The Transnational Ideological Precursors - From Romanticism to the Völkisch Movement
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume I, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
Fascist ideology did not arise in a vacuum. It synthesized philosophical traditions that had emerged in the nineteenth century—traditions we have already encountered in previous chapters. These traditions were ambivalent: they grasped real problems of modernity, but radicalized their critique into one-sided polarizations that were eventually taken up by fascism and heightened into a murderous worldview.
It is crucial to understand: this development was not inevitable. Romanticism did not necessarily lead to National Socialism, Nietzsche was no proto-fascist, Heidegger’s existential philosophy contained no fascist essence. But between these philosophical traditions and fascist ideology there existed affinities—patterns of thought, motifs, lines of critique that fascism could take up, reinterpret, and radicalize.
The following account presents chains of contingency, not teleology. It shows how it historically became possible for philosophical traditions to be mobilized for a barbaric ideology—not that this had to happen of necessity.
Branching Roots
The roots of fascist ideology reach deep into European and transatlantic intellectual history of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In England and the United States, biological racism developed in the context of colonialism, slavery, and imperial expansion. In France, political counter-Enlightenment arose from aristocratic fear of the Revolution of 1789 and its egalitarian consequences. In Germany, romantic motifs of immediacy and myth were radicalized in völkisch terms.
These parallel developments did not remain isolated. They cross-fertilized one another through translations, scholarly correspondence, academic networks, political circles. Gobineau’s race theory found more resonance in the USA and Germany than in France. The American eugenics movement inspired German “racial hygienists.” German Romanticism was received and transformed by French and English thinkers.
National Socialism was the most radical synthesis of these transnational currents—not their cause, but their murderous consequence. Germany radicalized and instrumentalized what had been prepared elsewhere. This observation is no excuse—on the contrary: it shows that every culture must critically reflect on its contributions to fascist ideology. The task is not to distribute blame, but to recognize structures that can lead to barbarism in different contexts.
28.3.1 Gobineau and Scientific Racism from France
Arthur de Gobineau (1816-1882) was a French diplomat and writer whose “Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines” (1853-1855) became the foundation of modern scientific racism. The four-volume work initially received little attention in France but was enthusiastically received in Germany and the United States.
Gobineau’s basic thesis: world history is the history of the rise and fall of civilizations—and this process is determined by race. Gobineau divided humanity into three “main races”: white, yellow, and black. The white race—and within it the “Aryans”—was superior to all others. Civilizations arose only where the white race dominated or at least had strong influence.
The decline of civilizations was explained through racial mixing. When “pure” Aryans mixed with “inferior” races, this led to “degeneration”—to the loss of those qualities that had first made civilization possible. Gobineau interpreted the French Revolution of 1789 as a symptom of this degeneration: the French people had been so diluted by centuries of racial mixing that the aristocratic qualities (which he identified with “Aryan” blood) had disappeared.
The political motivation: Gobineau was a convinced legitimist—a supporter of the deposed Bourbon monarchy. His racism did not arise primarily from biological research but from political despair. The revolution had disempowered the aristocracy; democracy seemed unstoppable. Gobineau sought an explanation for the supposed decline—and found it in “race.” His theory was an attempt to reinterpret class struggle as racial struggle: not exploitation by the aristocracy was the problem, but “racial mixing,” which led to the rule of the “inferior.”[1]
The ambivalence: Gobineau himself was not an antisemite. On the contrary—he described Jews in quite positive terms as “a free, strong, and intelligent race.”[2] His race theory was directed primarily against the “mixing” of Aryans with Celts and Slavs within Europe. But this theoretical construction could easily be reinterpreted: if “purity” is the highest good and “mixing” leads to degeneration, then the demand for racial segregation or even elimination lies close at hand.
Transmission to Germany: Gobineau’s work remained marginal in France—but it found enthusiastic readers in Germany. The decisive mediator was Richard Wagner (1813-1883). Gobineau and Wagner met in Rome in 1876 and became friends. Wagner, who had already developed a fanatical antisemitism, read Gobineau’s race theory through this antisemitic lens—ignoring the fact that Gobineau himself had rated Jews positively.
After Wagner’s death, his daughter Cosima Wagner continued this instrumentalization. In 1894 she founded the “Gobineau Society,” which disseminated Gobineau’s work in Germany. But the German reception was already a perversion of the original: Gobineau’s aristocratic cultural critique became völkisch racism, his skepticism toward mass movements became nationalist mobilization, his ambivalence toward Jews became eliminationist antisemitism.
Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855-1927), Wagner’s son-in-law, carried out the decisive transformation. In his “Foundations of the Nineteenth Century” (1899), he combined Gobineau’s race theory with radical antisemitism and German nationalism. Chamberlain—himself an Englishman—glorified the “Germanic race” as the bearer of all civilization and denounced Jews as its mortal enemies. Kaiser Wilhelm II corresponded enthusiastically with Chamberlain. Hitler venerated him as a spiritual forerunner—and visited the dying Chamberlain in Bayreuth in 1923.[3]
The American reception: Parallel to the German reception, Gobineau was received in the United States—albeit with a different thrust. The American physician Josiah Clark Nott (1804-1873), a leading proponent of “polygenism” (the doctrine that races have different origins), translated parts of the “Essai” into English (1856). Nott used Gobineau for the “scientific” justification of slavery: if Blacks were biologically inferior, then their enslavement was natural and justified.[4]
The chain of contingency: Gobineau’s race theory could have remained the abstract speculation of a disappointed aristocrat. But it was taken up, translated, reinterpreted, instrumentalized—in Germany for völkisch nationalism, in the USA for the justification of slavery, later in both countries for eugenics and extermination policy. The chain was historically contingent—but not arbitrary. Gobineau’s biologization of cultural differences, his hierarchization of “races,” his demonization of “mixing” created an ideological reservoir from which various movements could draw.
What must be sublated: Gobineau’s work contains no positive insights worth preserving. His biologization of cultural differences is scientifically untenable, his hierarchization of “races” ethically reprehensible. What remains is a cautionary tale about how political despair (legitimism after 1789) can transform into pseudo-scientific ideology—and how such ideologies unfold unintended effects when transferred to other contexts.
