The "Ideas of 1914" - German War Hegelianism
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume I, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
German War Ideology and State Hegelianism
In August 1914, a wave of war enthusiasm seized German intellectuals. The “August experience” seemed to abolish the divisions of society—workers, bourgeoisie, and nobility united in the “Burgfrieden” (the wartime domestic truce between the government, parties, and unions). The “Ideas of 1914” were proclaimed as a counter-model to the “Ideas of 1789”: not liberty, equality, fraternity, but duty, order, community.
Hegel became the philosophical guarantor of this ideology. His philosophy of the state—the state as “the actuality of the ethical idea”—seemed to legitimize the German authoritarian state. His critique of “abstract” liberalism, of atomistic individualism, became a weapon against the Western democracies. His nationalism—the historical mission of the “Germanic spirit”—was intensified into chauvinism.
The Opposition of “Culture” versus “Civilization”
A key concept of German war ideology was the distinction between “Kultur” and “Zivilisation.” German “culture”—organically grown, spiritually deep, communally oriented—stood against Western “civilization”—mechanical, superficial, individualistic.
This distinction had precursors in Nietzsche, but it was politically charged in 1914. Thomas Mann formulated it most elaborately in his Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man (1918): the German “spirit” against Western “politics,” German “music” against French “literature,” German “depth” against Western “shallowness.”
Hegel was appropriated for this opposition—although it contradicted his dialectical method. Hegel had not absolutized opposites, but mediated them. The abstraction of a pure “German spirit” against a pure “Western spirit” was anti-Hegelian. But war ideology needed no dialectical mediation—it needed enemy images.
Plenge, Sombart, Kjellén - The Political Instrumentalization
Three authors shaped philosophical war ideology in particular:
Johann Plenge (1874-1963), economist and sociologist, proclaimed in 1789 und 1914 (1916) the German “Ideas of 1914” as a world-historical turning point. German “organizational socialism”—the union of state and economy in wartime socialism—was said to be the model of the future. Hegel had conceived of the organic state; now it was being realized.
Werner Sombart (1863-1941), one of the most important German economists, published Traders and Heroes (1915). England, the nation of “traders,” embodied the spirit of commerce, of egoism, of utilitarianism. Germany, the nation of “heroes,” embodied the spirit of sacrifice, of duty, of idealism. Hegel had understood the state as ethical substance—England knew the state only as a trading company.
Rudolf Kjellén (1864-1922), Swedish political scientist, coined the term “geopolitics” and legitimized German expansion as the natural growth of an organic life of the state. His Der Staat als Lebensform (1916) radicalized Hegel’s idea of the organism into a biologistic theory of the state.
The systematic assessment: this instrumentalization fundamentally falsified Hegel. Hegel was not a nationalist in the nineteenth-century sense—he was a Prussian reformer who favored constitutional development. His philosophy of the state did not justify the authoritarian state, but demanded the rule of law. His critique of abstract individualism was not a justification of collectivism, but the insight that individuality realizes itself only in community.
The war ideologues read into Hegel what they had carried into him. They absolutized the moment of the state against the moment of society, the moment of community against the moment of freedom, the moment of the German against the moment of the universal. This was not interpretation of Hegel, but abuse of Hegel.