-ideol-
ogy thesis, one which implies that the demands of running an industrial capi-
talist society and of establishing totalitarian power were incompatible with
Nazi ideology. Yet if the ideology and practice of National Socialism were in
such total contradiction from 1933 to 1941, how do we explain their fright-
ful unity in the period from 1941 to 1945? The radicalization of the Hitler
regime towards war and genocide was most definitely an example of the unity
of Nazi ideology and practice. Schonbaum's "double revolution" thesis sug-
gests that the Nazis viewed their own belief with more cynicism than appears
to have been the case. Dahrendorf was right to stress the 'strong push toward
modernity" in National Socialism but wrong that this push demanded an
"astonishing" contradiction with Nazi ideology. Both have underestimated
the degree to which a selective embrace of modernity - especially modern
technology - had taken place within right-wing and Nazi ideology both before
and after the Nazi seizure of power in 1933.
As Poulantzas' work on fascism made clear once again, marxist analyses of

National Socialism often reproduced a version of the end-of-ideology thesis
just criticized.25 Poulantzas posited two periods of "fascism in power": an
initial phase in which monopoly capitalist interests consolidated their hege-
mony while continuing to make concessions to the "petty-bourgeois" masses,
followed by a "final period of stabilization" in which monopoly capital
secured a more total hegemony of monopoly capital over the mass movement.
Poulantzas' critics pointed out that such a periodization provided no explana-
tion for the destabilization of the Hitler regime and its pursuit of racial utopi-
anism, war, and genocide.26 Poulantzas' analysis is indicative of a long-standing
marxist dilemma when faced with explaining the primacy of politics in the
Third Reich.27
Hence we see that marxist, functionalist, and other not-so-ideologically-dis-

tinct theories of National Socialism run into trouble when attempting to
account for the ideological politics of 1939-1945. Marxists have tended to
view ideologies as securing the "hegemony" of dominant classes and are thus
at a loss when faced with the self-destructiveness and irrationality of the Hitler
regime for which Lord Tedder and other Allied officers were so thankful.
Those who have accentuated the anti-modernist nature of Nazi ideology have
had to reach a similar conclusion via a different route. For if the ideology was
fundamentally at odds with modern industrial society, then it certainly must
have come into "astonishing" contradiction to Nazi practice. Having come to

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view Nazi ideology as a web of cynical rationalization for a prior interest in

political power or class domination, interpreters find themselves at a loss for
explanations of its triumph. Fortunately, in both Europe and the US, the last
decade has witnessed important reconsiderations of National Socialism as well
as recoveries of insights that had been forgotten. Before turning to my own
reinterpretation I want to mention some of the work on which it builds.
Discussion of the synthesis of technics and unreason in German ideology of

the Right took place among the critical marxists of the period. Several of
Walter Benjamin's essays of the 1930s on fascism and the aestheticization of
war and technology have been particularly influential on subsequent work.
Benjamin was one of the first social critics to understand that cultural revolt
on the Right found an alternative to bourgeois society in visions of technolog-
ical war rather than in backward looking pastoralism.28 In the 1940s, Max
Horkheimer developed Benjamin's insights when he argued that National
Socialism was marked by an effort to organize strictly the "revolt of nature,"
that is, to channel anti-capitalist protest for its own ends.29 In his essays on
fascism of the 1930s, Ernst Bloch developed the notion of Ungleichzeitigkeit
(non-contemporaneity) according to which National Socialism's success had
to be understood in light of the Nazis' ability to fuse the mythic past with the
most modern aspects of industry. He also was an attentive observer of the
coexistence of mysticism and technical rationality in the writings of right-wing
engineers of this period.30 In both his wartime essays as well as in his very
important novel, Doctor Faustus, Thomas Mann grasped National Socialism
as a "highly technological romanticism."31 More than any other work of
modern social theory, Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment
took as one if its central themes the intertwining of myth and rationalization.
If, as they wrote, it was the "fully enlightened world" which radiated "disaster
triumphant," grasp of Nazism's ambiguous relationship to modernity was
clearly essential.32 This they provided in their analysis of anti-Semitism.
"Bourgeois anti-Semitism has a specific economic reason: the concealment of
domination in production."33 Right wing anti-capitalism identified the Jews
with the - "unproductive" - circulation sphere of banking, finance, and com-
merce, and praised the sphere of production and technology. Thus "German
anti-capitalism" produced anti-Semitism, not hostility to technology. But
anti-Semitism was bound to the Enlightenment in a broader sense as well. The
Jews came to symbolize both abstraction and rationalization as well as other-
ness and backwardness and were the last remnants of non-identity. In view of
the secular religion of modern nationalism, the Jews were wholly alien and
other.34 Out of this body of work emerged some central concepts - reifica-
tion, dialectic of enlightenment, non-contemporaneity, and aestheticization
of politics - which have contributed to the more recent and very fruitful
reconsiderations of the Third Reich.

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In the last decade, in part built on this conceptual edifice, a considerable body
of European and American scholarship has given additional impetus to recon-
siderations of National Socialism. Timothy Mason stressed the "primacy of
politics" over class interests in the Third Reich from 1936 on.35 Like Mason,
the West German sociologist Eike Hennig has argued that the Nazis' rhetorical
"refeudalization" of production relations was fully compatible with rational-
ization of industry in an authoritarian manner. Hence anti-modernist rhetoric
need not conflict with - on the contrary, it accompanies - rationalization of
industry.36 Anson Rabinbach has pointed to a "profound change" in Nazi
ideology in the mid-1930s in which remnants of volkisch anti-industrialism
were subordinated to glorification of technological rationality through aes-
thetics.37 A considerable number of studies have appeared which link the
Benjaminesque theme of the aestheticization of politics to the modern and
technocratic aspects of Nazi ideology in particular and German right-wing ide-
ology in Weimar in general.38 Klaus Theweleit's important study of the fascist
unconscious in Weimar, Mannerphantasien, connects the anti-feminine, anti-
bourgeois, masculine community born of the trench experience of World War I
to a fascination with modern technology. Rather than rejecting technology,
the men of the Right connected it to what Theweleit calls the "utopia of the
totally mechanized body."39 Recent West German historical studies of the ide-
ological views of engineers in Weimar and the Third Reich, as well as of the out-
look of Weimar's "conservative revolution," have further eroded the view that
the Right was uniformly antagonistic to modern industry and technology.40
Alvin Gouldner, in his fine essay on romanticism, made the important and -
at least among sociologists - long overdue point that German Romanticism
was by no means the exclusive property of the political Right, nor was it by
definition irrationalist or luddite. In fact, modern social theory would be
unthinkable without having incorporated some of the major themes of the
Romantics.41 More recently, three interpreters of Lukacs, Paul Breines, Ferenc
Feher, and Michael Lowy, have suggested a sociology of the German intelli-
gentsia from 1890 to 1933 organized around the notion of romantic anti-cap-
italism.42 In Lowy's terms, the revolt of the intellectuals against the expansion
of capitalism into the world of culture was "ideologically hermaphroditic,"
with exponents on the right, center and left.43 And Feher has emphasized
that World War I was a "turning point" for romantic anti-capitalism because
acceptance of the war and German nationalism required a break with impor-
tant elements of the pre-war tradition, such as criticism of positivism and
technological rationality.44
Finally, there have beerl some reconsiderations of the connections between

anti-modernity and anti-Semitism which George Mosse has accentuated.45

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Moishe Postone has interpreted anti-Semitism as a specifically modern ideol-

ogy, a form of "fetishized anti-capitalism" in which the "double character"
of the commodity analyzed by Marx is biologized into the juxtaposition of
the abstract Jew and the concrete German.46 Anti-Semitism attacks only the
abstract dimension of capital, i.e., finance, etc. while leaving concrete labor
and technology untouched. The "atavistic vocabulary" of anti-Semitism,
Postone argues, should not obscure its nature as a "historically new form of
thought," one bound up with the antinomies of industrial capitalism.47 In his
very important study of German engineers in Weimar and the Third Reich,
the West German historian Karl-Heinz Ludwig has pointed to a tradition of
technischen Antikapitalismus (anti-capitalism of the technicians) in which the
use-value of German technology was defended against its misuse by commer-
cial and profit-seeking interests. The latter were not infrequently identified
with the Jews. The anti-capitalism of the technicians found a shared discourse
with the romantic anti-capitalism of the literary Right on the terrain of selec-
tive anti-capitalism and anti-Semitism.48
With this recent work in mind we can take a fresh look at the ideological tra-
ditions of the German Right, in particular at efforts to reconcile fascination
with modern technology with a cultural-political revolt against the rationalism
identified with the symbols and realities of modernity - capitalism, liberalism,
marxism, the market, etc. I am particularly interested in the metaphors of, in
Geertz's terms, this "cultural system" which made possible the unification of
discordant meanings - such as Technik and Kultur - into a unified concep-
tual framework.49 If reconciliations between technics and unreason took place
before 1933 and remained effective afterwards, we can better account for
Nazi modernism in practice without having to postulate the contradiction
between ideology and practice suggested by Dahrendorf and Schonbaum, by
modernization theorists, and by marxists as well. On the basis of a recently
completed study, I will present the following thesis: In the form of what I
have called a tradition of reactionary modernism, an irrationalist cult of tech-
nology was an important aspect of right-wing ideology inside and outside the
Nazi Party in Weimar and the Third Reich. Reactionary modernism was not
due to a pragmatic or tactical reorientation to modern war and industrialism,
which is not to say that it did not transform necessities into virtues. Rather, it
incorporated modern technology into the cultural system of modern German
nationalism without diminishing in the slightest the appeals of war, aesthet-
icized politics, and race that were so important for intellectuals of the political
Right - both literary and technocratic - in this period.50 The reactionary
modernists were German nationalists. Their accomplishment was to have
transferred technology from the sphere of Zivilisation - bourgeois culture,
France, England, science, capitalism, etc. - into the sphere of Kultur -