28.3.2 German Romanticism and Its Völkisch Radicalization
Romanticism (c. 1790-1830) was the first great counter-Enlightenment movement of modernity. It reacted to the disenchantment of the world (Max Weber) brought about by Enlightenment rationality. The Enlightenment had objectified nature, mathematized it, mechanized it. It had turned the universe into a clockwork, the human being into a rational machine, society into a system of contracts. What was lost in this process, according to the Romantic diagnosis, was the living, the organic, the holistic.
The Romantics opposed abstract understanding with feeling, mechanical nature with living nature, analysis with synthesis, the individual with the whole. They discovered the significance of history, of tradition, of popular culture. They defended the concrete against the abstract, the particular against the universal, the irrational against the rational.
This critique had its justification. Enlightenment rationality really was abstract—it abstracted from everything particular, individual, historical. The Romantic longing for wholeness, immediacy, rootedness was an understandable reaction to the atomization of modern society.
But Romanticism radicalized this legitimate critique into problematic polarizations: feeling against understanding—not mediation, but a one-sided elevation of feeling as the privileged access to truth. Myth against history—myth as original truth, superior to critical reason. Volk against humanity—absolutization of one’s own people, one’s own culture, one’s own language. Organism against mechanism—transferring the concept of the organism onto society, in which everyone has their “natural” function.
These Romantic motifs remained at first within culture; they were not politically militant, not racist, not eliminationist. Many Romantics were apolitical, some liberal, a few even cosmopolitan.
The Mediating Instances - From Cultural Romanticism to the Political Völkisch Movement
The connection between cultural Romanticism and the political völkisch movement was not direct. It was mediated by a series of thinkers and movements that took up Romantic motifs and radicalized them politically.
Paul de Lagarde (1827-1891) transformed Romantic cultural critique into an antisemitic polemic. His “German Writings” (1878-1881) combined Romantic cultural critique with radical antisemitism. Lagarde denounced the “Judaization” of German culture, demanded the “annihilation” of Jewish influence, dreamed of a new German religion beyond “Judaized” Christianity. In Lagarde, the Romantic critique of modernity became a racial explanation: the problems of modernity were traced back not to structures but to a group—“the Jews.”[5]
Houston Stewart Chamberlain we have already mentioned in connection with Gobineau. His “Foundations of the Nineteenth Century” (1899) synthesized Romantic cultural philosophy with biological racism. Chamberlain read the whole of history as a racial struggle between “Aryans” and “Semites.” He biologized cultural differences into racial essences.
Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919) and monism combined Romantic natural philosophy with Darwinian evolutionary theory. Haeckel’s monism was initially a scientific worldview that conceived nature and spirit as unity—a quite Romantic motif. But Haeckel uncritically transferred Darwinian “selection” onto human society. From the scientific theory of evolution arose a social Darwinism that sanctioned the elimination of “weak” races and individuals. The Monist League, which Haeckel founded, became a mass organization that combined biological racism with progress-optimism.[6]
The völkisch movement (c. 1890-1933) is often retrospectively portrayed as a proto-fascist current—a simplification that does not do justice to historical reality. In its social reality it was more a loose conglomerate of the most varied currents: life-reformers, vegetarians, natural-healing advocates, nudists, back-to-the-land communards, spiritualists of all kinds, club-joiners, seekers of alternative lifestyles, city-dwellers who wanted to move to the countryside. The parallel to the green-alternative scene of the 1970s and 1980s is striking—there too one found a similar mixture of ecology, spirituality, longing for community, cultural critique, and experimental enthusiasm.
Within this heterogeneous milieu there were associations such as the “Hammerbund,” the “Deutschbund,” or the “Pan-German League,” which combined Romantic motifs with racism and antisemitism and fought for “purity,” “defense,” and “Germanic values.” They prepared the ideological terrain on which National Socialism could grow.[7] But they were by no means representative of the entire milieu—no more than the Red Army Faction or the “2 June Movement” were representative of the entire left-alternative scene of the 1970s.
The retrospective labeling as “völkisch movement” projects the later National Socialist outcome back onto a scene that, in its breadth, was much more harmless, eccentric, and heterogeneous. Monte Verità in Ticino, the life-reform settlements, the Wandervogel movement, progressive education (Reformpädagogik)—all this belonged to the same milieu without being proto-fascist. The lesson is: from a diffuse alternative milieu, various political developments can emerge. That National Socialism emerged from parts of the völkisch scene was not inevitable—but it happened, and the question is which elements enabled this fatal development.
The Völkisch-Occult Scene - The Thule Society and Ariosophy
A particular branch of the völkisch movement combined racism with occultism. This current—whose significance should be neither overestimated nor ignored—created concrete organizational links between völkisch ideology and early National Socialism.
The Transatlantic Root: Helena Blavatsky’s Theosophy
Ariosophy did not arise out of nothing. It drew on theosophy, which Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831-1891) founded in New York in 1875 together with Henry Steel Olcott. The Theosophical Society was a transatlantic movement that combined Eastern spirituality (especially Indian and Tibetan traditions) with Western occultism.
Blavatsky’s theosophy contained a doctrine of “root races”—different developmental stages of humanity in cosmic cycles. This terminology sounded racist, but Blavatsky’s own intention was the opposite: she proclaimed the “brotherhood of humanity without distinction of race” as the goal and saw the higher development of humanity precisely in the fusion of all races, not in their separation. Blavatsky herself was not a racist in the political sense—she assumed a superiority of Indian over European religions, which directly contradicted European racism.
The Ariosophic Perversion
Guido von List (1848-1919) and Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels (1874-1954) took over Blavatsky’s terminology and cosmological speculations, but inverted her universalist intention into its opposite. From the “brotherhood of all humans” came the “keeping pure of the Aryan race.” From the fusion of races came aristocratic racial separation. From the cosmic evolutionary scheme came a hierarchy in which the “Ario-Germans” stood at the top.
