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Community Purpose and the Nazi Lesson

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2009

Extract

Contemplating the catastrophic course of the Nazi Revolution we may well find it all too easy to see nothing in the spectacle but the nether darkness made visible; and if we are advised that it is not merely permissible but highly advisable to learn from the enemy, we may be tempted to think that whatever the Nazi war-machine has to teach the strategist and the technician, the political history of Germany in the last decade, and in particular the political ideology that has imposed itself upon the German mind with such apparent thoroughness, can yield only the negative lesson of a warning, by displaying upon the world-wide stage the doomful consequences of wrong principles ruthlessly pushed to their extreme. But it is certainly an error to deny that nothing of more positive value has emerged out of the revolutionary cauldron: and indeed it would be more than strange, where such whole-hearted energies of mind are being enlisted in the evil cause of Nazism, if none of its votaries had ever stumbled for a time into wisdom.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1944

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References

page 197 note 1 Machiavelli is said to have been the first to use the word “State” in the modern sense.

page 201 note 1 This was revived again in large measure with the advent of the internal-combustion engine and electrical power.

page 202 note 1 A symptomatic utterance is that of Raymond Asquith (about 1910), brilliant inheritor of the tradition of late Victorian Liberalism, that he found life “increasingly bare of motive.”

page 204 note 1 For instance, in the last paper which Hegel wrote, a criticism of the English Reform Bill, he contrasts, and with a great deal of justification, the capricious, irrational character of British law with German law with its systematically worked out rational principles. After a hundred years the wheel has indeed come full circle.

page 208 note 1 This is the word that Robert Bridges puts to such pregnant use in “The Testament of Beauty.”