Themes of Collectivism

emperor, Napoleon Bonaparte, in 1803 to engage Europe in a decade of wars.

The reaction of German intellectuals was horror, but their understanding of the crisis was not to blame Rousseau but rather to blame the Enlightenment for its anti-feudal sentiments. Napoleon was partly to blame, for he took advantage of the small countries that made up Europe at the time, ended monarchies, opened government offices staffed by citizens, formalized equality before the law, and extended property rights. The Enlightenment had grown desperate and was now imposing their ideas by the sword. To the Germans, the Enlightenment could no longer be thought of as a disaster over the Rhine but as an occupation from which an escape was needed. In connection to the occupation of Germanic states, the poet Johann Hölderlin wrote, “Kant is the Moses of our nation.”

From the ideas of Rousseau, collectivist thinking split into Left and Right. The general themes of both are anti-individualism, strong government, control of religion (either to promote it or suppress it), the view that education is primarily for (political) socialization, ambivalence toward science and technology, and tolerance if not deployment of group conflict, violence, and war when it serves the state. For all their differences in the emphasis and application of these themes, collectivist Left and Right had a common enemy: liberal capitalism, with its individualism, limited government, separation of church and state, education for intellectual development, and its generally optimistic outlook on peace and trade among all nations. While Left or Right collectivists might try to span a bridge between Marx and

Heidegger, they never dreamed of connecting liberal thinkers like John Locke or John Stuart Mill. Several thinkers, primarily of the collectivist Right, will be summarized here for their particular place in the development of collectivism. The collectivist Left will follow in the next chapter.

Rousseau is often seen as a man of the Left, but he had a great influence on generations of German thinkers, such as Kant, Herder, Fichte, and Hegel, all of whom are generally considered men of the Right. Liberal ideas made few inroads into Germany. Kant encouraged collectivist politics by his assertion of duty and sacrifice as the purpose of life. As he wrote in his essay, Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Intent, the individual “requires a master who will break his self-will and force him to obey a universally valid will.”

Another important figure to highlight is Johann Herder, whom some have called the “German Rousseau.” Herder agreed with Kant’s skeptical epistemology but disagreed with his more liberal views on morality being the same for all people. Herder argued that tribes, peoples, cultures, Volk were incompatible, and that each followed its own path. Essentially, he was a relativist when it came to progress. Herder is important as the roots of later nationalistic movements in central and eastern Europe.

Johann Fichte, another disciple of Kant, emerged around the defeat of Napoleon in Prussia. He presented his Addresses to the German Nation, which was meant to revive the German spirit. One of his solutions was to create a system of what he called “real German national education.” Its purpose he explains this way:

…the means of salvation which I promise to indicate consists in the fashioning of an entirely new self, which may have existed before perhaps in individuals as an exception, but never as a universal and national self, and in the education of the nation.

This system inspired the Prussian mass public-schooling systems now almost ubiquitously adopted across the world—including the United States in the early 20th century. However, Fichte, like other German thinkers, held the German ethnicity with such an esteem to believe that his form of “true education” was meant only for Germans.

And finally, Hegel held his own views politically, views that were somewhat peculiar to his German colleagues. Metaphysically, Hegel called what is real the Absolute, which was made up of processes natural to existence. Our lives, then, were a tiny part of this grand movement, and support of this process was our only moral imperative. Thus, governments were also to be aligned. The Absolute, or God, or Universal Reason, or the Divine Idea was inevitable and to attempt to thwart it was not only futile, but destructive to oneself as it went against one’s nature. In realizing the Absolute, Hegel writes, …this final end has supreme right against the individual, whose supreme duty is to be a member of the state … One must worship the state as a terrestrial divinity.

Freedom, for Hegel, was obeying the laws of the state that conform to the path of the Absolute. Most, upon trying to understand Hegel, would find such a definition of freedom lacking in any semblance to what is normally meant