Arthur Moeller van den Bruck
German historian (1876-1925)
Arthur Wilhelm Ernst Victor Moeller van den Bruck (23 April 1876 – 30 May 1925) was a German cultural historian, philosopher, reactionary, and writer best known for his controversial 1923 book Das Dritte Reich ("The Third Reich"), which promoted German nationalism and strongly influenced the Conservative Revolutionary movement and then the Nazi Party, despite his open opposition and numerous criticisms of theirs.
Quotes
editThe Third Reich (1923)
edit- Authorized English Edition (condensed). Translated by E. O. Lorimer. Introduction by M. A. Hamilton. London: George Allen & Unwin LTD. (1934). Full text online.
- The Revolution can never be un-made.
A revolution may be combated while there is yet time while there is yet faith that help may be found for the nation in its need. Such help will most readily be found in the government which has hitherto been the nation's best protector. But once a revolution has become a fact, there is nothing left for the thinking man but to accept it as a new datum, a new starting-point.- p.31
- Liberalism has taught the West to turn its principles into tactics to deceive the people. The west dubs this 'democracy,' though it has become evident enough how ill men thrive on a political diet of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity.
- p.37
- Marxism has in fact all the symptoms of a materialistic utopia. Marx credited the proletariat with the power to create a perpetuum mobile. Provided it was logically conceived 11 ought to be feasible. But the world itself is the perpetuum mobile. And Demiurgos allows no meddling with his job.
- p.41
- The materialist outlook is anthropomorphic. It does not lift man metaphysically above and beyond himself, but rationalistically drags him down to what it conceives to be his real self. It was the rationalist age of enlightenment that saw the birth of this philosophy. Up to that time man's thought had always been cosmic; it had found its justification in the divine justice and the divine holiness. It was conscious of a spiritual immanence. The rationalist's pride was to see only the animal in man. The humanist had stressed the mystic tie that binds the creature to the Creator. The rationalist created l'homme machine, a living automaton, a miracle of mud. Creation was explained not through the Creator but through the creature, and the creature was reduced to the sum of the matter of which he was composed and on which he was nourished. Rousseau's vegetative ideal, which aimed at being philanthropic, only added a sentimental touch. The French Revolution put these theories politically to the test and demanded " rights" for the enlightened man, expressly based on his "physical needs."
German thought rebelled against this degradation of man. German minds took heed of the spiritual as well as the bodily needs of man and evolved the conception of the "Education of the Human Race," by which all that had been lost might be re-won. Their interpretation of universal history had nothing to do with a mechanical "Progress," but passionately sought to recapture for man the ideals he had abandoned. Our escape from rationalism to idealism was signalized by the attention's being directed not to human rights but to human dignity.
- p.46-47
- Schiller long ago formulated the idealist conception of history, which secs in man a free moral agent, controlling nature. The materialists never got beyond the positivist point of view which confines history to an attempt to understand conditions, describe their phenomena and analyse their components. There is, however, another point of view possible: a metaphysical, which includes the physical, an intellectual, which includes the scientific: a point of view which recognizes the sublimity and rises above the degradation of man: the only point of view from which an answer is possible to the question: Who created the circumstances? It is no answer to reply that the circumstances created themselves. Marx never allowed himself to speculate whether perhaps materialism might not be merely a transition to some greater principle behind. He clung to the assertion that men make their own history, not as free agents, but under the compulsion of given circumstances. Again we ask: but who created the circumstances? There can only be one answer: Man himself is the datum.
- p.54
- The morning's dollar level became the substitute for morning prayer. We are still thinking of nothing but the miseries of to-day: the capitalist and proletarian think of nothing else. We have sunk to a depth which man never reached before: the materialist conception of history has reached its zenith
Can this last for ever? We know that it cannot. Disgust at materialism, at ourselves, has seized us. Reaction has set in, a reaction against socialism itself. Socialism can only help if it can purge itself of its materialism, its rationalism andwhat has been the most fatal thing of all-its liberalism.