This transformation was not a mere further development but a perversion—structurally analogous to what conservative Hegelians and later National Socialist ideologues did with Hegel: a thinker is instrumentalized for something that contradicts his own position.
List developed “Ariosophy”—a mixture of racism, Germanic mythology, occultism, and pseudo-scientific runic research. He proclaimed a supposed “Aryan-Germanic” primal religion, allegedly buried by Christianity. Lanz founded the “Order of the New Templars” in 1907 and published the journal “Ostara,” in which he advocated for the “keeping pure” of the “Ario-heroic race.” The young Hitler knew this journal—even though his later antisemitism drew on many sources.[8]
Against anachronistic blanket condemnations: it would be historically wrong and intellectually dishonest to denounce theosophy, anthroposophy, and related currents today as blanket “proto-fascist”—a tendency found in some circles calling themselves “antifascist.” Blavatsky’s theosophy was universalist, not racist. Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy developed in a wholly different direction than Ariosophy. That Ariosophists misused theosophical concepts makes theosophy no more a forerunner of fascism than National Socialist instrumentalization of Hegel makes him a “totalitarian.” Responsibility lies with those who pervert—not with those whose ideas are perverted.
The völkisch-occult scene (Thule Society, Ariosophy) formed mediating instances between Romantic motifs and political activism. The concrete organizational and financial mechanisms of these connections are analyzed below (19.5.2) in the context of the alliance of capital, church, and military.[9]
This occult scene was historically marginal, but symptomatic: it showed how Romantic motifs (longing for immediacy, myth, “original” religion) could be fused with racism and political activism. “Scientific” race theory (Gobineau, Chamberlain) and “mystical” Ariosophy complemented each other—one supplied the pseudo-scientific legitimation, the other the emotional mobilization.
What must be sublated: the Romantic critique of abstract Enlightenment rationality had a legitimate core. The Enlightenment really was abstract—it abstracted from history, tradition, concrete forms of life. But the solution does not lie in a return to myth, to feeling, to the “Volk” as an unquestionable unity. The solution lies in a concrete reason that does not negate the particular but takes it up into itself—in a dialectic that mediates the universal and the particular rather than playing them off against each other. Hegel’s philosophy offered precisely this mediation—but it was not taken up by Romanticism and its successors.
28.3.3 Schelling and the Munich Constellation
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling’s Berlin lectures (1841-1846) marked a turning point in Hegel reception (see Chapter 8.2). Schelling—himself a co-founder of German idealism—developed the sharpest systematic critique of Hegel’s logic. His basic thesis: Hegel’s “negative philosophy” explains only the “What” (the essences), not the “That” (existence).
Schelling’s program encompassed a philosophy that proceeds from “immemorial existence” (unvordenkliche Existenz), that shows how consciousness, culture, and religion develop historically from it, and that interprets not through a priori construction but mythologically.
The ambivalence: Schelling recognized a real problem—the contingency of existence, which cannot be derived from pure logic. But his solution—the return to mythology—was a regression. Instead of further developing the dialectic, he returned to pre-rational material.
Munich as a philosophical center: Schelling worked in Munich from 1827 to 1841. King Ludwig I appointed him professor at the newly founded University of Munich and president of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences. More importantly: Schelling became the philosophical teacher of Crown Prince Maximilian II, who later, as king, maintained close intellectual exchange with his former teacher until Schelling’s death (1854). Under Schelling’s influence, Munich became a significant philosophical center.[10]
The fatal effect: the image of Hegel: Schelling’s most important—and most fateful—contribution to the history of ideas was not his positive philosophy itself but the image of Hegel that he established. Schelling portrayed Hegel as an “abstract systematizer” who stifles life in the concept, who dissolves concrete existence into logical constructions, who does violence to reality through rational schemas.
This image was passed down—from Kierkegaard through philosophy of life to the National Socialist era. The National Socialist ideologues Alfred Baeumler and Alfred Rosenberg rejected Hegel, but they did so with arguments that ultimately went back to Schelling’s critique: Hegel as representative of “abstract,” “corrosive,” “Jewish” thinking against “concrete,” “living,” “Germanic” immediacy.[11]
A topographical coincidence without causality: the NSDAP’s headquarters were located from 1925 to 1930 at Schellingstraße 50 in Munich. This topographical coincidence—Hitler’s party on the street named after the philosopher who denounced Hegel as an “abstract systematizer”—is historically fascinating. But it would be absurd to construct a direct connection from this. Schellingstraße had already been so named in the nineteenth century. The NSDAP chose the building for practical reasons (proximity to the studio of house photographer Heinrich Hoffmann), not out of philosophical reverence.
The coincidence is nonetheless symptomatic: Munich as the place where Schelling’s anti-Hegel philosophy was taught and where the NSDAP was later founded. But the connection is indirect—via the transmitted image of Hegel, not via direct lines of influence.[12]
What must be sublated: Schelling’s pointing to the contingency of existence remains philosophically relevant. That something exists cannot be derived from its concept. But the answer to this is not a return to mythology, but the recognition that logic knows its own limits—that it presupposes the “that” of existence without being able to deduce it. This self-limitation of logic is not a weakness but an expression of its self-reflexivity.
28.3.4 Schopenhauer - The Metaphysics of the Will
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) radicalized the Romantic critique of reason on a philosophically higher level. His central thesis: the world in its essence is not reason but blind will. Behind all appearances there is no rational purpose, no divine plan, no development toward the better. There is only the blind, aimless, insatiable will to life.
This diagnosis destroyed the optimism both of the Enlightenment and of German idealism. Against Kant: reason is not autonomous but an instrument of the will. Against Hegel: history is not progress toward freedom but endless repetition of the same suffering. Against the Enlightenment: the world cannot be improved through reason, for it is irrational at its core.
The legitimate core: Schopenhauer’s pessimism was a necessary corrective to Enlightenment optimism. The world is not thoroughly structured rationally, suffering is fundamental, faith in progress is naive.
Schopenhauer’s ethical consequence, however, was compassion. Because all beings are driven by the same blind will and experience the same suffering, compassion is the only legitimate moral stance. Schopenhauer sought redemption from suffering through asceticism, through negation of the will to life. His ethics were universal—they applied to all beings capable of suffering, not only to one’s own group.