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Germany, art, soul, community, national socialism, etc. They turned the
romantic anti-capitalism of the Right away from backward looking pastoralism
and thus contributed to a continuity of political irrationalism that persisted
throughout the Hitler regime.51 In German nationalism, war, and modern
technology, they saw the components of a beautiful new order, one which
would replace the formless chaos due to capitalist exchange relations with a
"revolution from the right" that would restore the primacy of politics and
the state over economics and the market.52 Thomas Mann captured the essence
of what I am calling reactionary modernism when, in 1945, he wrote that
"the really characteristic and dangerous aspect of National Socialism was the
mixture of robust modernity and an affirmative stance towards progress com-
bined with dreams of the past: a highly technological romanticism."53 Mann
did not juxtapose rational modernity to an irrational past, but understood the
intertwining of Innerlichkeit (inwardness) and technology in the Third Reich.
The reorientation of German nationalism towards reactionary modernism

grew from two main groups of German intellectuals in Weimar: first, literati
and academics identified with the "conservative revolution," the ideological
core of the Weimar Right; and second, professors of engineering at German
technical universities as well as members of the politically influential national
engineering associations.54 The first group included the war hero and essayist,
Ernst Jiinger; the political publicist and author of The Decline of the West,
Oswald Spengler; the philosopher and sociologist Hans Freyer; the fascist legal
and political theorist, Carl Schmitt; and the influential sociologist and econo-
mist, Werner Sombart. They were all members of the German middle classes -
old and new - and thus possessed a sense of unity born of shared fears of large
capital, on the one hand, and the organized working class, on the other.55
Hence they were receptive to appeals to a national community supposedly
"above" narrow class interests, to a primacy of politics unhindered by "egois-
tic" self-interest, to national "idealism" rather than liberal or marxist "mate-
rialism," and to national traditions rather than to modernism and cosmopoli-
tanism.56 The German middle class was "intermediate" in a temporal as well
as in a social dimension. As Bloch's analysis of Ungleichzeitigkeit suggested,
the experience of pre-industrial community was still a vivid memory for the
same members of the Mittelstand who were working and living in the most
modern and rationalized of organizations, such as the army, or large science
and technology-based chemical and electrical industries. For these people,
part of the appeal of National Socialism was not a total rejection of modernity
but a promise to embrace it selectively in accordance with specific national
traditions. As Thomas Mann put it, they inhabited an "old new world of revo-
lutionary reaction."57

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One cannot fully comprehend the paradoxical nature of reactionary modern-

ism without understanding that, whatever differences existed among Weimar's
conservative revolutionaries, these ideologues were united in the opposition
to rationalism - whether it assumed a liberal or marxist form. Irrationalism
was the fundamental theme of the conservative revolution.58 Friedrich George
Junger, Ernst's brother, voiced a widespread view when he said that rational-
ity was synonymous with the weakness and lack of communal feeling of
those intellectuals who "betray the blood with the intellect" and who defend
a "community of mind" (Geistgemeinschaft) against the deeper and more
lasting "community of blood" (Blutgemeinschaft).59 In the conservative revo-
lution, irrationalism was expressed in the terms of Lebensphilosophie. Reason
was always preceeded by the adjectives "lifeless" or "soulless" and was juxta-
posed to vaguely defined but highly valued essences such as "life," "will," or
"soul".60 To be sure, there were right-wing figures who linked this irrationalist
tradition to anti-technological views. Moller van den Bruck looked to a Third
Reich beyond capitalism and marxist materialism "to save human nature from
the machine".61 Paul Ernst wrote that "whoever uses a machine, receives a
machine-heart."62 According to the philosopher Ludwig Klages, "the machine
can destroy life but never create it."63 While such views possessed a certain
internal consistency with the irrationalist traditions of the Right, the reaction-
ary modernists understood that they were a luxury that German nationalism
could not afford in an age of technological warfare.
In the following, I will present the major themes of reactionary modernism

as they emerged out of the conservative revolution. In the context of this
article it is not possible to devote adequate attention to the cultural politics
of German engineers in this same period. Suffice it to say that the anti-capital-
ism of the technicians was a tradition that both paralleled and was influenced
by the views of the right-wing literati. The empirical material from which
these themes have been distilled includes: books, essay collections, and articles
taken from right-wing journals of the Weimar Republic; published lectures
and essays by professors at German technical universities; and articles that
appeared in journals of the national engineering associations from the turn of
the century up through the mid-1930s.64 It also draws on books and essays
published by the Nazis, both before and after 1933. The empirical material of
the reactionary modernist tradition can be presented in the following five
themes: aesthetics; philosophy and the will; the primacy of politics over econ-
omics; the masculine community of the trenches in World War I; and anti-
Semitism. As will become evident, these were overlapping themes.
When Walter Benjamin, in his review of Ernst Junger's essay collection, Krieg
und Krieger, wrote that the cultic veneration of war evident in the essays was

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"nothing but an uninhibited translation of the principles of art for art's sake
to war itself,"65 he suggested one of the main themes of reactionary modern-
ism, that is, the aestheticization of politics, war, and technology. Through
presenting destruction and even self-destruction as an "aesthetic pleasure of
the first order,"66 the fascist celebration of war in the 1920s, according to
Benjamin, served to reinforce social domination over the individual and pos-
tulated the sharp, clean lines of modern technology as a beautiful alternative
to the flabby and complacent bourgeoisie. From the standpoint of the issue
of aesthetics and technology, a work such as Spengler's The Decline of the
West is important because of its "morphological" perspective. Everything
external - all political and cultural institutions, forms of architecture and
technology - is, in Spengler's view, merely the image of something internal,
that is, the soul, which is externalized in history as a succession of forms. The
metaphorical power of the work lay in its ability to present institutions as
externalizations of the soul. Thus, once modern science and technology were
seen as the expression of the German soul seeking to lend form to a formless
world, it was possible to view technical advance as not only compatible with
German Kultur, but to see in its power to create new forms, or Gestalten, a
process of renewed myth and re-enchantment as well.67
Praise of the beauty of war and technology also occur throughout Ernst
Junger's essays, books, and photograph collections dealing with the "front
experience" (Fronterlebnis) and its importance for post-war politics. In his
1929 essay collection, Feuer und Blut, Jiinger wrote: "Ours is the first gener-
ation to reconcile itself with the machine and to see in it not only the useful
but the beautiful as well."68 This reconciliation was a result of the war, "the
father of all things... and our father as well," a creative maelstrom of explo-
sions and energy which produced the "steel form... granite face... smooth,
lined, lean" body of the new man.69 Jiinger's separation of aesthetics from
moral considerations as well as his reified presentation of technological
war as a natural catastrophe are evident in the following passage from Der
Kampfals Inneres Erlebnis, first published in 1922:
Today we are writing poetry out of steel and struggle for power in battles in which
events mesh together with the precision of machines. There lies a beauty... there,
which we are not in a position to anticipate, in these battles on land, on water, and in
the air, in which the hot will of blood restrains and then expresses itself through the
dominance of technical wonder-works of power.70
In one of Junger's most well-known works, Der Arbeiter, he presented a

highly industrialized yet post-bourgeois symbol, the Gestalt of the worker
which combined the explosive energy of "total mobilization" with the pre-
cision of a "will towards form".71 In his important 1934 essay, "On Pain"

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(Uber den Schmerz) Jinger connected this aestheticist fascination with form
to a "second and colder consciousness" which - with the aid of such technol-
ogical devices as the camera - was able to view its own objectification as it
would an object of art, that is, as a process beyond "bourgeois" sentimental-
ity.72 Klaus Theweleit, in his recent study of the unconscious fantasy of
members of the Freikorps, Mannerphantasien (Male Fantasies), has pointed to
the importance of this "conservative utopia of the totally mechanized body"
evident in Jiinger and others for the right-wing cultural incorporation of the
machine.3 Throughout the literature on technology and culture produced by
German engineers in this period, the symbol of permanent form is a recurrent
one, and is repeatedly and favorably juxtaposed to a world of market exchange
said to dissolve all fixed forms into transient and formless moments of
exchange.74 As one engineer drawn to Nazism wrote, technical man struggles
against the anarchy of capitalist circulation with his "attempt to transcend
time and space through creation of form."75
A second theme of reactionary modernism was the view that modern technol-
ogy was an externalization of the will, a notion taken and selectively devel-
oped from Nietszche and Lebensphilosophie. 76 Spengler, for example, referred
to the particular Geist, a Faustian will to power over nature that lent a
mythic, even religious quality to technological advance.77 In The Decline of
the West he accentuated the "metaphysics and mysticism" of advanced tech-
nics,78 and in his 1931 essay,Man and Technics, emphatically rejected sugges-
tions that he was hostile to technology. On the contrary, Spengler expressed
alarm at youthful discontent with the machine and praised it with the rhetoric
of primordial struggle as being the manifestation of an "acting, struggling life
infused with soul".79 Along similar lines, Junger praised the generation of the
trenches as one that "builds machines and for whom machines are not dead
iron but rather an organ of power, which it dominates with cold reason and
blood."80 He expressed the symbiotic relation of soldier and technology as
follows:
We have to transfer what lies inside us onto the machine. That includes the distance
and ice-cold mind that transforms the moving lightning-stroke of blood into a con-
scious and logical performance. What would these iron weapons that were directed
against the universe be if our nerves had not been intertwined with them and if our
blood didn't flow around every axle.8'
Jiinger noted that whereas Nietszche could find no place for technology in his
"renaissance landscape,"82 the landscape of the modern battlefield exhibited
no conflict between technics and "a will to higher and deeper goals... higher
and deeper satisfaction" beyond those of bourgeois and marxist materialism.83