- p.57
- The population problem is THE problem of Germany: a socialist problem if you will, but more exactly a German problem. Since access to the outer world is forbidden us we must look for its solution within our own borders; and since it cannot there be solved, a day must come when we shall burst our frontiers and seek and find it outside. [...]
The victors have no population problems. Their countries give a home to all who speak their tongue. In addition they possess other lands to which their people may migrate. They have divided up the globe between them. Since the word 'annexation' has acquired an ugly ring, and 'sphere of influence' is no less suspect, they have invented the idea of the mandate and conferred it on themselves through the League of Nations. They have now not enough people to take possession of these countries and administer them to full advantage, or to bring them up to that level of progress which they consider it their peculiar privilege to promote. The population problem of the victors is that of declining populations.
- p.64-5
- The German nation is astir. Its path is blocked. It has lost its bearings. It seeks space. It seeks work: and fails to find it. We are becoming a nation of proletarians.
- p.70
- Every people has its own socialism.
- First: p.71
- The principle of liberalism is to have no fixed principle and to contend that this is in itself a principle.
- p.78
- The liberal is inspired by the ambition of the would-be great man who does not want to take the lower seat, the anxiety of the inadequate person to miss nothing. Jealousy of power explains this hate of genius, of anyone who is great, who does, singlehanded, things which can never be done by the many. Jealousy of power explains this hate of the dynasties with their hereditary prestige and privilege; this hate of the Papacy with its traditional authority transmitted to the wearer of the tiara; the hostility to Louis XIV's and to Pius IX's doctrines of infallibility. This jealousy of power explains no less that passion for constitutions which make power dependent on elections; this craze for parliaments to take control of the state; this mania for republics in which the parties divide the power and party leaders draw the pay and the electors enjoy the party patronage; or the preference for a limited monarchy that has resigned all real power but still lays claim to grace.
- p.88-89
- The liberal professes to do all he does for the sake of the people; but he dl'stroys the sense of community that should bind outstanding men to the people from which they spring. The prnple should J1aturally regard the outstanding man, not as an enemy bul as a representative sample of themselves. Liberalism is the party of upstarts who have insinuated Liberalism is the party of upstarts who have insinuated themselves IJclwecn the people and its big men. Liberals feel themselves as isolated individuals, responsible to nobody. They do not share the nation's traditions, they are indifferent to its pasl and have no ambition for its future. They seek only their own personal advantage in the present. Their dream is the great International, in which the differences of peoples and languages, races and cultures will be obliterated. To promote this they are willing to make use, now of nationalism, now of pacificism, now of militarism, according to the expediency of the moment. Sceptically they ask: "What are we living for?" Cynically they answer: Just for the sake of living!
- p.90
- The liberal has flourished at all periods. The nobody is always eager to imagine himself a somebody. The man who is a misfit in his own society is always a liberal out of amour propre. The disinterestedness of the conservative cherishes the sacredness of a cause that shall not die with him; the liberal says: Après moi, le déluge. Conservatism is rooted in the strength of man; liberalism battens on his weakness. The liberal's conjuring trick consists in turning others' weakness to his own account, living at other men's expense, and concealing his art with patter about ideals. This is the accusation against him. He has always been a source of gravest danger.
- p.90-91
- Liberalism was the ruin of Greece. The decay of hellenic freedom was preceded by the rise of the liberal. He was begotten of Greek 'enlightenment.' From the philosophers' theory of the atom, the sophist drew the inference of the individual. Protagoras, the Sophist, was the founder of individualism and also the apostle of relativity. He proclaimed that: "Opposite propositions are equally true." Nothing immoral was intended. He meant that there are no general but only particular truths: according to the standpoint of the perceiver. But what happens when the same man has two standpoints? When he is ready to shift his standpoint as his advantage may dictate? This same Protagoras proclaimed that rhetoric could make the weaker cause victorious. Still nothing immoral was intended. He meant that the better cause was sometimes the weaker and should then be helped to victory. But the practice soon arose of using rhetoric to make the worse cause victorious. It is no accident that the sophists were the first Greek philosophers to accept pay, and were the most highly paid. A materialist outlook leads always to a materialist mode of thought.