The problematic reception: his disciples often emphasized only the metaphysics of will, not the ethical consequence of compassion. The “will” became the new absolute—no longer reason, but will as the essence of the world. This philosophy of will without compassion could lead to social Darwinism: the stronger will prevails, that is “natural.”
What must be sublated: the seriousness of suffering, the critique of naive progress-optimism—but combined with an ethics of recognition that takes up Schopenhauer’s compassion and grounds it systematically. Schopenhauer’s ethics of compassion remains valuable—but it must be detached from its pessimistic metaphysics and transformed into a theory of mutual recognition.
28.3.5 Nietzsche - The Most Complex Case
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) is the most complex and most contested case. His radical ideology critique was philosophically productive—his genealogy exposed power structures behind moral norms, his perspectivism showed the contextuality of all knowledge. But this critical energy was, in Nietzsche himself, bound up with explicitly aristocratic, anti-democratic, anti-egalitarian positions.
Nietzsche’s diagnosis: the modern world is nihilistic. The death of God, the disenchantment of the world, the loss of all absolute values lead to inner emptiness, to nihilism as the “most uncanny of all guests.” His critique struck both Christianity and the Enlightenment. Christianity had set life-hostile values: humility instead of pride, compassion instead of strength, the beyond instead of this world. The Enlightenment had criticized Christianity—but only to replace it with even more abstract values: reason, human rights, progress. These Enlightenment values were, according to Nietzsche, only secularized Christian values.
Nietzsche’s alternative: the revaluation of all values. Not equality, compassion, reason, but strength, pride, self-overcoming. Not compassion for the weak, but the self-enhancement of the strong. Not the equality of all human beings, but the breeding of the Übermensch.
Domenico Losurdo’s Materially-Rich Critique
The Italian philosopher Domenico Losurdo showed in his study “Nietzsche, the Aristocratic Rebel” (2002) that Nietzsche’s philosophy was no neutral moral critique but a consciously political project to defend aristocratic power structures against democratic and socialist tendencies.[13]
Losurdo’s evidence (which he documents extensively): Nietzsche’s explicit defense of slavery (including American Southern slavery). His admiration for colonial “master races” and imperial expansion. His hatred of socialism, democracy, women’s rights, animal protection—all “slave morality.” His demand for the “breeding” of a new master class. These were not metaphors, but concrete political positions.
Concrete examples (which Losurdo cites): “Slavery belongs to the essence of a culture” (Nachlass). “The slave has no place in pessimism”—he is to work, not complain. “A good and healthy aristocracy […] will […] accept without any scruples the sacrifice of countless human beings” (Beyond Good and Evil, §258). Admiration for the “Negro slavery” of the Americans as the foundation of their economic strength.
The National Socialist reception: Rosenberg, Baeumler, Krieck invoked Nietzsche. They took up his aristocratic elements—“master morality,” “will to power,” “blond beast,” “breeding.” Losurdo’s thesis: this was not mere falsification, but consistent radicalization of tendencies that were already present in Nietzsche himself.
But also falsification: Nietzsche was anti-antisemitic (he despised antisemites as “misbirths”), anti-nationalist (he despised the German “louts of imperial founding”), cosmopolitan (he demanded “mixing” of the European peoples). National Socialist nationalism and racism were a narrowing of Nietzsche’s aristocratic cosmopolitanism.
Nietzsche’s texts are ambiguous, contradictory, literary. He was no systematic philosopher. His vision of the Übermensch was individualist, aristocratic, not völkisch. But his texts could be read in a völkisch manner. His critique of equality could be read as a justification of racial hierarchies. His affirmation of strength and hardness could be read as legitimation of violence. His contempt for compassion could be read as justification for the annihilation of the “weak.”
This völkisch reading of Nietzsche was promoted by his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, who manipulated his literary estate. She arranged Nietzsche’s fragments into “The Will to Power” (1901)—a work Nietzsche would never have published in this form. She linked Nietzsche’s philosophy with völkisch antisemitism. Hitler visited the Nietzsche Archive, posed with a bust of Nietzsche—a symbolic appropriation.
The philosophical tension: Nietzsche’s critical method (genealogy, perspectivism) is worth sublating—it exposes hidden power structures, shows the historicity of seemingly eternal truths. But his aristocratic content (defense of domination, slavery, hierarchy) is reprehensible.
The question remains: can Nietzsche’s critical method be separated from his aristocratic content? Can genealogy be preserved without adopting the legitimation of domination? A contemporary Hegelian philosophy would have to sublate Nietzsche’s critique—but self-reflexively, with normative criteria (recognition), and without accepting his aristocratic affirmation of life at others’ expense.
What must be sublated: Nietzsche’s genealogical method—the exposure of power structures behind moral norms—remains philosophically productive. But it must be combined with normative criteria that Nietzsche himself refused. Genealogy shows that values have arisen historically—it does not show which values should hold. This is where dialectic must set in: a theory of recognition that does not fall back into naive morality but also not into aristocratic decisionism.
28.3.6 Philosophy of Life - Life against Spirit
Philosophy of life (Dilthey, Bergson, Simmel, later radicalized by Klages) rightly criticized natural-scientific reductionism. “Life” cannot be mathematized, mechanized, reduced to causal laws. Intuition, experience, understanding are independent modes of access to reality.
“Life” became the central concept. Not the abstract categories of logic, not the mechanical laws of physics were to be the measure—but life itself in its immediacy, dynamism, irrationality.
The legitimate core: the critique of reductionism. The humanities need their own methods, not reducible to the natural sciences. Immediate experience, temporal duration, organic wholeness cannot be fully rationalized.
The danger: “life” against “spirit”—especially in Ludwig Klages (“The Mind as Adversary of the Soul,” 1929-1932). When life becomes the principle, the intellect becomes a “disease,” reflection becomes “corrosion,” critique becomes “decadence.”[14]
Philosophy of life radicalized its insight into an opposition: life against reason. The rational was declared hostile to life, analysis became destruction, reflection became paralysis. Intuition, immediate experience, were declared privileged modes of knowledge—superior to rational cognition.