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If a battleship was, in his words, an "embodiment of an icy will" one of many

"steel translations of our blood and our brains,"84 then it could not, at the
same time, be understood as a product of social processes. The apotheosis of
the will among the reactionary modernists was simultaneously a celebration
of reification.
This celebration was not an endorsement of a rationalized world but, at least

in intention, a protest against it. A third and related theme of the literati and
engineers was the view that technology was an indispensable handmaiden to a
renewed primacy of politics. The legal scholar and fascist political theorist,
Carl Schmitt, rejected the cultural pessimism of some humanist intellectuals
which claimed that technical advance entailed "the domination of spiritless-
ness over spirit or perhaps an intellectualized but soulless mechanism."85
Rather, as he wrote in Der Begriff des Politischen (The Concept of the Politi-
cal), technology possessed an "activistic metaphysic" oriented to the idea of
"limitless power and domination over nature, even over the human physis."86
Like Spengler and Jiinger, Schmitt looked to a new political elite which under-
stood this metaphysic and Geist of technology and would strive to reinstate a
primacy of politics and idealism over parliamentary squabbling and market
egoism. Hans Freyer argued from a sociological and philosophical perspective
that such a vision constituted a "revolution from the right".87 However,
unlike previous conservative attacks on "industrial society," this new revolt
had reconciled the German soul to modern technology. "Contemporaneity,"
Freyer wrote with relief, "is no longer compromise".88 The major impulse of
the right-wing assertion of the need for a primacy of politics was not a return
to preindustrial conditions but the "revolutionary" drive to end the domina-
tion of the economy over social life, which, in the view of the conservative
revolutionaries, both the social democrats and communists had abandoned
due to their own crude materialism. The slogan Primat der Politik was charac-
teristic of the logic of reactionary modernist discourse in that it put forth a
verbal anti-capitalism which saw in war and the state repositories of life uncor-
rupted by "soulless" reason and the market. In Spengler's vivid terms, the
primacy of politics called for a new Caesarism, a new authoritarianism that
would "break the dictatorship of money" which, he continued, could "be
overcome and mastered only by blood".89
Fourth, the masculine community of the trenches was decisive for reaction-
ary modernism both as a constitutive and formative experience and as a theme
in the subsequent ideology of the post-war Right. Hannah Arendt, speaking
of the Left in modern politics, has referred to the "revolutionary tradition
and its lost treasure,"90 whereby she was referring to those fleeting moments
of community and public discussion (the American committees of correspon-

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818
dence, the Russian and post-World War I soviets and workers councils, etc.)
when the abstract, utopian ideal of a good society became a concrete utopia,
a historical experience. The reactionary tradition has its lost treasure as well.
The male community of the trenches and its retrospective mythologization
was the concrete utopia of the post-war Right. Timothy Mason has written
that National Socialism "can be understood as an effort to reproduce the
experience of August 1914 as a permanent condition."9l In light of the impor-
tance which the above-mentioned literature has attributed to the backward
looking nature of Nazi ideology, two things ought to be kept in mind: first,
that the past to which the post-war Right pointed was "mythic" but not at all
distant; and second, that the community (Gemeinschaft) celebrated was a
highly industrialized, forward-looking rather than a pastoral, backward-look-
ing one. Jiinger, for example, spoke fondly of the "special community"
shaped by the same "destiny," held together as an "organism" and facing a
hostile world.92 While the Left looked to proletarian revolution for creation
of the new man, Junger could write that he had already appeared: "The glow-
ing dusk of a sinking era is at the same time, a dawn."93 He urged that post-
war German nationalism break with the "objections of a misguided romanti-
cism which views the machine as in conflict with culture," and to "penetrate
and enter into the forces of our time - the machine, the masses and the
worker."94 All of the reactionary modernists had learned an important lesson
from World War I: nationalism and modern life, to use Junger's expression,
were fully compatible.95 But such compatibility demanded a selective break
with previous right-wing ideological traditions. This was evident in the redefi-
nition of the idea of community in light of the front experience as well as in
the attack on what the post-war Right saw as the passivity, escapism, and
effeminate concern for nature of the nineteenth century romantics. If the
German Right in this period described itself as desiring the "romantic politi-
cian,"96 as Schmitt put it, it meant something quite different - active, politi-
cally engaged, dominant over nature - than what it understood traditional
romanticism to represent. The ideologists of the Right not only coined new
terms. They also redefined the meaning of old ones. Thus celebration of the
romantic politician and the Volksgemeinschaft should not be immediately
interpreted as implying a rejection of industrial society. The reactionary
modernists rejected neither Nietszche nor the machine. Rather, they saw in
war a fully modem, anti-bourgeois, yet highly industrialized alternative to
capitalist exchange.
Finally, it should be kept in mind that reactionary modernism was as selective

in its cultural-political assault on capitalism as it was in appropriating the past.
It was not property and class relations, of course, which the reactionary mod-
ernists denounced, but rather a surfeit of abstraction, parasitism, and commer-

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cialism conjured up by the contemptible word Geld (money). In The Decline

of the West, for example, Spengler's wrath was directed at the archetypical
merchant (Handler) who has unfairly attained predominance over the truly
creative laborers of agriculture and industry.97 The sinister aspect of this attack
was the identification of particular groups - during the war the English, and
later the Jews - with this odious spirit of capitalism. This became a promi-
nent theme within the "anti-capitalism of the engineers" and was most fully
developed outside engineering circles by Werner Sombart and, of course, by
the Nazis. Sombart's primary contribution to reactionary modernism was the
translation of anti-capitalist rhetoric into an attack on the "Jewish spirit" and
a defense of primordial German virtues, among which he included productive
labor and technical "creation". In his Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben,
Sombart had pointed to a collective Jewish psychology - abstract, rational,
contractual, conceptual, rootless - which was uniquely well suited to capital-
ist exchange relations.98 Germans, on the other hand, accustomed to centu-
ries of life in the forests of Europe rather than the deserts of the Middle East,
were oriented to matters of the will, soul, emotion, and concrete immediacy,
and were, as a result, attuned to the production of use-values. In modern
times, he wrote, "the Christian ascends to heaven as an engineer [while] the
Jew does so as a traveling salesman or clerk."99 This translation of social-
economic categories into those of race and religion led to analyses of capital-
ism such as the following:
In its essence, capitalism means nothing other than the dissolution of economic pro-
cesses into two constituent elements: technology and commerce and the primacy of
commerce over technology. So from its beginnings, capitalist industry offered the Jews
the opportunity to be active in a manner that was in keeping with their character.'0?
Here, in embryonic form, is the contribution of anti-Semitism to the reconcili-

ation of technics and irrationalism. If "capitalism" was defined as the primacy
of commerce over technology, then "anti-capitalism" meant reversing this
relationship, that is, making technology predominant over commerce, or, in
other words, elevating the world of German use-value over that of interna-
tional, Jewish exchange-value. In their ideological statements on technology,
as in most everything else, the Nazis brought forth little that was new. Rather,
they elaborated on the existing literature. For example, Peter Schwerber
wrote in Nationalsozialismus und Technik: Die Geistigkeit der nationalsozia-
listischen Bewegung (National Socialism and Technology: The Spirituality of
the National Socialist Movement): "technical spirit" and the Nordic race were
united against the common enemy: "Jewish materialism".'01 The latter had
transformed technology into a commodity and then stifled its development.
National Socialism would, he continued, liberate technology from the restric-
tions imposed on it by the Weimar Republic - i.e., it would break with the

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Versailles restrictions on rearmament. Fascism, one might say, promised to

liberate a will said to reside in the forces of production from the restrictions
imposed by the existing bourgeois social and political relations, a program of
political reaction, cultural protest, and technical advance.
Having traced the themes of reactionary modernism, I would like to comment

on the particular problem of the relation between engineers and ideologues in
German fascism. In his classic work, Behemoth, Franz Neumann wrote that
there existed an acute antagonism between the "magic character" of Nazi
propaganda and the rational nature of the production process in industrial
society. Because engineers were, in his words, practitioners of "the most
rational vocation," they would experience this antagonism most intensely,
would regard Nazi ideology as "bunk" and would be one of the first groups
to break with Hitler's irrationalism.'02 Yet Neumann turned out to be wrong,
for the conflict between political ideology and technocratic consciousness
never assumed serious proportions. One common explanation (one put for-
ward by Albert Speer, Hitler's armaments minister from 1943 to 1945) which
receives support from our theories of bureaucratization is that engineers and
technocrats are apolitical, ignore larger political and moral issues, and merely
follow bureaucratic orders. Gouldner, Konrad and Szelenyi, and Habermas
have argued that technocratic outlooks are hardly so depoliticized and that
they contain their own political and ideal interests.03
On the basis of this and other studies of engineers in Nazi Germany, I would
argue that the common juxtaposition of the ideologue to the technocrat
vastly underestimates the degree to which technical intellectuals were recep-
tive to and producers of traditional political ideologies. Beginning before
World War I and with growing stridency during Weimar, the cultural politi-
cians of the German engineering profession responded to threats which they
saw as coming from two sources: first, from the cultural pessimists among the
literary intellectuals who denounced technology as a harbinger of soullessness
and cultural crisis; and second, from capitalist exchange relations, which they
denounced as "commercialism" and which they feared would predominate
over the interests of engineers as producers and "artists".'04 Ludwig has
pointed to what he calls "anti-capitalism of the technicians" (technischen
Antikapitalismus) which articulated this protest against the expansion of rela-
tions of exchange into the world of "technical culture". The Nazis were fully
aware of this tradition and sought with great success to present themselves to
German engineers as a movement dedicated to emancipating technology from
its misuse by market interests in order to place it in the service of a great
revival of national idealism.'05 The ideologues from the technical intelligentsia
could meet the Nazis on the plane of irrationalism because they believed that