- p.92
- All this was hailed as progress: but it spelt decay. The same process continues: the disciples of reason, the apostles of enlightenment, the heralds of progress are usually in the first generation great idealists, high-principled men, convinced of the importance of their discoveries and of the benefit these confer on man. But no later than the second generation the peculiar and unholy connection betrays itself which exists between materialist philosophy and nihilist interpretation. As at the touch of a conjuror's wand the scientific theory of the atom reduces society to atoms.
- p.92
- Amongst the discoveries which reason made, the most fateful was this: that man is not free. It might well have seemed the most obviously reasonable thing to hedge this unfree man about with state conventions. Instead, the liberals demanded that this man-who was biologically unfree-should have perfect individual and political freedom.
- p.95
- The English always talked of freedom. They always sought their own freedom at the expense of everyone else's. They early developed a peculiar mode of thought based on a confusion of ideas, which gave precedence not to a cause for its own sake but to the advantage they themselves derived from it. There was no hypocrisy in this: though it looked like hypocrisy. It was merely an incredible naivete combined with a natural brutality of approach. The English were perfectly unconscious of these things. Their trump card was their stupidity, and in their stupidity lay their highest shrewdness.
- p.95
- Our enemies have their present success. The moment is in their favour, but everything else is against them. The secret, however, must not be revealed before its time. What we can, however, already detect is a regrouping of men and nations. All anti-liberal forces are combining against everything that is liberal. We are living in the time of this transition. The change is taking place most logically from below and attacking the enemy where his power began. There is a revolt against the age of reason.
- p.112
- Who is the liberal chameleon: democracy?
Who is this Moloch who devours the masses and the classes and the trades and the professions and all human distinctions?
Who is this Leviathan? We must not let either the rhetoric or the bonhomie of the democrat deceive us about the true nature of the monster.- p.121
- There have been peoples who flourished under democracy; there have been peoples who perished under democracy. Democracy may imply stoicism, republicanism and inexorable severity; or it may imply liberalism, parliamentary chatter and self-indulgence.
- p.135
- A Policy may be reversed: History cannot.
- p.179
- The revolutionary concludes overhastily that the world will now for all time be guided by the political principles which governed him in overthrowing it.
The reactionary takes the diametrically opposite line: he seriously considers it possible to delete the Revolution from the page of history as if it had never been.
The revolutionary is soon cured of his error. The very day that sees the old moulds of life shattered, brings home to him the urgent necessity of casting it into new moulds. [...]
The reactionary on the other hand imagines that we need only revert to the old moulds in order to have everything again exactly "as it was before." He has no inclination to compromise with the new.- p.179
- The reactionary's reading of history is as superficial as the conservative's is profound. The reactionary sees the world as he has known it; the conservative sees it as it has been and will always be. He distinguishes the transitory from the eternal. Exactly what has been, can never be again. But what the world has once brought forth she can bring forth again.
- p.181
- Revolutions are only interludes in history.
Marx called them the steam engines of history. We might rather call them the collisions of history: immense railway accidents which take their toll of sacrifice; which may be pregnant of consequences, but which have something of the banality of accidental catastrophes. [...]
At best catastrophes have the virtue of calling attention with a terrible emphasis to existing faults, to which custom and stupidity and self-sufficiency have blinded us. The necessary salvage work after a revolution must, however, be handed over to some experienced person conversant with the whole administration who can set the wrecked, overturned engine in motion again. Life of its own weight resumes its equilibrium, and the conservative principle on which all life is based is vindicated.- p.186