This polarization was fatal. It suspended critical reason in the name of “life.” It made the irrational into truth. It opened the door to any irrationalism that invoked “life.”
The National Socialist reception: Alfred Baeumler interpreted Nietzsche as a philosopher of life against the systematic philosopher. Ernst Krieck demanded “völkisch education” against “abstract science.” Life (Germanic, instinctive, healthy) against spirit (Jewish, intellectual, corrosive).
National Socialism systematically took up these motifs from philosophy of life. “Life” now meant: racial life. The race as an organic whole that must defend itself against “foreign” influences. “Healthy popular sentiment” as immediate truth against “corrosive” critique. The “blood and soil” ideology as an expression of living rootedness against the abstract, “rootless” modernity.
What must be sublated: the critique of reductionism remains justified. But “life” must itself be grasped conceptually—not as an opposite to the concept.
Here lies the deepest irony of philosophy of life: precisely Hegel had developed, in his Logic, a philosophy of life that contains everything the philosophers of life missed—but without irrationalism. In the chapter on the “Idea of Life” (Science of Logic, Vol. 2), Hegel shows life as the immediate Idea—as the first form of the unity of concept and reality. The living organism is this unity, enacts it actively, but does not yet know it.
Hegel’s analysis of the three life-processes—self-differentiation (internal articulation without loss of unity), self-preservation (exchange with the external through assimilation), self-sublation (production of the new, continuation of the species)—captures exactly what the philosophers of life were seeking: the living as a self-referential system that cannot be reduced to mechanism. “Self-” in Hegel is no mysticism, but a structural quality: life refers to itself, organizes itself, preserves itself, develops itself—in contrast to mere objects, which exist only for another.
The philosophers of life did not know Hegel—or only through Schelling’s distorted image. They accused the “abstract systematizer” of stifling life in the concept. Yet Hegel had shown: the concept is living when it applies itself, differentiates itself, develops itself. Not “life against spirit,” but “life as a moment of spirit”—as the immediate Idea that sublates itself into knowing.
The dialectical sublation of philosophy of life therefore lies not in a synthesis of “life” and “concept,” but in the insight that this opposition rests on a misunderstanding—a misunderstanding that Schelling introduced into the world and that the philosophers of life uncritically adopted.
28.3.7 Transatlantic Social Darwinism - From Theory to the Practice of Annihilation
Social Darwinism—the transfer of Darwin’s biological theses to human society—developed not in Germany but in England and the United States. It supplied the pseudo-scientific foundation for racial hierarchies, eugenics, and ultimately for National Socialist extermination policy. The transatlantic dimension of this development is indispensable for understanding the ideological roots of fascism.
The Theory: Spencer, Galton, and the Transformation of Biology into Politics
Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), British philosopher and sociologist, coined in 1864 the formula “Survival of the Fittest”—not Charles Darwin himself. Spencer transferred Darwin’s biological theory of evolution to society: the “struggle for existence” was not merely a law of nature, but also a social principle. The “strong” prevailed, the “weak” perished—and this was not only factual but also good. Compassion and solidarity with the “weak” were counterproductive—they kept the “unfit” alive and weakened the overall population.[15]
Francis Galton (1822-1911), Darwin’s cousin, developed from this eugenics—the doctrine of “improving” the human race through targeted breeding. His main work “Hereditary Genius” (1869) claimed that human abilities were primarily inherited. Galton demanded “positive eugenics” (promotion of reproduction among “valuable” people) and “negative eugenics” (prevention of reproduction among “inferior” people). The term “eugenics” was adopted internationally—as a seemingly value-neutral science.[16]
The theory was already problematic in itself: it confused social inequality (a product of historical power relations) with biological difference. It naturalized class relations and colonial hierarchies. It justified domination as “natural selection.”
The American Eugenics Movement - Mass Mobilization and Forced Sterilization
In the United States, eugenics developed into a mass movement, carried by respected scientific institutions and financed by the wealthiest foundations in the country.
Charles B. Davenport (1866-1944), professor of zoology, founded in 1904, with financing from the Carnegie Institution, the “Station for Experimental Evolution” at Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island. In 1910, the Eugenics Record Office (ERO) was established there, led by Harry H. Laughlin (1880-1943). The ERO systematically collected “family trees” of American families to document “hereditary inferiority.” The categories were explicitly classist and racist: “feeble-mindedness,” “criminality,” “pauperism” were classified as hereditary—and disproportionately affected the poor, Blacks, immigrants (especially Italians, Jews, Irish).[17]
The Rockefeller Foundation financed eugenic research in the USA and—crucially—also in Germany. Between 1922 and 1939, millions of dollars flowed into eugenic programs. The Foundation financed the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology in Berlin, where Ernst Rüdin and Eugen Fischer worked—both central figures of National Socialist “racial hygiene.”[18]
Forced sterilization as a mass program: Indiana passed the first forced-sterilization law in 1907, targeting “criminals, idiots, imbeciles, and rapists.” By 1931, 30 other states had followed. The Supreme Court legitimized this practice in 1927 in the notorious ruling Buck v. Bell. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote: “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” The ruling enabled unrestrained forced sterilizations.[19]
The numbers are shocking: between 1907 and 1963, over 60,000 people were forcibly sterilized—disproportionately women, Blacks, Indigenous people, the poor. California alone carried out more forced sterilizations by 1933 than all other U.S. states combined. California’s laws became the model for the National Socialist sterilization laws.[20]
Racial laws and segregation: parallel to eugenics there existed a system of racist legislation: “anti-miscegenation laws” prohibited marriages between whites and other “races” in most states. “Jim Crow laws” institutionalized segregation in the South. The “one-drop rule” defined even one drop of “Black blood” as sufficient for racial classification. National Socialist jurists studied these legal constructions intensively.[21]
The Transatlantic Connection - Exchange, Inspiration, Financing
The connection between American eugenics and German “racial hygiene” was not indirect, but directly documented:
Personal networks: Charles Davenport and Harry Laughlin maintained close correspondence with German eugenicists. Davenport systematically sent materials on American sterilization laws to Eugen Fischer, director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology. Fischer expressly thanked him for this “valuable information.”[22]
