Left versus Right in the 20th Century

by the term. Rather than ends in themselves, Hegel argued that “individuals come under the category of means to an ulterior end.… [He] must dedicate himself to the ethical whole.” What Hegel called “world-history” was this path toward the Absolute, and even morality may be ignored when a “world-historical individual” rises to power and makes progress toward the “One Aim.”

Overall, we observe in these four figures not only a distaste for liberalism, but also for the conservative agenda of returning to feudal societies. Instead, the collectivist Right’s plan was progressive rather than conservative, pushing forward toward a kind of society with governments strong enough to subordinate its citizens so that they may be sacrificed to goals of national “progress.”

Both collectivists on the Left and Right had a favorable stance on socialism: it meant a progressive agenda toward public works and a strong community ready to work, fight, and die for the needs of the state. Much hinged on the success of the collectivist Right in the Great War, what was later called World War I. Moeller van den Bruck, an avid anti-Marxist, wrote, “We have lost the war against the West. Socialism has lost it against Liberalism.”

Germany suffered a devastating military and spiritual defeat. In The Decline of the West, author Oswald Spengler, a man of the German Right, described the decadence found in the liberal West due to its love of democracy, capitalism, and technological progress. Spengler further rose to intellectual life after writing Prussianism and Socialism in 1920. His strategy was to steer away from international socialism, the strategy of the Left, and to urge a national socialist

focus. Other German thinkers, such as Werner Sombart and Moeller, argued similarly that “every people has its own socialism … international socialism does not exist.”

And so, shortly after World War I, Germany formed its National Socialist German Workers party, soon to be headed by Adolf Hitler. Moeller would actually predict this, writing in 1923, Socialism begins where Marxism ends. German socialism is called to play a part in the spiritual and intellectual history of mankind by purging itself of every trace of liberalism. … This New Socialism must be the foundation of Germany’s Third Empire.

Hitler would speak with Moeller as a colleague at an event, calling him the “Rousseau of the New Germany.”

Instructive to the rise of National Socialism in Germany is Josef Goebbels, Hitler’s director of propaganda. Goebbels had a Ph.D. in philology and was strongly influenced by the work of Spengler. He had a strong voice in the party, particularly in constructing its socialist economic platforms. Goebbels hated money, calling it the “source of all evil.” He regularly wrote letters to the Communists of Germany, urging them to join them against their common enemy, capitalism, to “liberate the whole working class.” The intellectual climate was so strong that German university students and professors at this time, filled with the German intellectual tradition of Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Spengler, commonly wore the Nazi armbands through the 1920s and 1930s. There was also anger surrounding the Great Depression, many believing it was caused by

capitalism, and that collectivists on the Left and Right would finally set things right.

Unfortunately for the National Socialists and the collectivist Right, the liberal West not only survived the Great Depression, but it was victorious in World War II. The losers were discredited again, physically, morally, and spiritually, and Germany, again in ruins, was occupied and split by the West and the collectivist Left, the Soviets, for nearly half a century. By the second half of the twentieth century, the intellectual battle was now between liberal capitalism and Left socialism.