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technology was itself the externalization of essentially non-rational forces -

will, race, blood, etc. Their reactionary modernist metaphors helped them to
interpret the mundane world of technical reason in a manner fully consonant
with Nazi politics. If they saw tanks, battleships, bridges, and cars as manifes-
tations of the will to power or the spirit of the Aryan race, it was hardly likely
that they would oppose the Final Solution of the Jewish question on the
grounds that to do so contradicted rational power politics. Reactionary
modernism contributed to the nazification of the technical intelligentsia, and
facilitated pursuit of a racial dogma at the expense of the minimal formal
rationality a not so ideologically committed stratum might have possessed.l06
The accomplishment of the reactionary modernists can be summarized as fol-

lows: They placed modern technology within the political discourse of
German nationalism, that is, of Kultur, and removed it from that of enlighten-
ment, reason, and civilization.107 Where German conservatives had previously
claimed that too much technology would destroy German culture, the reac-
tionary modernists claimed that too little would doom the German nation.
Above all they claimed that technology could be described with what Adorno
called "the jargon of authenticity,"108 the language of immediacy, experience,
soul, feeling, blood, permanence, will, and instinct rather than the supposedly
lifeless rhetoric of abstraction, analysis, intellect, mind, and concepts. Through
identifying technology with form, production, use-value, and creative labor
rather than with formlessness, circulation, exchange-value, and parasitic
finance capital, they elaborated an emotionally powerful anti-capitalist pro-
test which, of course, posed no threat to actual property and class relations.
And through their evocations of the Gemeinschaft of the trenches of World
War I as the alternative to the Gesellschaft of civilian egoism, they expressed
their understanding that appeals to community need not look to the distant
past for images of the future. National Socialist anti-Semitism merged with
reactionary modernist discourse, for once the Jews were equated with capi-
talism and communism, the destruction of the Jews would eliminate the two
major evils in the modern world and attain the ultimate goal: National Social-
ist revolution.109
In Mein Kampf, Hitler divided mankind into three categories: founders, bear-
ers, and destroyers of culture, and assigned these historical roles to Aryans,
Japanese, and Jews, respectively. Hitler defined Aryan culture as a synthesis
of "the Greek spirit and Germanic technology"."0 His definition of Aryan
culture expresses the paradoxes of the reactionary modernist tradition and
demonstrates how inadequate the dichotomies of common sense and socio-
logical analysis are when faced with Nazi ideology and politics. Rather than
succumb to a potentially debilitating "escape from technology," the reaction-

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ary modernists sought to infuse it with spirit and soul, to redefine the modern
in terms that were old and familiar.11 Theirs was a highly selective rejection
of modernity. In 1919, in a speech advocating German rearmament and com-
plete abolition of the Treaty of Versailles, Hitler said: "The misery of
Germany must be broken by Germany's steel. That time must come."112 The
point was that, for Hitler, Germany's steel was both a necessity and a virtue.
This paradoxical combination of irrationalism and technics was fundamental

to the Weltanschauung and political practice of Hitler and National Socialism.
It also affected segments of the traditional conservative elites who lent their
support to Hitler's "revolution from the Right". This synthesis of political
reaction and racism, on the one hand, with technological modernism, on the
other hand, emerged before 1933 and was a contributing factor to the triumph
of ideological politics after 1933. The rise of the Nazi technocrats did not, as
Schonbaum and Dahrendorf suggested, require the decline of Nazi ideologues.
Although, as Rabinbach argued, there was a shift from volkisch ideology to
technocratic aesthetics during the 1930s, this change was founded on already
existing ideological foundations and took place along an irrationalist contin-
uum. By then both the Nazis and the conservative revolutionaries already had
broken with the more pronounced pastoral and anti-technological resentments
that had previously characterized German nationalism. Fulfillment of the
National Socialist Weltanschauung and industrial advance were, up to the
point at which the former led to the destruction and self-destruction of German
society, mutually reinforcing and complementary phenomena.113 The anal-
ysis of reactionary modernist views presented in the article is meant to help
explain the terrible consistency of Nazi ideology and practice. The core of
Hitler's world view was racism, not a traditional conservative animus against
industrial society. And anti-Semitism itself was - and is - intertwined with
modernity. The reinterpretation of right-wing views of technology presented
here seeks to explain how Nazi ideology could persist with such force in an
advanced industrial society; how, that is, "the entire cloudy National Socialist
ideology" was not perceived as "bunk" by those in close contact with the
instrumental rationality of advanced technology. Once we understand that, as
Mann put it, "dreams of the past" were inseparable with visions of "robust
modernity," the unity of Nazi ideology and practice is less difficult to explain.
The notion that ideas, especially ideas of low intellectual quality and unques-
tionable moral depravity, should be taken seriously in explaining historical
and social events does not fit well with the current preoccupations of histori-
cal sociologists with "structural" considerations - classes, organization of
states, political parties, international economics, and relations between nation-
states. Usually attached to these preoccupations is the assumption that ideas

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and subjective intentions are clearly of secondary significance in explaining

revolutions, counter-revolutions, wars, stability, and instability. As I men-
tioned at the outset, this general skepticism about the importance of ideology
is reflected in analyses of National Socialism in some of the following ways:
Hitler is described as a cynic and opportunist for whom ideas were mere
instruments toward the goal of total power, not anticipations of future prac-
tice.14 Recently, one West German political scientist, Hans Mommsen, has
attributed "the cumulative radicalization of the regime" to bureaucratic
chaos, competing factions, and absence of unified administration rather than
to the fulfillment of an ideological program."s And, as I mentioned before,
those who emphasized the backward-looking elements of Nazi ideology
pointed to the incompatibility of such ideas with an industrial society, while
marxists have often seen National Socialism primarily as a tool of capitalism.
Obviously, the present essay does not share this skepticism about the central-
ity of the National Socialist ideology. Rather, as Weber argued, it presupposes
that in order to explain a series of events, one must understand the subjective
meaning of actions from the point of view of the actor. Without taking ideas
seriously how can we account for the fact that "the lunatic devotion of the
madman's judgment pervaded every aspect of German activity"? Klaus
Hildebrand, a West German historian of foreign policy in the Third Reich has
emphasized how much rational calculations of traditional power politics or
capitalist class interest were undermined by Hitler's implementation of his
racial ideology. Perhaps the ruthless efficiency of the Hitler regime has turned
our attention away from its moments of irrationality and self-destructiveness
for which Lord Tedder was so grateful. For example, consider some of the
following implications of the ideologically inspired decision to wage war
against the Jews, to attempt to exterminate bolshevism (literally), and to pro-
ject plans of colonizing Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union: anti-Nazi resis-
tance was far more tenacious than in Western Europe; German military forces
were tied down; transport routes were blocked; potential skilled and certainly
cheap labor for war production was killed; most unlikely allies of totally dif-
ferent economic and social systems were forged into a coalition to wage total
and unlimited war against the Germans and their visions of a master race.
Moreover, the dogma of racial superiority led Hitler and other German leaders
to overestimate their own strength and underestimate that of other nations.
And even though Hitler saw, as early as 1941, that victory in the war against
the allies was unlikely, he continued to pursue the war against the Jews. In
Hildebrand's words, "when the racist dogma shed its cloak of mere propa-
ganda and entered the phase of its implementation, it torpedoed the policy of
cunning calculation."116

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National Socialism presents us with, in Weber's terms, the triumph of an ethic

of ultimate (racial) ends over the politics of (nationalist or capitalist) respon-
sibility. What was rational from the standpoint of Nazi racial dogma was irra-
tional from the perspective of the nation-state or capitalist class. Hitler pushed
anti-Semitism far past the point at which it served as a useful mechanism of
social integration by projecting responsibility for social discontent onto a con-
venient scapegoat.117 This regime, which acted on the basis of the utopia of a
biologically superior master race rather than on careful considerations of the
interests of dominant social-economic classes, is not a "case" which the skep-
tical rationalism of a positivistic social science is well equipped to handle."8
There is something vaguely comforting, after all, in the idea that states, how-
ever oppressive they may be, are rational actors. At least in this case - and
there are others - this idea is a comforting illusion.
I am in agreement with West German historians such as Karl Bracher and

Eberhard Jackel who have recently reasserted the validity of earlier analyses
of National Socialism, such as those of Arendt, Mosse, and Nolte (and Bracher
himself) according to which, as Bracher puts it, "it was indeed Hitler's Welt-
anschauung and nothing else that mattered in the end, as is seen from the ter-
rible consequences of his racist anti-Semitism in the planned murder of the
Jews."19 Jackel has argued that Hitler's Weltanschauung did indeed have
clear goals and purposes beyond wielding power for its own sake and that
"there is a method in this madness even though madness it is."120 Bracher has
gone even further and posed the issue most clearly. The neglect of Hitler and
his ideas by social science is symptomatic of "the most important problem of
nazism: its fundamental underestimation" by the political Left and Right in
Germany, which enabled him to come to power, and then by other nations,
which facilitated his march to war and quest for European domination.121
For Bracher, then and now, what passes for "sophisticated" insight into the
"actual" purposes behind Hitler's ideology turns out to be gross political
naivete. My analysis of reactionary modernism is directed against the "fun-
damental underestimation" of the importance of ideology in general, and
Nazi ideology in particular. Myth and enchantment continue to haunt the
rationalized and disenchanted world. As Adorno and Horkheimer put it, "the
fully enlightened world radiates disaster triumphant."'22 The notion of the
dialectic of enlightenment is a theory of modern society which makes room
for the paradoxes of reactionary modernism in a way that the dichotomies of
tradition and modernity, or progress and reaction do not. In view of the prev-
alence of ideological politics in this century, the theory of the dialectic of
enlightenment appears to be one with a wealth of empirical evidence to sup-
port it.

