The connection between socialism and nationalism in Germany was close
from the beginning. It is significant that the most important ancestors of
National Socialism —Fichte, Rodbertus, and Lassalle—are at the same time
acknowledged fathers of socialism.* While theoretical socialism in its Marxist
form was directing the German labor movement, the authoritarian and na-
tionalist element receded for a time into the background. But not for long.’
From 1914 onward there arose from the ranks of Marxist socialism one teacher
after another who led, not the conservatives and reactionaries, but the hard-
working laborer and idealist youth into the National Socialist fold. It was only
thereafter that the tide of nationalist socialism attained major importance and
rapidly grew into the Hitlerian doctrine. The war hysteria of 1914, which, just
because of the German defeat, was never fully cured, is the beginning of the
modern development which produced National Socialism, and it was largely
with the assistance of old socialists that it rose during this period.
Perhaps the first, and in some ways the most characteristic, representative of
this development is the late Professor Werner Sombart, whose notorious
Handler und Helden (“Merchants and Heroes”) appeared in 1915.° Sombart had
begun as a Marxian socialist and, as late as 1909, could assert with pride that
he had devoted the greater part of his life to fighting for the ideas of Karl Marx.
He had done as much as any man to spread socialist ideas and anticapitalist
resentment of varying shades throughout Germany; and if German thought
became penetrated with Marxian elements in a way that was true of no other
country until the Russian revolution, this was in a large measure due to Som-
bart. At one time he was regarded as the outstanding representative of the per-
secuted socialist intelligentsia, unable, because of his radical views, to obtain a
university chair. And even after the last war the influence, inside and outside
Germany, of his work as a historian, which remained Marxist in approach af-
ter he had ceased to be a Marxist in politics, was most extensive and is partic-
ularly noticeable in the works of many of the English and American planners.
In his war book this old socialist welcomed the “German War” as the in-
evitable conflict between the commercial civilization of England and the heroic
culture of Germany. His contempt for the “commercial” views of the English
people, who had lost all warlike instincts, is unlimited. Nothing is more con-
temptible in his eyes than the universal striving after the happiness of the indi-
vidual; and what he describes as the leading maxim of English morals: be just
“that it may be well with thee and that thou mayest prolong thy days upon the
land” is to him “the most infamous maxim which has ever been pronounced
by a commercial mind.’ The “German idea of the state,” as formulated by
: Fichte, Lassalle, and Rodbertus, is that the state is neither founded nor formed
by individuals, nor an aggregate of individuals, nor is its purpose to serve any
interest of individuals. It is a Volksgemeinschaft in which the individual has no
rights but only duties. Claims of the individual are always an outcome of the
“commercial spirit. “The ideas of 1789”—liberty, equality, fraternity—are
‘Characteristically commercial ideals which have no other purpose but to secure
certain advantages to individuals. The Road to Serfdom pp. 182,183