Institutional financing: the Rockefeller Foundation financed, between 1926 and 1939, the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Psychiatry in Munich, led by Ernst Rüdin. Rüdin later became the architect of the National Socialist sterilization laws. The Foundation also financed research by Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, whose assistant was Josef Mengele—before he went to Auschwitz.[23]
Mutual recognition: in 1936, Harry Laughlin received an honorary doctorate from the University of Heidelberg for his “achievements in the field of racial hygiene.” The ceremony took place on the anniversary of the purge of Jewish professors from the Heidelberg faculty (1934). Laughlin proudly accepted the title and saw in it the “shared conception of German and American scientists regarding the nature of eugenics.”[24]
Direct inspiration: the Californian eugenicist C.M. Goethe visited Germany in 1934 and wrote enthusiastically to a colleague: “You will be interested to know that your work has played a powerful part in shaping the opinions of the group of intellectuals who are behind Hitler in this epoch-making program.”[25]
The German Racial Laws as an American Import
The legal historian James Q. Whitman documented in “Hitler’s American Model” (2017) that National Socialist jurists systematically studied American racial laws. In drafting the Nuremberg Race Laws (1935), they discussed at length American precedents—segregation laws, anti-miscegenation laws, the “one-drop rule.”[26]
The irony: some National Socialist jurists found the American laws too radical. The “one-drop rule” (one drop of “Black blood” makes a person “Black”) appeared to them too strict. The Nuremberg Laws defined “full Jews” as persons with at least three Jewish grandparents—a “more moderate” definition than some American racial laws.[27]
The Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring (1933), which legalized forced sterilization in Germany, explicitly took American models as its orientation. Laughlin’s “Model Eugenical Sterilization Law” served as a template. In the first four years, over 400,000 people were forcibly sterilized—a number exceeding all American sterilizations to that point. The quantitative radicalization was German—but the legal and scientific foundation was transatlantic.[28]
The Systematic Point - Not a German Special Path, but Western Modernity
Social Darwinism and eugenics were not specifically German phenomena. They arose in the Anglo-American countries, were promoted there by elite institutions, legitimized by the highest courts, financed by the wealthiest foundations. Germany imported this ideology and radicalized it into industrial mass extermination.
This observation is no relativization of the Holocaust. It is no excuse for German crimes. But it shows: the ideological and practical foundations for racist extermination policy were present in Western modernity—not as a deviation, but as one of its dark possibilities.
The transatlantic eugenics movement reveals three fatal structures:
First: the biologization of social problems. Poverty, crime, “feeble-mindedness” were understood not as products of social conditions but as hereditary defects. The solution was not social reform, but biological intervention.
Second: the transformation of science into an instrument of domination. Eugenics presented itself as value-neutral science—but it legitimized class relations, racism, colonialism. Renowned universities, respected scientists, leading foundations pursued this pseudo-science.
Third: the alliance of capital and “science”. Carnegie and Rockefeller did not finance eugenics out of philanthropic motives, but out of class interest: fear of the “dangerous classes,” of the labor movement, of social upheaval. Eugenics offered a biological legitimation for social hierarchies.
What must be sublated: Darwin’s scientific theory of evolution—but without social-Darwinist politicization. Chance is a moment of natural development—but no legitimation for “selection” in society follows from this. Science and ethics must be distinguished. Natural science describes how the world is—it does not say how it ought to be. From “survival of the fittest” no norm follows that would eliminate the “unfit.” The naturalistic fallacy—inferring an ought from an is—is logically invalid and ethically devastating.
28.3.8 Heidegger - Existential Philosophy without Recognition
Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) is regarded by many as the most influential German philosopher of the twentieth century—an assessment that is itself part of the problem to be analyzed here. For Heidegger’s influence is owed not least to a conjuncture that replaced systematic rigor with existential rhetoric and systematically blanked out the question of recognition of the Other. His entanglement with National Socialism is not fully clarified to this day. “Being and Time” (1927) analyzed human existence in its temporality, finitude, thrownness. Heidegger’s philosophy was no naive irrationalism—it was a subtle analysis of the structures of human existence.
The legitimate core: the significance of existence, finitude, thrownness. Dasein is not simply an object among others—it comports itself toward its own being. What does it mean that I exist? How do I relate to my own finitude? What is authenticity? These questions are philosophically legitimate.
The critique of rationality: Heidegger criticized the entire Western metaphysical tradition as “forgetfulness of being.” Since Plato, philosophy had forgotten Being and occupied itself with beings. It had objectified Being, rationalized it, technologized it—and thereby lost its mystery. This critique struck the entire tradition of rational metaphysics.
The privileging of immediacy: Heidegger sought an access to Being beyond rational metaphysics. He found it in mood (anxiety), in the call of conscience, in being-toward-death. Not rational argumentation, but fundamental existential experiences were to disclose Being.
The fundamental problem - the missing recognition: Heidegger’s philosophy has a decisive gap: in “Being and Time” there is no developed theory of intersubjectivity, no ethics of recognition of the Other. “Being-with” (Mitsein) is mentioned but not systematically developed. Care is directed primarily at one’s own being-toward-death, not at the recognition of the Other as an autonomous Dasein.
This gap is not merely a theoretical deficit. It is the systematic locus at which Heidegger’s National Socialist engagement was made possible—not as a chance aberration, but as the consequence of a philosophy in which the ethical remains systematically underdetermined. Where recognition of the Other is not grasped as a constitutive moment of one’s own Dasein, the philosophical resource is missing to resist appropriation by collectivist ideologies.
Hegel had shown in the “Phenomenology of Spirit”: self-consciousness constitutes itself only through the recognition of another self-consciousness. The I becomes only in relation to the Thou. This insight is missing in Heidegger. Dasein is indeed “being-with”—but this being-with is not developed as an ethical structure, not as mutual recognition grounding rights and duties.