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Finally, the analysis of reactionary modernism presented here suggests that

the fundamental problem of Nazism is not only one of the underestimation of
Hitler and his ideas. It is also the extent to which these ideas were believed,
especially among those whose orientation to functional rationality would lead
us to expect that they would recognize Hitlerism for the practical - if not
moral - catastrophe it was. The resistance that Neumann expected from the
technical intellectuals did not materialize. Perhaps many recognized that Nazi
ideology was indeed "bunk" but were restrained from acting by fear, oppor-
tunism, or the moral division of labor which shuts out all "non-technical"
questions. But Hitler was not the only person to take his ideas seriously. Reac-
tionary modernist ideology as it merged with the National Socialist Weltan-
schauung made it all that more likely that Hitler's appeals to the triumph of
the will would drown out the mundane facts concerning the military and
industrial capacities of the anti-Hitler coalition. In learning to speak the lan-
guage of Kultur, will, and the soul, the reactionary modernists contributed to
the primacy of politics and ideology over sober calculation of social and
national interests in an advanced industrial society. In view of the reconcilia-
tions of technics and unreason presented in this paper, we must insist that
Nazi ideology was by no means an unambiguous rejection of modernity as it
has often been presented. Those who do not want to take Nazi ideology seri-
ously in explaining the political history of the Third Reich will, in my view,
have to find some reason to justify such a "fundamental underestimation"
other than its supposed rejection of modern industrial society.
NOTES
1. Lord Tedder, "Forward," in H. R. Trevor-Roper, The Last Days of Hi

(New York, 1979), 14.
2. On the Comintern's analysis of National Socialism see Gert Schafer, Die k
munistische Internationale und der Faschismus (Offenbach, 1973); and Pier
Aycoberry, The Nazi Question (New York, 1981), esp. 47-68.
3. Hermann Rauschning, The Revolution of Nihilism (London, 1939).
4. The term "reactionary modernism" is taken from my doctoral dissertatio
"Reactionary Modernism: Reconciliations of Technics and Unreason in Weima
and the Third Reich," Brandeis University Sociology Department, 1980. I wish
express my gratitude to the German Academic Exchange Service for assistanc
pursuit of this study.
5. On this theme see Timothy Mason, "The Primacy of Politics - Politics and E
omics in National Socialist Germany," in The Nature of Fascism, ed. S. J. Wo
(New York, 1969), 165-195. Also see Timothy Mason, Sozialpolitik im Drit
Reich: Arbeiterklasse und Volksgemeinschaft im Dritten Reich, 2nd.ed. (Oplad
1978). Mason qualifies his primacy of politics thesis by arguing that the N
sought to contain social contradictions such as the specter of working class d
content and revolt and lack of popular support for the regime and its ideolo
through a Flucht nach vorn - flight forward - into expansionist war. Thus it
the weakness of the regime and its ideological props, added to the Nazis' raci
and anti-communism, and the imperialist designs of German industry - not
strength of Hitler's world view or its broad acceptance - that led to war. Eve
assuming the highly controversial thesis that the regime needed war to prop u
crumbling popularity, Mason's analysis of the internal social contradictions of

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826
Nazi regime is insufficient to account for the particular nature of the Flucht nach
vorn: holocaust and racial war. See Chaps. 1 and 4. Other historians have argued
that the traditional displacement of internal contradictions onto foreign policy
was subordinated by Hitler to a new element in Prussian-German history, i.e., war
for the sake of a racial utopia. Also see below, note 113.
6. See John Norr, "German Social Theory and the Hidden Face of Technology,"
European Journal of Sociology (1974), 312-36; Claus Offe, "Technik und Ein-
dimensionalitat: Eine Version der Technokratie-these?," in Antworten aufHerbert
Marcuse, ed. Jiirgen Habermas (Frankfurt/Main, 1968), 73-88.
7. For example see Gareth Stedman-Jones, "The Marxism of the Young Lukacs,"
New Left Review (Nov.-Dec., 1971), 27-64; Lucio Coletti, From Rousseau to
Lenin (London, 1972).
8. Rene Konig, "Zur Soziologie der Zwanziger Jahre: oder Ein Epilog zu zwei Revo-
lutionen, die niemals stattgefunden haben, und was daraus fir unsere Gegenwart
resultiert," in Die Zeit Ohne Eigenschaften: Eine Bilanz der Zwanziger Jahre, ed.
Leonard Rheinisch (Stuttgart, 1961). 82-118. K6nig presents the "revolution
from the Right" as primarily anti-industrial in outlook.
9. See George Lukacs, Die Zerstdrung der Vernunft (Darmstadt and Neuwied, 1962).
This work, arguably Lukacs' worst, nevertheless contains some excellent and
insightful chapters on the relation between German social-economic development
and the ideological foundations of Nazism.
10. George Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology (New York, 1964 and 1981); Fritz
Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair (New York, 1965). Also see Helmut
Plessner, Die verspdtete Nation (Frankfurt/Main, 1974); and Fritz Ringer, The
Decline of the German Mandarins (Cambridge,'Mass., 1969).
11. Talcott Parsons, "Democracy and Social Structure in Pre-Nazi Germany," in
Essays in Sociological Theory (New York, 1964), 123. In the same volume also
see "Some Sociological Aspects of the Fascist Movements," 124-41.
12. Henry J. Turner, Jr., "Fascism and Modernization," in Reappraisals of Fascism,
(New York, 1975), 117-39.
13. Parsons, "Democracy and Social Structure." For a recent and comprehensive over-
view of the social science literature see Walter Laquer, ed., Fascism: A Reader's
Guide (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1978).
14. On Marinetti see James Joll, Three Intellectuals in Politics (New York, 1960),
133-84. On fascist ideology in France and Italy a good introduction and com-
parison to National Socialism is Ernst Nolte, Three Faces of Fascism, trans. Leila
Vennewitz (New York, 1966).
15. Charles Maier, "Between Taylorism and Technocracy: European Ideologies and
the Vision of Productivity in the 1920s," Journal of Contemporary History (April,
1970), 27-51. On the same theme see Helmut Lethens,Neue Sachlichkeit: Sttidien
zur Literatur des Weissen Sozialismus (Stuttgart, 1970). Lethens also includes use-
ful material on technology and aesthetics.
16. This by now familiar story is well summarized by Ralf Dahrendorf in Society and
Democracy in Germany (New York, 1969). Thorstein Veblen, Imperial Germany
and the Industrial Revolution (Ann Arbor, 1966) remains a classic account. Also
see David Landes, The Unbound Prometheus (New York, 1972).
17. Lukacs, Die Zerstorung der Vernunft, vol. 1, 37-83.
18. Dahrendorf, 45.
19. On the political significance of the dichotomy between Kultur and Zivilisation in
Germany from 1890 to 1933 see Ringer; Michael Lowy, Pour une Sociologie des
Intellectuelles Revolutionnaires (Paris, 1976).
20. Veblen; Barrington Moore Jr., The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy
(Boston, 1966), esp. 484-508.
21. Dahrendorf, 381, 382, 385, and 386.
22. Ibid., 396. Dahrendorf refers to family policy as indicative of a contradiction
between organic ideology and mechanical practice. Despite traditional rhetoric,
"the Nazis' family policies all amounted to the one overwhelming task of repro-
duction," 388. While the social position of women in Nazi Germany did not
accord completely with tradition (for example, women continued to enter the
labor force), the focus on reproduction accorded well with the Nazis' racial ideol-
ogy.
23. David Schonbaum, Hitler's Social Revolution (New York, 1966).
24. Ibid., 276.
25. Nicos Poulantzas, Fascism and Dictatorship: The Third International and the
Problem of Fascism (London, 1974).
26. See Ernesto Laclau, Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory (London, 1977);
Jane Caplan, "Theories of Fascism: Nicos Poulantzas as Historian," History Work-

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827
shop Journal (1977), 83-100; and Anson Rabinbach, "Poulantzas and the Prob-
lem of Fascism," New German Critique (Spring, 1976), 157-70.
27. See Schafer; Anson Rabinbach, "Towards a Marxist Theory of Fascism and
National Socialism," New German Critique (Fall, 1974), 127-53, for discussions
of this lacuna.
28. See his discussion of Ernst Jiinger and other figures of the post-war Right in Walter
Benjamin, "Theorien des deutschen Faschismus," in Walter Benjamin: Gesammelte
Schriften, Vol. 3 (Frankfurt/Main, 1977), 238-50. Trans. by Jerold Wikoff as
"Theories of German Fascism," New German Critique (Spring, 1979), 120-28.
29. See Max Horkheimer, The Eclipse of Reason (New York, 1947 and 1974).
30. Ernst Bloch, Erbschaft dieserZeit (Frankfurt/Main, 1962) and "Technik und Geis-
tererscheinungen," in Verfremdungen I (Frankfurt/Main, 1962), 177-85. Parts of
Erbschaft dieser Zeit have been translated by Mark Ritter as "Nonsynchronism
and Dialectics," in New German Critique (Spring, 1977), 22-38.
31. Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus (New York and London, 1949) and "Deutschland
und die Deutschen," in Thomas Mann. Band 2. Politik (Frankfurt/Main, 1977),
281-98.
32. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York,
1972).
33. Ibid., 173.
34. Ibid., 168-208. On Horkheimer's sociology of religion and analysis of anti-
Semitism see Julius Carlebach, Karl Marx and the Radical Critique of Judaism
(London, 1978), 234-67. On Horkheimer and Adorno's analysis see Martin Jay,
"The Jews and the Frankfurt School: Critical Theory's Analysis of Anti-Semitism,"
New German Critique (Winter, 1980), 137-49; and Anson Rabinbach, "Anti-
Semitism Reconsidered: Reply to Piccone and Berman," New German Critique
(Fall, 1980), 129-41.
35. Mason, "The Primacy of Politics."
36. Eike Hennig, Burgerliche Gesellschaft und Faschismus in Deutschland (Frankfurt/
Main, 1977); also see Timothy Mason, "Zur Enstehung des Gesetzes zur Ordnung
der nationalen Arbeit, vom 20 Januar 1934: Ein Versuch uiber das Verhaltnis
'archaischer' und 'moderner' Momente in der neuesten deutschen Geschichte," in
Industrielles System und politische Entwicklung in der Weimarer Republik, ed.
Hans Mommsen, Dieter Petzina, and Bernd Weisbrod (Diisseldorf, 1974), 323-51.
37. Anson Rabinbach, "The Aesthetics of Production in the Third Reich," Interna-
tional Fascism, ed. George Mosse (London and Beverlv Hills. 1 979). 189-222.
38. Lethens; Ansgar Hillach, "Asthetisierung des politischen Lebens. Benjamins
faschismustheoretischer Ansatz - eine Rekonstruktion," in Walter Benjamin im
Kontext, ed. Burkhardt Lindner (Frankfurt/Main, 1978), 127-67; Karl-Heinz
Bohrer, Die Asthetik des Schreckens (Munich, 1978); George Mosse, The Nation-
alization of the Masses (New York, 1970). Much of recent West German work has
been summarized in Rainer Stollman, "Fascist Politics as a Total Work of Art,"
New German Critique (Spring, 1978), 41-60. The Berlin journal, Asthetik und
Kommunikation, has been particularly active in this area.
39. Klaus Theweleit, Mdnnerphantasien, 2 vols. (Frankfurt/Main, 1978). For a good
discussion of this important work, see Lutz Niethammer, "Male Fantasies: An
Argument For and With and Important New Study in History and Psychoanalysis,"
History Workshop (Spring, 1979), 176-86. Theweleit argues that the fascist image
of the "new man" emerging from the war gave clear form to what had been a
chaotic conglomeration of "flesh, hair, skin, bones, feelings.... the old man." On
the juxtaposition of images of total order and total chaos in the right-wing imag-
ery of this period see the very interesting work by Joachim Schumacher,Die Angst
vor dem Chaos. Uber die falsche Apokalypse des Burgertums (Paris, 1937; reprint
ed. Frankfurt/Main, 1978).
40. See Karl-Heinz Ludwig, Technik und Ingenieure im Dritten Reich (Konigstein,
Ts/Duisseldorf, 1979); Gert Hortleder, Das Gesellschaftsbild des Ingenieurs
(Frankfurt/Main, 1970); Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich (New York, 1970);
and Herbert Mehrtens and Steffen Richter, eds., Naturwissenschaft, Technik und
NS-Ideologie (Frankfurt/Main, 1980).
41. Alvin Gouldner, "Romanticism and Classicism: Deep Structures in Social Science,"
in For Sociology (Harmondsworth, 1975), 323-66.
42. Lowy; Paul Breines, "Marxism and Romanticism and the Case of George Lukacs:
Notes on Some Recent Sources and Situations," Studies in Romanticism (Fall,
1977), 473-89; Ferenc Feher, "Am Scheideweg des romantischen Antikapitalis-
mus. ...," in Agnes Heller, et al., Die Seele und das Leben: Studien zum frihen
Lukdcs (Frankfurt/Main, 1972), 241-327.
43. Lowy, pp. 25-78.

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828
44. Feher, 284-85. German engineers began to incorporate technology into a nation-
alist cultural framework as early as the 1870s. See Ludwig; and Herf, 185-249
("'German Engineers as Ideologues of Technology and Culture'). The centrality
of the war for the ideological reorientation of post-war reaction has been excel-
lently analyzed by Karl Priimm in Die Literatur des soldatischen Nationalismus
der 20er Jahre, 2 vols. (Kronberg, 1974); and "Das Erbe der Front. Der Antide-
mokratische Kriegsroman der Weimarer Republik und seine nationalsozialistische
Fortsetzung," in Die deutsche Literature im Dritten Reich, eds. Horst Denkler
and Karl Priimm (Stuttgart, 1976), 138-64. Also see Eric Leed, No Man's Land
(New York, 1979); and Robert Wohl, The Generation of 1914 (Cambridge. 1979).
45. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology.
46. Moishe Postone, "Anti-Semitism and National Socialism: Notes on the German
Reaction to "Holocaust'." New German Critique (Winter, 1980), 97-115.
47. Ibid. Postone argues that the endpoint of this fetishized anti-capitalist revolt
against the Jews as the personification of the abstract dimension of capital was
Auschwitz. Postone's point of departure is the idea that "the specific characteris-
tics of the power attributed to the Jews by modern anti-Semitism - abstractness,
intangibility, universality, mobility - are all characteristics of the value dimension
of the social forms analyzed by Marx," 108. Although his starting point is differ-
ent, Postone suggests paradoxes in National Socialist views of technology and the
Jews that are parallel to those put forth in the present essay.
48. Ludwig; Herf, 185-249.
49. Clifford Geertz, "Ideology as a Cultural System," in The Interpretation of Cultures
(New York, 1973), 220; also see Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form
(New York, 1957); and J. P. Stern, Hitler: The Fuihrer and the People (Berkeley
and Los Angeles, 1975) for fine discussions of Hitler's language.
50. In addition to above mentioned works on fascist aesthetics, see George Mosse,
"Fascism and the Intellectuals," Woolf, 189-222.
51. For a description of irrationalism in the post-war Right, see Priimm, Die Literatur;
Kurt Sontheimer, Antidemokratisches Denken in der Weimarer Republik (Munich,
1962 and 1978); Lukacs, Die Zerstorung der Vernunft; and Herbert Marcuse,
"The Struggle Against Liberalism in the Totalitarian View of the State," in Nega-
tions (Boston, 1968), 3-42.
52. The phrase "revolution from the Right" is taken from the title of Hans Freyer's
Revolution von Rechts (Jena, 1931).
53. Thomas Mann, "Deutschland und die Deutschen," 294.
54. The literature on the conservative revolution is extensive. See the following:
Herman Lebovics, Social Conservatism and the Middle Classes in Germany,
1914-1933 (Princeton, 1969); Sontheimer; Walter Struve, Elites Against Democ-
racy: Leadership Ideals in Bourgeois Political Thought in Germany, 1890-1933
(Princeton, 1973).
55. Lebovics, 4-11.
56. Ibid.; Karl Dietrich Bracher, Die Auflosung der Weimarer Republik (Kon
1978), 152-53; and Arno Mayer, Dynamics of Counterrevolution in Eur
1870-1956 (New York, 1971).
57. Bloch, 194-26; Mann, Doctor Faustus, 354-55.
58. In addition to the above mentioned works by Lukacs, Sontheimer, Marcuse, and
Priimm, see Christian Graf von Krokow, Die Entscheidung: Eine Untersuchung
fiber Junger, Carl Schmitt und Martin Heidegger (Stuttgart, 1958). Merely because
the term irrationalism has at times been misdirected at any critique of positivism
does not mean it should be discarded when it is an accurate descriptive term as it
is in this case. Habermas has cautioned that "insight into the dialectic of enlighten-
ment is not yet anti-modernism," in Jiirgen Habermas, Philosophisch-politische
Profile (Frankfurt/Main, 1971), 250. Nor are critiques of positivism necessarily
irrationalist.
59. Friedrich George Jiinger, Der Aufmarsch des Nationalismus (Leipzig, 1926), 21.
60. On the reception of Lebensphilosophie in the conservative revolution see
Sontheimer; Lukacs, Die Zerstorung der Vernunft; and Hillach. One of the major
problems with Lukics' discussion of the impact of Lebensphilosophie on the
German Right is his failure to distinguish between texts and the reception, that is,
active reinterpretation, of those texts by subsequent authors. For example,
Nietzsche's idea of the will to power could conceivably serve the cause of anti-
militarist and anti-technological protest. Instead the post-war Right saw it as the
core of an amoral aestheticism which juxtaposed the "beauty" of war and tech-
nics to civilian decadence. On the Nietzsche reception within the conservative
revolution see Bohrer; Hillach; and Nolte. On the general methodological issue of
active reinterpretation of past traditions in light of current interests, see Raymond