Heidegger’s National Socialist engagement: in 1933 Heidegger joined the NSDAP and assumed the rectorship of the University of Freiburg. His rectoral address linked his philosophy with National Socialist rhetoric: the German university must “assert itself,” must find its way to “service to the people,” must educate students toward “struggle” and “sacrifice.” He spoke of the “inner truth and greatness” of the National Socialist movement, of the “self-assertion of the German university,” of the “awakening of the people.”
Heidegger remained rector for only one year, but he remained a party member until 1945. After 1945 he was silent about his National Socialist past. He reinterpreted his entanglement as a philosophical question of destiny: Being itself had “sent” itself in National Socialism—a flight from moral responsibility into ontology. No genuine reckoning, no apology, only concealment.
What must be sublated: existential analytic—the analysis of temporality, finitude, thrownness—remains philosophically valuable. But it must be supplemented by the dimension of recognition. Care must be expanded to include recognition of the Other as an autonomous Dasein. Existential philosophy without ethics is dangerous—it offers no resources to resist appropriation by collectivist ideologies.
Heidegger’s case shows: a philosophy that fundamentally criticizes rationality, privileges immediacy, and leaves out the ethics of recognition is susceptible to political aberrations. Not because it necessarily leads to fascism—but because it provides no philosophical resources to resist it.[29]
28.3.9 The Distorted Reception of Hegel - “Prussian State Philosopher” and “Totalitarian”
The philosophical precursors of fascism were ambivalent—they grasped real problems, but radicalized their critique into dangerous polarizations. But there is a decisive difference between these precursors and Hegel: Hegel did not voluntarily become a forerunner of fascism—he was instrumentalized through a distorted reception.
Although the National Socialist state ideologues Alfred Baeumler and Alfred Rosenberg did not invoke Hegel and even took a rejecting stance toward him, there were influential voices among German and Italian philosophers who used Hegel to ideologically ground authoritarian regimes. This instrumentalization invoked a distorted image of Hegel that had partly already arisen in the nineteenth century and unfolded fateful effects in the interwar period.
The Distorted Image and Its Components
The fascist image of Hegel constructed four distortions, each interpreting isolated textual passages:
Hegel as “Prussian state philosopher”: the formula “What is rational is actual; and what is actual is rational” was read as a justification of every existing order—as though Hegel had sanctified the Prussian authoritarian state.
Hegel as “totalitarian”: his statements about the state as “the actuality of the ethical Idea” and “that which is rational in and for itself” were interpreted as the dissolution of the individual in the collective—as though there were no individual rights against the state in Hegel.
Hegel as “Germanophile”: the passages in the philosophy of history about the “Germanic spirit” as the realizer of freedom were read as a glorification of German superiority—as though Hegel proclaimed the Germans the pinnacle of world history.
Hegel as “mystic of the Absolute”: the “World Spirit” and the “Absolute Idea” were interpreted as metaphysical entities—as religious state metaphysics that transcendently legitimized the German Volk-state.
What This Distorted Image Systematically Ignored
This distorted reception overlooked or suppressed central aspects of Hegel’s position:
On the philosophy of right: Hegel expressly distinguishes between rational and merely positive law. Only what corresponds to its concept is “actual” in the emphatic sense. Philosophy is not apology for the existing, but a standard of critique. The famous formula does not justify every facticity, but demands its examination against reason.
On ethical life (Sittlichkeit): Hegel’s concept of “ethical life” presupposes mutual recognition—not subjugation. Civil society (§§182-256 of the Philosophy of Right) has its own rationality and autonomy. The state is to secure the conditions of individual freedom, not to swallow up the individual.
On the philosophy of history: Hegel’s philosophy of history is not Germanocentric, but universal. “World history” is the explication of “progress in the consciousness of freedom”—not nationalism, but a universalist project of freedom. The Germans are not the final end, but (in the nineteenth century) momentary bearers of this development.
On the Absolute: Hegel’s “Absolute” is not a metaphysical entity, but the self-reflection of method. The “Absolute Idea” is “the method that knows itself” (Logic, end)—not a divine superstructure, but the structure of self-reflexive rationality.
The Emergence of the Distorted Image
These distortions had three causes:
Selective reading: the National Socialist-friendly interpreters—such as Theodor Haering in Germany or Giovanni Gentile in Italy—read Hegel highly selectively. They cited passages about the “power of the state” but ignored the constitutional limitations. They isolated individual formulations from their systematic context.
Schelling’s phantom: Schelling had already established Hegel as an “abstract systematizer” who dissolved concrete reality into conceptual constructions. This image was passed down—from generation to generation, without carefully reading Hegel’s texts themselves. The nineteenth century had created a caricature of Hegel that was politically instrumentalized in the twentieth century.
The conservative tradition: already in the nineteenth century, conservative Hegelians had interpreted Hegel’s philosophy of right as a legitimation of the Prussian monarchy. This affirmative reading emphasized state authority but neglected the critical dimension. The fascist instrumentalization could connect to this tradition.
The fatal consequence: after 1945, Hegel stood under general suspicion. Karl Popper formulated the most influential accusation: Hegel as forerunner of totalitarianism. This accusation hit the distorted image, not Hegel himself—but it had a lasting effect. To this day Hegel scholarship struggles against this reputation.[30]
What must be sublated: the distorted image itself must be overcome—through careful reading of Hegel’s texts in their systematic context. Hegel’s philosophy contains precisely the resources that the fascist precursors lacked: a theory of recognition that constitutes the I in relation to the Thou. A dialectic that mediates the universal and the particular, rather than playing them off against each other. A logic that reflects its own limits and does not congeal into dogma. The task is not to “rescue” Hegel, but to make his philosophical insights fruitful for a present that wants to learn from the catastrophes of the twentieth century.