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829
Williams' comments on "the work of selective tradition" in Marxism and Litera-

ture (New York, 1977), 122-23.
61. Moller van den Bruck,DasDritte Reich (Berlin, 1923), 68. Also see Stern, 231-325.
62. Paul Ernst, Der Zusammenbruch des deutschen Idealismus (Munich, 1918), 451.
63. Ludwig Klages, Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele (reprint ed. Bonn, 1969).
64. The conservative revolution encompassed over 500 political clubs and journals in
the Weimar Republic. For a complete list see Armin Mohler, Die Konservative
Revolution in Deutschland, 1918-1932, 2nd. ed. (Darmstadt, 1972). Some of the
journals I examined were: Die Tat, Das Gewissen, Standarte, Deutsches Volkstum,
Arminius, Die Kommenden, Technik und Kultur, the journal of the Verband
Deutscher Diplom-Ingenieure was particularly important.
65. Benjamin, "Theorien des deutschen Faschismus," 125.
66. Ibid., 127.
67. Oswald Spengler, Der Untergang der Abendlandes, 2 vols. (Munich, 1972). On
aspect of Spengler's political writing was directed at "cleansing" Prussian cons
vatism of "feudal agrarian narrowness". See Struve, 236-37.
68. Ernst Jiinger, Feuer und Blut (Berlin, 1929; reprint ed. Stuttgart, 1960), 81. T
best of the recent work on Junger is Bohrer; and Priimm, Die Literatur des sold
tischen Nationalismus. In English, see the discussions of Jiinger in Leed; Woh
Struve; and Herf. Theweleit's Mdnnerphantasien contains some excellent analy
of Jiinger as well.
69. Ernst Junger, Der Kampf als Inneres Erlebnis (Berlin, 1922; reprint ed. Stuttgart,
1960), 13 and 57.
70. Ibid., 107.
71. Ernst Jinger, Der Arbeiter: Herrschaft und Gestalt (Berlin, 1932; reprin
Ernst Jiinger Werke, vol. 6, Essays II), 9-329. For discussions of Der Arbeiter, see
Struve; Norr; Gerhard Loose, Ernst Jiinger (New York, 1974); and Hans-Peter
Schwarz, Der Konservative Anarchist: Politik und Zeitkritik Ernst Jungers
(Freiburg, 1962).
72. Ernst Junger, "Uber den Schmerz" (Hamburg, 1934; reprint ed. Werke, vol. 7,
Essays III), 187.
73. Theweleit, vol. 2, 188. Theweleit describes the development of this utopia as fol-
lows: "The multiplicity of the human desire-machine turns into the unity of the
lust-persecution machine of the martial man, while the unity and simplicity of the
machine which produces objects is endowed with an aesthetic multiplicity of
quasi-human expression." Reification, the attribution of will and purpose to tech-
nology outside social relationships, was a leitmotif of right-wing (and not only
right-wing) discussion. The reification of technology, of course, was a major theme
for Adorno, Benjamin, Horkheimer, Lukacs, and Marcuse. Also see Langdon
Winner, Autonomous Technology (Cambridge, Mass., 1977), and my review,
"Technology, Reification and Romanticism," New German Critique (Fall, 1977),
175-91. J. P. Stern notes the uses of reification of technology in avoiding respon-
sibility for political actions in Hitler, 82-83.
74. Albert Speer recalls that Hitler responded to Speer's "theory of riun value" with
great enthusiasm. According to this "theory," buildings were to be constructed to
last thousands of years. See Speer, 93-94.
75. Heinrich Hardensett, Der kapitalistische und der technische Mensch (Munich,
1932), 128.
76. See Stern, Hitler, esp. 43-97 and footnote 60.
77. Spengler, vol. I, and Der Mensch und die Technik (Munich, 1931; reprint ed.
Munich, 1971).
78. Spengler, Der Untergang, vol. 2, 1191.
79. Spengler, Der Mensch und die Technik, 6.
80. Ernst Jiinger, Das Waldchen 125 (Berlin, 1925), 19.
81. Ernst Jiinger, Feuer und Blut, 84.
82. Ibid., 81.
83. Ernst Jiinger, "Nationalismus und modernes Leben," Arminius 8 (1927), 5-6.
The most extensive analysis of Jiinger's political essays of the 1920s is in Priimm,
Die Literatur.
84. Ernst Jiinger, "Fortschritt, Freiheit und Notwendigkeit,"Arminius 8 (1926), 8-10.
85. Carl Schmitt, Der Begriff des Politischen (Munich and Leipzig, 1932), 78.
86. Ibid., 79-80.
87. Hans Freyer, Revolution von Rechts (Jena, 1931).
88. Ibid., 72.
89. Spengler, Der Untergang, vol. 2, 1193-94.
90. Hannah Arendt, "The Revolutionary Tradition and Its Lost Treasure," in On
Revolution (New York, 1965), 217-85.

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91. Mason, Sozialpolitik im Dritten Reich, 26.

92. Jiinger, Kampfals Inneres Erlebnis, 89.
93. Ibid.,77.
94. Ernst Jiinger, "Grosstadt und Land," Deutsches Volkstum 8 (1926), 579-80.
95. Jiinger, "Nationalismus und modernes Leben."
96. Carl Schmitt, Politische Romantik (Munich and Leipzig, 1919), 146.
97. Spengler, Der Untergang, vol. 2, 1162.
98. Werner Sombart, Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben (Leipzig, 1911), 329
Sombart wrote that in "Jewish psychology .... paper stands over against blood.
Reason against instinct. Concept against perception. Abstraction against sensuous-
ness," 319. On Sombart's analysis of the Jews and capitalism see the following:
Carlebach, 227-34; David Landes, "The Jewish Merchant - Typology and Stereo-
typology in Germany," Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook (1974), 11-23; Paul
Mendes-Flohr, "Werner Sombart's 'The Jews and Modern Capitalism': An Analy-
sis of Its Ideological Premises," Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook, 87-107; Arthur
Mitzman, Sociology and Estrangement (New York, 1973); Werner Mosse, "Weber,
Sombart and Beyond," Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook (1979), 3-15 ;ToniOelsner,
"The Place of the Jews in Economic History as Viewed by German Scholars," Leo
Baeck Institute Yearbook (1962), 183-212; Karl Thieme, ed., Judenfeindschaft
(Frankfurt/Main, 1963). When considered in light of Sombart's argument con-
cerning the affinity between Jewish spirit and the development, Max Weber'sProt-
estant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism emerges not only as a debate with
marxism but also with some of the common anti-Semitic interpretations of capi-
talist development.
99. Ibid., 134.
100. Ibid., 132. Also see Sombart'sDeutscher Sozialismus (Berlin-Charlottenberg, 1934)
and Die Zdhmung der Technik (Berlin-Charlottenberg, 1935) in which his enthusi-
asm for the "national revolution" is apparent.
101. Peter Schwerber, Nationalsozialismus und Technik: Die Geistigkeit der national-
sozialistischen Bewegung (Munich, 1930), 37. For more material on National
Socialism and engineers see Ludwig; and Herf, 235-49.
102. Franz Neumann, Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism,
1933-1944 (2nd. rev. ed. New York, 1944; reprint ed. New York, 1966), 471.
103. Alvin Gouldner, The Dialectic of Ideology and Technology, (New York, 1976);
Jiirgen Habermas, Towards a Rational Society (Boston, 1969); George Konrad
and Ivan Szelenyi, The Intellectuals on the Road to ClassPower (New York, 1979).
104. These are repeated themes in the journal Technik und Kultur. Carl Weihe, editor
and frequent contributor, collected his views in Kultur und Technik (Frankfurt/
Main, 1935).
105. On the personal and ideological connections between the conservative revolution,
engineering ideologues, and the Nazis, see Ludwig, 18-102.
106. On the conflicts and lack of conflicts between technocrats and ideologues in the
Hitler regime see the memoirs of Hans Kehrl, Krisenmanagers im Dritten Reich
(Dusseldorf, 1973); and Ludwig, 382-93. The only example of opposition to
Hitler on technocratic grounds which Ludwig presents is Fritz Todt's objection to
continuation of the invasion of the Soviet Union when hopes of a quick victory
faded.
107. See footnote 19 on the politicization of the idea of Kultur.
108. Theodor Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity (Evanston, Ill., 1973).
109. On the missionary zeal with which the Nazis pursued the war against the Jews see
Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide (London, 1967); Lucy Dawidowicz, The
War Against the Jews, 1933-1945 (New York, 1975); Hannah Arendt, The Ori-
gins of Totalitarianism (2nd. ed. enl. New York and Cleveland, 1958); George
Steiner, In Bluebeard's Castle (New Haven, 1979). Also see the following recent
articles on the relationship of anti-Semitism and the holocaust to National Social-
ism as a whole: Ferenc Feher, "Istvan Bibo and the Jewish Question in Hungary,"
New German Critique (Fall, 1980) 3-46; Jeffrey Herf, "The 'Holocaust' Recep-
tion in West Germany," New German Critique (Winter, 1980), 30-52; Claude
Lanzmann, "From Holocaust to 'Holocaust,' Telos (Winter 1979-80), 137-43;
Postone; and Rabinbach.
110. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (Boston, 1939), 318. Cited in Eberhard Jickel, Hit
World View: A Blueprint for Power, trans. Herbert Arnold (Cambridge, M
1981), 90.
111. A good example was provided by an associate of Spengler. See Manfred Schr6ter,
Die Kulturmoglichkeit der Technik als Formproblem der produktiven Arbeit
(Berlin and Leipzig, 1920). Joseph Levenson in his Confucian China and Its Mod-
ern Fate (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1968) dealt with a similar problem, i.e., how
the Chinese intellectuals reconciled Chinese culture and Western methods.

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112. Cited in Jackel, 28.

113. See Klaus Hildebrand, The Foreign Policy of the Third Reich, trans. Anthony
Fothergill (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1973). Hildebrand describes the breaking
apart of the "dual state" as follows: "Originally the 'old' conservative ruling class
had helped the National Socialist party to get power in order to be able to safe-
guard their hereditary positions of power. But the 'new' National Socialist elite,
feeling itself victorious, no longer wished to see the ideological factors of anti-
semitism, anti-Bolshevism and Lebensraum used primarily to serve the existing
social order and treated merely as slogans to achieve integration. What they desired
was the strict realisation of these motivating elements in their Weltanschauung,
and - connected to this - they wanted to replace the conservative leading groups
with the 'biologically' superior SS master race. The ideological factor in the Pro-
gramme had helped to guarantee and consolidate the working of the existing
social order. Now the ideology worked more and more as a brake, blocking the
development of the rational power politics which Hitler also continued to con-
duct," 106-07.
114. See Rauschning. Rauschning's thesis was repeated in Alan Bullock's important
biography, Hitler: A Study in Tyranny (New York, 1953). Hitler was consumed
by "the will to power in its crudest and purest form, not identifying itself with
the triumph of a principle as with Lenin or Robespierre - for the only principle
of Nazism was power and domination for its own sake.... [Hitler was] an oppor-
tunist without scruple," 382 and 806. See Jackel, 13-19.
115. Hans Mommsen, "National Socialism - Continuity and Change," in Laquer,
179-210. In the midst of this organizational chaos, writes Mommsen, "even the
'Final Solution of the Jewish Question' came to pass only in the uncertain light of
the dictator's fanatical propaganda utterences, eagerly seized upon as orders for
action by men wishing to prove their diligence, the efficiency of their machinery,
and their political indispensability," 200. The suggestion that there was anything
"uncertain" about Hitler's plans for the Jews or that the Final Solution was the
product of a culmination of ad hoc measures adopted in the context of the chang-
ing fortunes of the war has, as one would expect, aroused considerable contro-
versy. For a somewhat more qualified version of Mommsen's thesis - which never-
theless lays responsibility at Hitler's feet - see Martin Broszat, "Hitler und die
Genesis der 'Endlosung," Vierteljahresheft fuir Zeitgeschichte (October, 1977),
739-75. Christopher Browning, "Zur Genesis der 'Endlosung," Vierteljahreshefte
fur Zeitgeschichte (January, 1981), 97-109, responds to Broszat and argues that
the Final Solution was the working out of a central plan of extermination chosen
at the latest in 1941. For general treatments, see Dawidowicz; and Uwe Dietrich
Adam, Judenpolitik im Dritten Reich (Konigstein, 1972). The idea that the Third
Reich was inwardly characterized by organizational confusion is not a new one.
See Neumann, as well as the excellent discussion of subsequent English language
and West German discussions of this theme in Gert Schafer, "Franz Neumanns
Behemoth und die heutige Faschismusdiskussion," Afterward to Behmoth: Struk-
tur und Praxis des Nationalsozialismus, 1933-1944. (Frankfurt/Main, 1977),
665-776.
116. Hildebrand, 140. Also see the very important work of Andreas Hillgri
Strategie. Politik und Kriegfiihrung 1940-1941 (Frankfurt/Main, 1
Kontinuitdt und Diskontinuitdt der deutschen Aussenpolitik von Bis
Hitler (Diisseldorf, 3rd ed., 1971). In his essay "Die 'Endlosung' and das
Ostimperium als Kernstuck des rassenideologischen Programms des Nation
lismus" ("The 'Final Solution' and the German Empire in the East as th
stone of National Socialism's Racial-Ideological Program") Vierteljahr
Zeitgeschichte (April, 1972), 133-53, Hillgriiber criticizes the view of H
"opportunist without principles" and emphasizes the centrality of anti
in Hitler's war aims in the invasion of Russia. Extermination of the J
the "Jewish-bolshevik" leadership, acquisition of Lebensraum for Germ
zation, colonization of the slavic masses by the Germans, and acquisiti
and raw materials to make possible economic autarky under German con
the four intertwined and ideologically grounded goals of Hitler's war,
see Norman Rich, Hitler's War Aims (New York, 1973).
117. See note 113. Also see Erich Goldhagen, "Weltanschauung und Endlo6su
teljahresheft fur Zeitgeschichte October, 1976), 379-405. Goldhagen
"The most striking refutation of the thesis that the National Socialists
believing and cynical manipulators of anti-Semitism, is, of course, the
exterminate the Jews." If the Jews were to serve primarily as a scapego
nique to maintain Nazi domination, then the Nazis, Goldhagen argues, w
to keep them alive. In murdering them, they destroyed their own inst

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domination, 393. Goldhagen thus takes issue with Franz Neumann's statement in
Behemoth that "The internal political value of Anti-Semitism will ... never allow
a complete extermination of the Jews. The foe cannot and must not disappear; he
must always be held in readiness as a scapegoat for all the evils originating in the
socio-political system," 125. Goldhagen further argues that the Final Solution of
the Jewish question was not an instrument in service of other goals. On the con-
trary, in the matter of the Final Solution, Hitler's actions should be described as
value-rational (wertrational) rather than instrumental-rational (zweckrational),
397. See note 109.
118. On this see Steiner, 34-36; also see Feher's excellent discussion of the superiority
of Jean-Paul Sartre's discussion of anti-Semitism as a "new demonology" (in Anti-
Semite and Jew (New York, 1948 and 1962)) over previous socialist (and subse-
quent sociological) discussions of anti-Semitism in Feher, "Istvan Bibo," 38-41.
119. Karl Dietrich Bracher, "The Role of Hitler: Perspectives of Interpretation," in
Laquer, 217.
120. Jackel,43.
121. Bracher, "The Role of Hitler," 212. Bracher insists that ideas must be taken seri-
ously. He adds that "the fashionable tendency to dissolve all historical develop-
ments into structural and collective processes represents an understandable reac-
tion to the crude concept of Manner machen Geschichte - history is made by
great men," 214, but he insists that "the formation and translation of Hitler's
ideology remains the central problem of any analysis of nazism," 219. On the
importance and possibility of overcoming the false dichotomy between a sociol-
ogy concerned with power and structures and one focused on ideology, conscious-
ness, action, intention, and agency see Anthony Giddens' very suggestive Central
Problems in Social Theory (London, 1979). He points out the obvious: recognizing
the "authenticity of belief' does not at all entail a "paralysis of critical will" or
abandonment of "critical evaluation of the justification of belief," 250-51.
122. Horkheimer and Adorno, 3.
Theory and Society 10 (1981) 805-832. Printed in the Netherlands.

0304-2421/81/0000-0000/$02.50 ? 1981 Elsevier Scientific Publishing Company

193.140.239.12 on Thu, 27 May 2021 11:41:15 UTC

Reactionary Modernism Some Ideological Origins

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Reactionary Modernism: Some Ideological Origins of the Primacy of Politics in the

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/657334

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Some Ideological Origins of the Primacy of Politics in the

In 1946, reflecting on the "fantastic debacle" of the Hitler regim

Center for European Studies, Harvard University.

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is due to a view first articulated by Hermann Rauschning, a former associate

view I call reactionary modernism.4 Such a reinterpretation seeks to account

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the whole tendency of rationalization in the Western world."1 Henry J.

Of course there were peculiarities to Germany's development. Compared to

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As Poulantzas' work on fascism made clear once again, marxist analyses of

Hence we see that marxist, functionalist, and other not-so-ideologically-dis-

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view Nazi ideology as a web of cynical rationalization for a prior interest in

Discussion of the synthesis of technics and unreason in German ideology of

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Finally, there have beerl some reconsiderations of the connections between

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Moishe Postone has interpreted anti-Semitism as a specifically modern ideol-

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The reorientation of German nationalism towards reactionary modernism

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One cannot fully comprehend the paradoxical nature of reactionary modern-

In the following, I will present the major themes of reactionary modernism

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In one of Junger's most well-known works, Der Arbeiter, he presented a

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If a battleship was, in his words, an "embodiment of an icy will" one of many

This celebration was not an endorsement of a rationalized world but, at least

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Finally, it should be kept in mind that reactionary modernism was as selective

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cialism conjured up by the contemptible word Geld (money). In The Decline

Here, in embryonic form, is the contribution of anti-Semitism to the reconcili-

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Versailles restrictions on rearmament. Fascism, one might say, promised to

Having traced the themes of reactionary modernism, I would like to comment

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technology was itself the externalization of essentially non-rational forces -

The accomplishment of the reactionary modernists can be summarized as fol-

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This paradoxical combination of irrationalism and technics was fundamental

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and subjective intentions are clearly of secondary significance in explaining

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National Socialism presents us with, in Weber's terms, the triumph of an ethic

I am in agreement with West German historians such as Karl Bracher and

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Finally, the analysis of reactionary modernism presented here suggests that

1. Lord Tedder, "Forward," in H. R. Trevor-Roper, The Last Days of Hi

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Williams' comments on "the work of selective tradition" in Marxism and Litera-

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91. Mason, Sozialpolitik im Dritten Reich, 26.

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