Steven Kale: “Gobineau, Racism, and Legitimism: A Royalist Heretic in Nineteenth-Century France,” in: Modern Intellectual History 7:1 (2010), pp. 33-61. Kale shows that Gobineau’s racism arose from his legitimist politics, not the other way around. ↩︎
Arthur de Gobineau: Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines (1853-55), Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1933, Vol. 1, p. 345. Cited according to the English translation: The Inequality of Human Races, trans. Adrian Collins, London: Heinemann, 1915, p. 124. ↩︎
On Chamberlain see in detail Geoffrey G. Field: Evangelist of Race. The Germanic Vision of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, New York: Columbia University Press, 1981. Chamberlain wrote to Hitler in 1923: “You are not, as they have vilified you, a fanatic, but the exact opposite, an awakener.” Letter of October 7, 1923, cited in Field, p. 432. ↩︎
On the American reception of Gobineau see Reginald Horsman: Race and Manifest Destiny. The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism, Cambridge/MA: Harvard University Press, 1981, pp. 139-157. ↩︎
Paul de Lagarde: Deutsche Schriften (1878-1881), Göttingen: Dieterich, 1920. On its impact see Fritz Stern: The Politics of Cultural Despair, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961, [German edition: Kulturpessimismus als politische Gefahr. Eine Analyse nationaler Ideologie in Deutschland, Bern: Scherz, 1963], pp. 55-154. ↩︎
On Haeckel and monism see Daniel Gasman: The Scientific Origins of National Socialism. Social Darwinism in Ernst Haeckel and the German Monist League, London: Macdonald, 1971. ↩︎
On the völkisch movement see Uwe Puschner: Die völkische Bewegung im wilhelminischen Kaiserreich. Sprache - Rasse - Religion, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2001. ↩︎
On List and Lanz see Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke: The Occult Roots of Nazism (1985), New York: New York University Press, 1992, pp. 33-123. Goodrick-Clarke warns against overestimating the influence of these occult currents—but he shows their real existence and effect. ↩︎
On the Thule Society see Goodrick-Clarke, Occult Roots, pp. 148-177. The direct causal connection between Thule and National Socialism is weaker than often claimed—but personal overlaps undoubtedly existed. ↩︎
On Schelling’s Munich period see the editorial project of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences. On Maximilian II as Schelling’s student see Winfried Müller: “Maximilian II. von Bayern und F.W.J. Schelling,” in: Akademie Aktuell 4 (2016), pp. 14-21. ↩︎
On the National Socialist rejection of Hegel see Chapter 23 of this book (The National Socialist Reception). Alfred Baeumler: Nietzsche, der Philosoph und Politiker, Leipzig: Reclam, 1931, criticizes Hegel as a representative of “systematic thinking” against Nietzsche’s “life.” Alfred Rosenberg: Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts (1930), Munich: Hoheneichen, 1935, p. 529, denounces Hegel as a representative of “Jewish-dialectical thinking.” ↩︎
On Schellingstraße see Katja Klee: “NSDAP-Geschäftsstelle,” in: nsdoku.lexikon, NS-Dokumentationszentrum München, 2025. ↩︎
Domenico Losurdo: Nietzsche, il ribelle aristocratico (2002), Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2002; German: Nietzsche, der aristokratische Rebell, Berlin: Argument, 2009. ↩︎
Ludwig Klages: Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele, 3 vols., Leipzig: Barth, 1929-1932. Klages (1872-1956) was a philosopher and characterologist. ↩︎
Herbert Spencer: Social Statics (1851), London: Chapman, 1851; idem: Principles of Biology (1864), London: Williams & Norgate, 1864. The formula “survival of the fittest” first appears in Principles of Biology, Vol. 1, p. 444. ↩︎
Francis Galton: Hereditary Genius. An Inquiry into Its Laws and Consequences, London: Macmillan, 1869. The term “eugenics” was coined by Galton in 1883 in Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development. ↩︎
On the work of the ERO see Garland E. Allen: “The Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor, 1910-1940: An Essay in Institutional History,” in: Osiris 2 (1986), pp. 225-264. ↩︎
Paul Weindling: “The Rockefeller Foundation and German Biomedical Sciences in National Socialism,” in: History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 22:3 (2000), pp. 391-412. The Foundation financed the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute until 1939 with a total of over $400,000. ↩︎
Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200 (1927). The ruling was never formally overturned, although it is now regarded as shameful. ↩︎
Alexandra Minna Stern: “Sterilized in the Name of Public Health: Race, Immigration, and Reproductive Control in Modern California,” in: American Journal of Public Health 95:7 (2005), pp. 1128-1138. California carried out over 20,000 forced sterilizations between 1909 and 1963. ↩︎
On the “one-drop rule” see F. James Davis: Who Is Black? One Nation’s Definition, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991. ↩︎
Jonathan Spiro: Defending the Master Race. Conservation, Eugenics, and the Legacy of Madison Grant, Burlington: University of Vermont Press, 2009, pp. 231-247. ↩︎
Edwin Black: War Against the Weak. Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race, New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2003, pp. 296-315. Black documents the Rockefeller financing in detail. ↩︎
Stefan Kühl: The Nazi Connection. Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism, New York: Oxford University Press, 1994, pp. 39-40. ↩︎
Letter from C.M. Goethe to E.S. Gosney, cited in Black, War Against the Weak, p. 315. ↩︎
James Q. Whitman: Hitler’s American Model. The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017. ↩︎
Whitman, Hitler’s American Model, pp. 79-127. Whitman shows the detailed discussions among National Socialist jurists about American racial definitions. ↩︎
Gisela Bock: Zwangssterilisation im Nationalsozialismus. Studien zur Rassenpolitik und Frauenpolitik, Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1986, pp. 230-236. ↩︎
On Heidegger and National Socialism see Victor Farias: Heidegger and Nazism (1987), Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989; Hugo Ott: Martin Heidegger. Unterwegs zu seiner Biographie, Frankfurt/M.: Campus, 1988; Emmanuel Faye: Heidegger. The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy (2005), New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. The debate is not concluded. ↩︎
Karl Popper: The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. 2: “The High Tide of Prophecy: Hegel, Marx, and the Aftermath,” London: Routledge, 1945. For the refutation see Walter Kaufmann: “The Hegel Myth and Its Method,” in: Philosophical Review 60 (1951), pp. 459-486; and in detail Chapter 29 of this book. ↩︎